Superfly, 3.5 stars

This is the first movie I've seen where the budget probably had a line for "coke spoons". Everyone here seems to have one, and people even lounge about wearing nothing but them. While I've probably seen some blaxploitation before, in college and with an ironic attitude, I tried to take "Superfly" seriously on its own terms and found a surprisingly well-assembled movie whose main strength is its strong yet subtle performances.

The plot is tired and barely worth recapping (stop me when this sounds familiar): A coke dealer decides to make one last big score and then use the profits to go straight. His underworld friends have other ideas and attempt to defeat this plan. The filmmaking and performances quickly elevate the material, however, as "Requiem for a Dream" has done more recently. Priest, the coke dealer, is played by Ron O'Neal as a clear-eyed, realistic man who is more honest than most others in his line of work. O'Neal allows us to see a desire for security and a fear of winding up shot to death on a sidewalk, both of which motivate Priest to try for one last score. In addition to this strong lead performance, the film boasts a well-tailored, jazzy Curtis Mayfield score and an filmmaking style that stops the action temporarily for an experimental montage of stills showing the various users of Priest's big score. The use of split-screen can be tricky by itself; so can stopping your action at a fairly pivotal point to show a series of stills. The fact that both techniques are combined here to make a scene that is one of the more memorable in the film speaks to the skill of the filmmakers.

I haven't yet seen the other blaxploitation classic that casts a long shadow over the genre (I refer of course to "Shaft".) However, I couldn't help feeling that in this case there was very little exploitation going on, and instead there was a piece of solid filmmaking and acting with an ending where the only exploitation is of the white establishment.