Van Peebles

"Well, I finally got to see that new movie, 'Posse'," said my friend, Will B. Humble, the other day.Humble and I were cooling out after work at our favorite tavern, the Old Briarpatch. It was Happy Hour, don't you know, and the peanuts were free."Oh yeah," I said, "the new Mario Van Peebles flick about black cowboys. What'd you think?""It was OK, I guess," said Humble thoughtfully. "I just wish it was the kind of movie I could take my nephews to see.""Too violent?""Nah, no more than any other western."

Orson Welles once lamented that the only thing a writer needed was a pen and an artist an easel -- but the film director needed an army.Getting an army has historically been the rub of the movie business; but hard as that is, imagine how much harder it would be if you were a young black male living in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. You're 17 years old. Where do you get your army?Or imagine that you're 22 and you're from South Central L.A., the stalking ground of the Bloods and the Crips, and you seethe to make a film that tells the truth about your growing up. Armies don't grow on trees, not even palms.

HOLLYWOOD Tears will flow, hearts will rend and noses will sniffle all over America tonight as CBS airs the made-for-TV movie "Triumph of the Heart: The Ricky Bell Story."The title notwithstanding, it will only be a small, somewhat fictive slice of the real Ricky Bell story. (It will be on Channel 11-WBAL at 9 p.m.)"We weren't doing the complete Ricky Bell story," said screenwriter Jeff Andrus, who spent a month last year researching the former USC football hero's life and tragic early death.

In 1971, I dubbed Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song "a vile piece of ego-tripping from a black filmmaker who hopes (presumably by default) to become the `revolutionary' mass-media force of his people." And that's just what happened. Van Peebles, who directed, produced, wrote and scored the picture and also starred in it as a radicalized pimp, became, in film historian Donald Bogle's words, "a folk hero of black cinema." He positioned himself as the first filmmaker to tell a story from within black culture.

WITH ''NEW Jack City,'' Mario Van Peebles lets the industry know that he is much more than a pretty face. Van Peebles, who directed and appears in the new film, proves that he can both act and direct and do both for the same movie.The film, opening here today, comes close to comic book time and time again, but just as often, it remains in check. The plot may seem a bit fanciful, but it easy enough to read all this as truth, the kind we get from the newspapers.Van Peebles, heretofore known primarily as an actor (''Heartbreak Ridge'')

A column in yesterday's editions of The Sun contained incorrect information about movie and television projects involving Alan Sereboff. Mr. Sereboff is associate producer of the film "In the Living Years." The column also incorrectly listed Mario Van Peebles as the star of the film. Mr. Sereboff also has agreed to co-produce a public service announcement for Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children.The Sun regrets the errors.

Actor Melvin Van Peebles is walking quickly through the Renaissance sculpture gallery of the Walters Art Museum, being pursued by a tall black woman with a menacingly purposeful stride, who is being pursued by actor Melvin Van Peebles, who is being pursued by a tall black woman with a menacingly purposeful stride, who is ... Get the idea? If not, don't worry. There promises to be plenty more suitably odd and calculatedly impressionistic scenes in Baltimore: Baadasssss Cinema Part 2. The futuristic short film from British director Isaac Julien, filmed here last month and slated for a February premiere, hopes to find the common ground among three local museums - the Walters, the Contemporary and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum - and blaxploitation cinema, the tough-talking, hard-living symbol of black empowerment that Van Peebles helped usher in with his 1971 movie, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.

In "Gunmen," the machine guns have all the best lines. The automatic pistols should sue, the sawed-off shotguns need a new agent, and the one poor pitiful little revolver is so overwhelmed it seems like a victim of society.As for the actors, they hardly register amid the hardware.This is an oafish, overwrought mock Italian western updated to South America, where the endless fighting centers not on gold or cattle but the profits from cocaine and heroin. It's full of immense close-ups of men with dirty, oily faces and messy hair, and music that sounds like an accordion and a trombone thrown down the stairs.

The good guys of "Posse" wear some bad threads -- and Mario Van Peebles wears the baddest. The star-director of the new black Western, which has filmgoers lined up at the box office, may be the cowboy with just the right attitude to turn a different generation of dudes on to Western-wear.Julia Chance, fashion editor of The Source, the magazine of hip-hop music, culture and politics, sees it happening with a distinctive city-slicker twist. "We of the African-American community have a way of embellishing fashion and making it our own. We'll see Western, but not as a complete look."

If you are one of those viewers who believes that made-for-television movies are nothing but shopworn formula and that the major networks and cable channels never try anything new, you need to see "Riot," at 8 tomorrow night on Showtime."