Super Fly: The Blaxploitation Landmark and Its Soundtrack

Most films and their soundtracks are on the same side. Super Fly is the strange case where the songs turned prosecution witness. Gordon Parks Jr shot a Harlem cocaine dealer with all the reverence a camera can muster — the coat, the car, the hair, the sheer unhurried cool of a man who has decided he is the best-dressed thing in the borough — and Curtis Mayfield sat above the whole picture in a falsetto, patiently explaining that this man is killing people for a living. The film glamorises. The record indicts. Fifty years on, that argument between image and sound is still the most interesting thing happening in the frame.

I came to it the way most people my age did, backwards: the Mayfield album first, bought on the strength of “Freddie’s Dead” turning up on a compilation, and the film years later on a battered rental tape that made the night exteriors look like a coal cellar. Hearing the songs before seeing the pictures turns out to be the right order. It means you arrive already knowing what the film is going to spend ninety-odd minutes half-admitting.

The last-score picture in a fur collar

The plot is one of the oldest in crime cinema. Youngblood Priest, played by Ron O’Neal, is a Harlem cocaine dealer who has looked at his own life and concluded it has a short expiry date. He wants out. Getting out requires one enormous final deal — thirty kilos, moved fast — after which he walks away rich and clean. His partner Eddie, played by Carl Lee, cannot understand why anyone would leave a business this good. Priest goes to his old mentor Scatter, played by Julius Harris, for the weight. Sheila Frazier plays Georgia, the woman who believes him when he says he means it.

Anyone who has watched a heist film knows what a last-score plot is for. It exists so the audience can spend the running time waiting for the trap to close, and the tension comes from the gap between what the hero has planned and what the people around him actually are. Super Fly understands this perfectly, which is why it is a much tighter piece of screenwriting than its reputation suggests. Phillip Fenty’s script keeps Priest’s exit strategy visible at all times and keeps quietly demonstrating that every single person he needs to execute it has a reason to betray him.

The real ancestor here sits outside the cycle entirely: the classical American caper film, and specifically John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) — the template where the plan is flawless and the men are not, and the doom is baked into the personnel rather than the police. Super Fly is that structure relocated to Harlem, dressed in a floor-length leather coat, and handed to a hero the 1950s would never have allowed to be the protagonist. Watch the two back to back and the family resemblance is obvious.

Mayfield in the room

Curtis Mayfield had left The Impressions in 1970 to go solo, and the Super Fly commission arrived at exactly the moment he had the freedom and the standing to do something odd with it. What he delivered was a song cycle in character. “Pusherman” is sung by the dealer, in the first person, cheerfully listing what he can supply. “Freddie’s Dead” is a eulogy for a minor character, a hustler crushed by the machine, and it is the film’s real thesis statement: the trade eats the small people first and the coat does nothing to stop it. “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” is the whole social diagnosis compressed into a verse.

Mayfield appears in the film himself, performing with his band in a nightclub while the story continues around him, and that cameo is the clearest possible statement of the record’s relationship to the picture. He is literally in the room, watching, singing about what these people are doing while they do it.

The commercial result was one of the great inversions in film history. The Super Fly album went to number one on the Billboard chart and is routinely cited as one of the very few soundtracks to have outgrossed the film it was written for. Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man landed the same year; Isaac Hayes had taken the Academy Award for the Shaft theme the year before. For a brief window, the score was the reason a studio greenlit a crime picture, and the composers knew it.

Why the film still looks good

Gordon Parks Jr was the son of Gordon Parks, the Life photographer who had directed Shaft, and Super Fly was his first feature. The eye is inherited and unmistakable. This is a film made for very little money — reported budgets sit in the region of a few hundred thousand dollars, financed substantially outside the studio system before Warner Bros picked it up for distribution — and Parks Jr spends none of it on things the camera cannot see.

His method is photographic. He shoots real Harlem streets in real winter light, with a long lens and a documentary flatness, and then cuts to Priest arranged inside the frame like a fashion plate. The tension between those two registers is the whole visual argument: a magazine cover standing in a location that is plainly, unromantically cold. The film’s most famous formal move is a montage of the cocaine trade built from still photographs, cut to Mayfield, and it works because Parks Jr is a photographer’s son doing the thing photographers do — freezing a transaction so you have to look at it instead of letting it flow past.

The other craft decision worth naming is the sound. Dialogue in Super Fly is often thin, location-recorded, half-swallowed by street noise. Mayfield’s tracks arrive at full studio fidelity, clean and huge. The mix puts the moral commentary at the front and the characters’ self-justifications at the back, and that hierarchy is doing work whether or not anyone planned it.

The case against

It has to be made honestly, because it was made loudly at the time. Civil-rights organisations objected to Super Fly on the grounds that it took a cocaine dealer, made him the hero, gave him the best clothes and the best car and the best lines, and sent him off at the end in better shape than he arrived. The charge is that a film cannot claim critical distance while spending its entire budget on making the man look magnificent, and that teenage audiences were never going to hear Mayfield’s fine print over the roar of the image. The protests were real and organised, and the cycle’s defenders have been arguing with them ever since. I set out the industrial background to that fight — a broke Hollywood chasing a market it had ignored for decades — in blaxploitation, genre cinema and the studio that followed the money.

The objection lands. Ron O’Neal is too good, and Parks Jr’s camera loves him too much, for the film’s disclaimers to fully register. Where I part company with the prosecution is on the assumption that a film has to be uniformly disapproving to be about something. Super Fly wants you to want Priest’s life and then wants you to sit with what wanting it means. That is a legitimate thing for a crime film to do; Scarface did it, Goodfellas did it, and both got the same complaint.

The messier truth is that the film’s own influence proved the objectors partly right. The coat and the car and the hustle got copied for decades. “Freddie’s Dead” got covered. The two halves of the film parted company almost immediately.

Spoilers below

Priest’s plan works, and that is the audacity of the thing. The betrayal arrives as expected — Eddie has been dealing with the corrupt white police commissioner who is running the supply chain from the top, which recasts the entire film as a story about a Black man working for a white cop without knowing it. Scatter is disposed of. Priest is told he will keep dealing for as long as he is told to.

Then he wins. Priest has covered himself with an arrangement involving a mob contact, a piece of insurance that makes his death expensive for the men who want him dead, and he walks away with his money and his life. He beats the commissioner in a car park and leaves.

That ending is why Super Fly mattered and why it enraged people. In 1972 the American crime film had a rule: the criminal dies, or goes to prison, or at minimum loses. Priest keeps everything. The film hands its Black protagonist the one thing the genre had always denied him, and the price is that the moral accounting has to be paid entirely by the soundtrack. Freddie is dead. Priest is fine. Mayfield’s record spends its whole length insisting those two facts belong in the same sentence, and the film gives you the freeze-frame instead.

I find I admire the nerve more each time. The film’s failure of nerve is real — it lets its hero off — and it is also the only genuinely radical gesture available to it. Both things are true at once, which is the permanent condition of this cycle.

The verdict: a beautifully shot, tightly plotted crime picture carrying a masterpiece it cannot quite live up to, and worth your time for the argument between them. Watch it for Parks Jr’s photography and O’Neal’s stillness, then play the album again and notice how much of the film’s thinking Mayfield was doing on its behalf.

Where to go next: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song for the independent detonation that made Super Fly financially thinkable, Black Caesar for the same last-score anxiety with James Brown on the score instead of Mayfield, and the blaxploitation canon for the ten that still play. The film circulates on disc and streams widely; the album has never been out of print, which tells you which one won.