Petey Wheatstraw was, in some ways, the first movie on my list for this series.
I'm being a bit cheeky when I say this. Of course, as soon as Elvis Mitchell's documentary Is That Black Enough for You?? gave me the idea to do this series, I realized that Shaft was my biggest blind spot and the movie I would watch first.
But Petey Wheatstraw was on my Kanopy watchlist even before I saw Mitchell's movie, just waiting for its perfect occasion to rise to the top of that list. That didn't happen until this series, unfortunately -- but then again, previous neglect of blaxploitation is why I'm doing this series.
Of course, part of the reason it came up for viewing as early as March was that a bird in the hand beats two in the bush. When something is already available to you on streaming, it tends to jump ahead of things where you have to shell out some money to see it (as I did with the first two movies, each chosen specially for their months for different reasons).
Another good reason to watch it: It stars Rudy Ray Moore, the character played by Eddie Murphy in Dolemite Is My Name, which was my #14 movie of 2019. Perhaps Dolemite would have been a better Moore movie to watch, but Dolemite isn't on Kanopy -- though the movie he made the year before Petey Wheatstraw, The Human Tornado, is. By getting to it early, it left me with a chance to watch one of these films later in the series, if I really dug Moore.
So, did I really dig Moore?
In parts I did. There is definitely a goofy charisma there that explains why he was popular within this milieu in the late 1970s. (Made in 1977, Petey Wheatstraw is now the newest movie I've seen in this series by more than five years.)
I think I thought he would be more consistently entertaining, which is a funny comment to make about a performer who has stylized himself on the principle of being loud and outrageous and chaotic -- in short, inconsistent by his very nature. But, I can't deny that I hoped Petey Wheatstraw would see its ideas through just a bit more coherently.
Of course, other times I just reveled in the joyous nonsense of it all.
There is not a lot of plot in Petey Wheatstraw, but the chaos is baked into the movie from the very beginning. In a device I recalled from Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story -- because I haven't actually read the novel on which it was based -- the title character, after some opening introductions to the audience, says he recalls his own birth. So of course we go straight to a scene of this birth, and it's immediately hilarious. Petey emerges from between his mother's legs as a boy of about eight or nine years old, and the first thing he does is start wailing on the doctor, who runs screaming from the shabby house where he's been born. This leads to an immediate scolding by his mother, which adds further hilarity to the affair. No one seems surprised by the fact that a newborn should be as large as he is, should be able to talk or hit people, and should be in a position to even understand what it means to be scolded.
It might have been something to sort of follow Petey through this picaresque childhood, but pretty soon we get to the main plot. Petey is a standup comedian about to open a new club, but that means he's drawn the ire of competing comedians Leroy and Skillet, played by Leroy Daniels and Ernest Mayhand. Apparently, they are so eager for their act to retain the spotlight over Petey's that they are willing to kill for it, and so it is that Petey and a bunch of his cohorts are assassinated -- at a funeral for a boy killed in the previous scene, no less.
Sound grim? Well don't you worry. The corpses littered on the church steps are soon revived, as showing up on the scene is none other than the devil. (He's played by G. Tito Shaw.) Oh, I think I forgot to tell you -- the movie sort of has a subtitle that I don't find used as part of its official title anywhere, so I'm not using it here. But the full title, if you chose to use it, would be Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-Law. (I always like a title that rhymes.)
So Lucifer is happy to reverse what has just happened over the last five minutes if Petey will agree to sell his soul and marry the devil's daughter. We don't see her face right away, but Petey gets a look at it, and he assures us that she is ugly. But, it's better than him and all his friends being dead. So the scene rewinds and Petey has saved everyone, plus been given a special walking stick belonging to the devil that has magic powers.
After this promising setup, there's a fair bit of meandering in the middle of the movie -- things happening that don't make much sense, and are more enjoyable to appreciate on the level of sheer spectacle. For example, at one point Petey turns an abusive man into a poodle, but I don't think this man or the woman Petey's saving from him have anything else to do with the rest of the movie.
By the end, when Petey tries to fool the devil into getting out of his commitment to marry the girl, the movie has found some of its purpose again, as well as a wild spirit that it never lost in the first place.
I won't say I loved Petey Wheatstraw. It's the first movie in this series to get a technically thumbs down star rating, as it ended up at 2.5 stars on Letterboxd. But the more curious thing was that the things I did like about it were not tied to Moore himself, or not as tied to him as I expected they would be. That speaks well both of the supporting cast and of the wild imagination of writer-director Roquemore, who I would not be surprised to learn was also a character in Dolemite Is My Name. (Does not appear to be the case, though Mike Epps does play Jimmy Lynch, who is Petey's closest friend and second billed in the Petey Wheatstraw cast.)
When I do give the movie only 2.5 stars, it's certainly not because I wanted it to be made any better than it was. The low-tech special effects and makeup are of course a huge part of the fun, and I suspect they wouldn't have wanted to make this movie any better even with five times the budget. This is a movie that is what it wants to be.
I'll see another such movie in April, title undetermined as of now.
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