The actor and filmmaker Mario Van Peebles is the son of Melvin Van Peebles, whose Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) was the first "blaxploitation" film, or at least the movie that opened the door for that genre. (Whether it fit the category itself depends on whom you ask.) Young Mario appears in it as the young version of his father's character, and in 2003 he made a film called Baadasssss! that told the story of the elder Van Peebles' early career. Mario Van Peebles clearly internalized his dad's landmark body of work, and that's evident in his own directorial debut, New Jack City, which opened 18 years ago this week, on March 8, 1991. The story of drug dealers operating in New York at the height of the crack epidemic, New Jack City has elements of gangster films both old and new, but also functions as a high-end blaxploitation picture, transported from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.The tone is established over the opening credits, as Queen Latifah raps about money (Queen Latifah was a rapper in those days) and a radio reporter delivers a litany of bad news: police shootings, drug deals gone awry, millions of Americans living below the poverty line. As the film's villain, powerful Harlem drug lord Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes), says, "You gotta rob to get rich in the Reagan era." Many down-and-out Harlemites might agree that it's nearly impossible to get ahead by honest means in a system that continually beats you down, but notice how Nino takes it further -- he doesn't just want to make a living; he wants to get rich.

This struggle against The Man (specifically, the white man) ran through all of the '70s blaxploitation films and pops up subtly in New Jack City, mostly through the reversal of roles. Blacks are in power while whites are ineffectual. We first meet Nino when he and one of his henchmen are holding a white man by his ankles over the East River, threatening to kill him for missing a loan payment. The district attorney's prosecutor, the police commissioner, and most of the detectives are black; the sergeant who ignores citizens' pleas for help when Nino turns their apartment building into a crack house is white. A white cop, Nick Peretti (Judd Nelson), who's part of the sting operation to bring down Nino frequently wonders if some strategic detail or other is "a black thing" that he just doesn't understand. In the end -- and thanks to his black partner, Scotty (Ice-T) -- Nick comes to realize the truth: "Drugs ain't a black thing, or a white thing. It's a death thing. Death don't give a s*** about color."The film mixes the blaxploitation tropes with those of another genre, the organized-crime flick. Genre blending was common in the '70s, when many films could be described as "the black version of [fill in the blank]." (Sometimes, as with Blacula, the title said it all.) Like most modern movie gangsters, Nino loves the movie gangsters who came before him, with frequent references to Al Pacino in Scarface and a line about how his own luxurious crime-funded lifestyle is "George Raft, James Cagney-type s***!" (If it hasn't happened already, there will presumably one day be a movie gangster who idolizes Nino Brown, and the circle of life will continue.) With hubris typical of his ilk, Nino declares that he won't suffer the same downfall as those tragic cinematic figures, boldly standing in front of a projection of Scarface and yelling, "The world is mine! All mine!" He seems to have forgotten that most of the people he claims he won't end up like once said the same thing. Van Peebles also draws parallels to Al Capone, including a newscaster's comparison of a particularly deadly drive-by shooting to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. A scene where Nino scolds his crew, seated around a boardroom table, before stabbing a sword into one goon's hand inspires thoughts of the famous scene in The Untouchables where Robert De Niro as Al Capone vents his frustrations with a baseball bat. New Jack City premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1991 and, upon its theatrical release in March, became the most successful independent film of the year, eventually grossing $47.6 million in the United States. This was an eye-opener for studio executives, who generally considered black audiences a small niche not worth being targeted directly. As The Onion A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin observed upon the film's 2005 DVD release, "it seems hard to believe that [in 1991], explicitly marketing a film to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of the black youth audience was a novel and audacious move."Apart from its very in-the-moment fashion, hairstyle, and music choices, New Jack City holds up extremely well, particularly if you bear in mind that so many of its now-ubiquitous clichés were quite a bit newer then. Nearly every crime drama with a largely black cast made since 1991 borrows from New Jack City, and rappers reference it constantly. You have to wonder if some of the rappers who glorify the drug trade missed the "crime doesn't pay" message of the film the same way Nino missed it in Scarface. FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When New Jack City was released, 18 years ago this week, on March 8, 1991...• It opened in second place at the box office, behind The Silence of the Lambs, which had been in the top spot for four weeks. The other new wide release that weekend was the Michael J. Fox/James Woods action comedy The Hard Way, which it's hard to believe actually exists. Home Alone and Dances with Wolves, released 17 and 18 weeks earlier, respectively, were still in the top 10. • On TV, Blossom, Clarissa Explains It All, and The $100,000 Pyramid had recently premiered. • The No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was Mariah Carey's "Someday," which had just replaced Whitney Houston's "All the Man That I Need." Other recent No. 1 songs included "Gonna Make You Sweat" by C+C Music Factory, and Madonna's "Justify My Love."• The Rodney King beating, captured on amateur video, had happened five days earlier. In other violence news, the Gulf War had begun (and ended) since the start of the year. • The New York Times Best Seller List, strangely enough, didn't have any Stephen King on it, at least not in the top 15. The No. 1 novel was Danielle Steel's Heartbeat; Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park was also on the list.• Emma Roberts was less than a month old. Jamie Lynn Spears was a month away from being born, and 17 1/2 years away from having a baby of her own. Beloved comedian Danny Thomas had died a month earlier, dancer Arthur Murray had died a few days earlier, and lyricist Howard Ashman (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast) would die a week later. * * * * *"Eric's Time Capsule" appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, where New Jack Swing is always in style.