Melvin Van Peebles and Perry Henzell made seminal 70s films – now their kids have recovered their fathers’ would-be classics
Justine Henzell and Mario Van Peebles both know what it’s like to grow up on movie sets as the child of a groundbreaking director. Henzell was six in 1972 when her father, Perry, finished The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first full-length feature, starring the reggae legend Jimmy Cliff as a fugitive whose musical success coincides with his criminal notoriety. Van Peebles even starred in his father Melvin’s third film, the 1971 underground hit Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which is credited with inspiring the Blaxploitation genre.
As adults, each of them has now had a hand in rescuing and restoring great movies by their fathers that might otherwise have been lost or neglected: Henzell’s more ruminative second feature No Place Like Home, which was lost for more than 20 years, and Van Peebles’s stylish, Nouvelle Vague-tinged 1967 debut The Story of a Three-Day Pass, overlooked at the time and later overshadowed by the more incendiary Sweetback. Henzell laughs when I remark on her father’s momentum in getting started on his second feature so quickly after the first. “He may have had momentum but he had no money,” says the 55-year-old, the ocean lapping at the Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica, shoreline behind her. “The film was shot in fits and starts as the cash came in. He was completely broke after The Harder They Come. He’d been carrying those cans around the world himself trying to sell it. The film still hadn’t repaid its investors and here he was making something even more experimental.”
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