Don't Play Us Cheap

Rhetta Hughes and Joe Keyes Jr.

Melvin Van Peebles' Don't Play Us Cheap, from 1973 , is his most overlooked and underrated flick. Part of this is due to the film's unusual origins and part due to its release or lack thereof. Peebles originally published the story as a French language novel entitled La fête à Harlem. The project, in each of its iterations, centers on a Harlem apartment where Miss Maybell (Esther Rolle) is hosting a Saturday night bring a bottle party with dancing, appetizers, and a grand feast. The guests sing and raise a rumpus, rejoicing in each other's company. Two interlopers are welcomed, but they turn out to be imps, ordered by Satan to disrupt the festivities. However, the sheer good-heartedness of the partygoers upend their plans.

Peebles had adapted the novel into a stage musical which briefly played San Francisco in 1970. Peebles filmed the production soon after, but was unable to find a distributor. He next mounted the play on Broadway, with largely the same cast that is in the film, where it had a fairly successful run. The film had a token, if you will excuse the expression, release and then languished in obscurity for decades. The ramshackle nature of the film and its weirdness probably scared off the major film studios, but it is Peebles' funky nerve that makes it resound today. Peebles doesn't open up the material, but turns it inside out. We view the apartment not just from a proscenium view, but from multiple points of view, including that of the denizens of the underworld. Numerous cinematic and theatrical techniques are used to reinforce the mood of bonhomie: a black and white segment, theatrical tableaux, shots through window frames, everything including the kitchen sink. I do think Peebles does indulge his love of superimpositions too much, but Peebles is trying to conjure the antic hilarity of his characters and I feel he largely succeeds.

Part of the reason is Peebles was able to attract a talented ensemble who were all impressive vocalists. Rhetta Hughes had been a backup vocalist with such luminaries as "Bobby Blue" Bland and Bob Dylan. Avon Long, who gives the film's most outstanding performance, had sung at the Cotton Club and played Sportin' Life in a Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess. Since, as you can probably tell from my description, the plot is slight, the film functions more as a musical revue with roots, fully exposed, in vaudeville and minstrelsy. Peebles' songs draw as much from show tunes as they do from soul. What is fully modern is the extremely funky costumes which remind me of the illustrations Pedro Bell provided for Funkadelic albums of this period. Don't Play Us Cheap  is as much a product of post-Sly Afro-American street culture as Miles Davis' On the Corner and as much a stylistic ragamuffin as that album.