ST. LOUIS BLACK FILM FESTIVAL Continues This Week with RAISIN IN THE SUN and SUPER FLY

The folks behind the St. Louis Black Film Festival Presents a Classic Black Film Double Feature for Black History Month at Landmark’s Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar in St. Louis’ Loop) each Thursday in February. Last year the St. Louis Black Film Festival presented a series of new films by black filmmakers, but this year are going back into the vaults and digging out some vintage cinema for audiences with an interest in black history to enjoy on the big screen.

The final offerings for festival are screened this Thursday, February 23rd. The movies are A RAISIN IN THE SUN at 5pm and SUPER FLY at 7pm.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1961) is based on the first play on Broadway ever written by a black woman, Lorraine Hansberry and some of the events written in A Raisin In The Sun were experienced by her personally, most particularly her own family’s struggle to move into the white suburbs. The four main characters in A RAISIN IN THE SUN are Walter Younger, Jr., his wife Ruth, his sister Berneatha, and mother Lena, played by Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, and Claudia McNeil respectively who all came over from Broadway. The family patriarch has recently died and the family is awaiting a $10,000.00 insurance check, courtesy of his years of service with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first primarily black union to organize in the USA. The money represents a chance to rise out of the stifling poverty in which they’ve been living but the situation is more complex than it seems.

A black man finds that leaving behind a life of crime is harder than he imagined in the groundbreaking crime drama SUPER FLY (1972). Priest (Ron O’Neal) is a successful cocaine dealer who drives a fancy car, commands a small army of street salesmen, and lives a life of luxury. However, Priest is just smart enough to know that there’s no real future in dealing coke, and one day he makes a proposal to his partner Eddie (Carl Lee) — they take their 300,000-dollar savings, buy 30 kilos of cocaine, and use their street team to move it out in four months, leaving a million dollar profit for both Priest and Eddie, allowing them to get out of the business for good. Eddie is wary but willing to go along, but Scatter (Julius Harris), a former dealer who set Priest up in the cocaine trade, is both unwilling and unable to sell them that much product. While SUPER FLY was a box-office smash and (along with SHAFT and SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS) one of the key films of the Blaxploitation movement of the early ’70s, it’s best remembered today for the soundtrack composed and performed by Curtis Mayfield, which included the hit songs Freddie’s Dead, Pusherman, and the title tune.

So head to Landmark’s Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar in St. Louis’ Loop) this Thursday to take in some black film history during this last week of Black History Month.