his bathroom explaining to a fugitive named Sweetback (acted by Van Peebles) just why there is nothing to worry about. He is too convincing, singing this ghetto song, to be believed. And he is not to be believed. That is exactly why he practices so hard his craft of deception. Only another hustler would know just how hard. But it is to this trickster that Sweetback, a professional sex show stud, runs with his deepest trouble. He has become, in a rare fit of rage, what Martin Luther King called a drum major for justice. Has mashed up two sadistic policemen during the performance of their racist duty, and now i~ tget in the wind, run the race for his life.

Sweetback is the ultimate sexualist, in whose seemingly vacant eyes and unrevealing mouth are written the protocols of American domestic colonialism. Here stands before us a triumph of the missionary purpose: a man whose only politics have been the politics of his body. And there rests his vulnerability. To the American White of liberal or conservative stripe, the Black man represents precisely the same thing: a male being whose existence and humanity share space in his crotch. (For good-liberal or evil-conservative reasons.) What, after all, is Eldridge

Cleaver remembered for most in his book "Soul on Ice"? Cleaver, the rapist, was his own phallic knight of the realm. assured there would always be a demand for his services and aware that most, but not all power comes from the barrel of a gun. In his own province, Sweetback, an exorbitantly gifted sexual satisfier-Aretha's original Dr. Feelgood-Iives a part of the same legend. As he runs, the law and the mythology of his existence pursue Sweetback. He is hard pressed on several occasions to elude either or both.

Technically, the film dazzles, is a rough diamond glittering an inquisitive light upon a people and what,is, in fact, their own business. Van Peebles em -ploys the camera like a surgeon slicing away fat and other body tissues, always probing toward real or imagined diseases. Sealed into nearly every frame of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a desperate level of energy, a frenetic, often dizzying romp through a portion of the Republic, encountering or passing by Its disgraceful streets, the crumbling houses in which live its pimps, whores, Its witless members of the law enforcement world, its thieves and assassins who all, ultimately, are the Republic's victims.

Certainly the film is objectionable. Van Peebles can zoom in as smoothly, as gracefully, and as precisely on the Brothers who are into revolution as he can put a candid lens on Brothers who are into cocaine. And, seemingly, with the same Intense concern. The film also captures Sweetback's exploits in the sexual arena With a graphic blunthess too realistic to bear any description here. And Van Peebles has made the sermons of storefront churches ring as vividly as the rhetoric of the streets; has brought an almost too sharp focus to a casual murder here, teen violence and arson there. (A scene with sudden and stunning impact occurs when some young Bloods set tire to an occupied police car.)