Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song obviously had a starkly different approach to noir than the previous films we have watched. The fact that it was not based on a book led to some of these liberties, but mostly it varied in the way decent into darkness (or lack thereof) was depicted as well as the differences in main characters. In The Maltese Falcon (1946), the classic macho Sam Spade never loses or has anyone question his worth or masculinity. He starts at the top, but he descends into the darkness and moral ambiguity of noir. However, Sweetback was never at the top, or even close. He lived in the margins his whole life, first as an orphan and then as a prostitute. However, he lived as a black man in a society controlled by white people, and that is what truly marginalized him. Therefore, he never really descended into darkness, as he lived in it his whole life. Instead, the noir lies in the hopelessness of the characters. The constant shots of running and the abuse suffered by the black community as the police tried to find him show the unjust and dark place they live, where they can face beatings and torture, and no one cares.
In Murder, My Sweet (1944), the detective Philip Marlowe has a lower economic status, so while he is not on top, he is white and that gives him advantages Sweetback does not have. Marlowe has the ability to investigate a crime he has been told to keep out of and even though he gets beaten up, he does not fear his safety that much. However, Sweetback was taken as a fake suspect to show the police were looking into a black murder. However, when the police begin to beat Mumu, he defends the one he believes will really bring about change. That makes him an actual desired suspect and now he must run from the police. While he his running for his life to Mexico, the police interrogate the community. The scene with Beetle was incredibly upsetting as the abused him, permanently deafened him, and you could see the fear in his face that he was not sure he would be allowed to walk out alive. The black community lived in the darkness and those crimes would never come to the light. Therefore the differences in the way Sweetback descended into darkness and how his character had more to worry about than the white leads of the other films led to a different type of noir, but one still impactful and marked by the grayness of morality in a changing world.