There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you can find something to laugh about in the midst of a very difficult conversation…
Watermelon Man (1970)
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Directed by: Melvin Van Peebles
Some things never leave us, especially our mistakes.
There’s an ugly problem we have, where even though the long arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, it occasionally gets bent the other way to prevent the inevitable. No matter how much common sense it makes to live up to the ideal that everyone is created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, we still get pushback with Jim Crow, redlining, Black Codes, the cry of “All Lives Matter…” The list is endless, and only covers systemic oppression, as opposed to Colfax, Clinton, Wilmington, Tulsa, Rosewood, and every other deranged act that people have tried to whitewash from our memory.
Amazingly, during the Civil Rights Era, it was a comedy that did most of the work to explain how messed up this all was:
Please note that this contains important and essential spoilers.
We open cold panning the bedroom of a suburban home that shakes with every ‘thump’ we hear. We soon discover that the disturbance is caused by Jeff Gurber (Geoffrey Cambridge), who might be hard to recognize at first due to being made up to look like a white man. This annoys his wife Althea (Estelle Parsons), who barely tolerates her husband’s efforts to keep healthy.
We continue as we watch Jeff go through his morning rituals, which includes a session under his heavy-duty tanning lamp, while Althea has to prep their children Burton (Scott Garret) and Janice (Erin Moran) to get them ready for school. When they sit down for breakfast together, as the opening credits get superimposed on screen, the parents react to morning news reports about riots in the black sections of town. Althea shows concern for the people in those neighborhoods, while Jeff dismisses their plight with contempt as he insensitively jokes about it at these peoples’ expense.
Jeff continues his obnoxious streak by racing his commuter bus to a stop further from his home (a ritual the regular commuters on the bus tolerate) and getting a health drink at a lunch counter on his way to work from the man who works the morning (Mantan Moreland) with whom he continues to espouse insensitive racist bits that only he seems to find funny.
Gerber makes himself ever more charming when he makes overt advances at Erika (Kay Kimberly), one of the secretaries in the office, and then carries on his “winning” streak with his boss, Mr. Townsend (Howard Caine), to whom he talks back to:
We then watch Jeff and Althea that night as she tries to encourage him to be passionate, and he refuses. Althea accuses Jeff of not wanting her anymore because of her age. Jeff continues his winning ways by denying this, and then falling asleep on Althea in the middle of the conversation.
Jeff would probably have spent the rest of his life being a boor and overall horrible human being, had he not woken in the middle of the night, thought something wasn’t right when he saw something odd as he pulled down his pajama bottoms to use the toilet, and then looked in the mirror:
Jeff, small minded bigot that he is, freaks the F! out. He spends the next few hours trying any home remedy he can grasp at to reverse his melanin issue, ultimately blaming his sun lamp, before he tries to grab some sleep to look for a cure in the morning.
He’s still not successful when Althea discovers what happened to Jeff in the middle of the night:
Jeff calls in sick that morning and buys as many skin whitening products from a pharmacist in the black sections of town as he can, going all in to try and handle his condition. Of course, his prejudice and poor understanding of human anatomy fail him miserably, leaving him depressed and frustrated.
The next day, he tries to resume his life, but he discovers what being black in America entails. His race with the bus leads the police to pull him over, as they assume he’s in nice clothes and running because he just stole something.
He gets looks from his coworkers, especially Erika who we discover has interesting tastes when she makes overt advances to Jeff. Mr. Townsend has Jeff’s clients reassigned to another agent while Jeff is encouraged to start selling policies in the parts of town he assumes that Jeff will now fit in better. And when Jeff tries to enter through the front door a private club he has a meeting with a client at, he comes close to being arrested.
For Jeff, a change is not only gonna come, but come again and again, harder each time. At home, he gets threatening phone calls calling him the n slur as they tell him he has to move. Soon, some of the neighbors show up, and in the interest of preserving their property values and neighborhood, they offer Jeff $50,000 to buy out his house if he moves out in two days.
Jeff still being obnoxious and a smart Alec despite the new packaging, he bargains them into paying double that to get him to move. The brief reconciliation Jeff has with Althea falls apart when she has to admit that as liberal as she is, she’s just not that liberal, before she takes the kids and leaves town. And because he can meet neither Mr. Townsend’s or Erika’s expectations as to what having an African American in their life means, Jeff soon leaves that behind to find a new way forward.
It’s how Jeff ends up when the film stops that we can see that the issues the film raises were present during the production as well. When Herman Raucher came out with a spec script in 1969, entitled The Night the Sun Came Out on Happy Hollow Lane, he envisaged a satire of liberal suburbanites who fail the acid test when one of their own wakes up a changed man, in more ways than one. Columbia, in a moment of sensibility, decided that a story with such a premise required an African American director.
Director Melvin Van Peebles on set with Geoffrey Cambridge during production
Van Peebles, however, saw the script as an avenue to explore how society treats African Americans as a whole. Raucher’s script looked at a major issue from a perspective of a group that had less to lose in the spirit of a comedy, while Van Peeble’s approach to the material was willing to get an up-close perspective of those who suffered every form of the issue, taking as its main influence John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. Originally, the script ended with Jeff waking up from a horrible dream; when Van Peebles refused to give Jeff an easy way out, it was one of the bigger points of contention over which the writer and director clashed bitterly.
In this case, the film works a lot better with Van Peeble’s vision. Having it all be a dream would have made the whole experience feel cheap. But having Jeff have to learn to accept being African American, and in the process become a much better human being, gives the story a much stronger foundation with real substance, as you watch him come to terms with how wrong everything he thought he knew was.
For the role of Jeff, no one was more right for the part than Cambridge. A headlining comedian during the 1960s, his body of work and his routines were sympatico with where Van Peebles wanted to take the movie. He brilliantly pulls off one of the few (if not only) attempts Hollywood makes at “whiteface,” doing a complete reverse of the routine it’s based on with the exaggerated faults being performed while in makeup being reversed.
Once he’s himself again, Cambridge carries off the difficult task of taking some painful situations and still finding a joke he can craft out of them that gets a solid delivery. He manages to tease the decent person Jeff becomes out from the complete a-hole he is at the beginning of the film, and does so in a manner that’s fascinating to watch as it unfolds.
In addition to directing, Van Peebles also scored the film, making the music work like a Greek chorus. The music varies in terms of instrumentation, from old timey player piano when Jeff is on screen before he changes, to jazzy funk when Jeff’s moved to a part of town that won’t reject him. The above track, “Love, That’s America,” plays over a montage where Jeff leaves his insurance job and learns just how little a college education means for an African American looking for work.
On top of this is a cast that plays off Cambridge well as they help set up the script’s gags, especially Moreland, whose own roles in the 1930s and 1940s becomes the impetus for the film’s sensibilities. The film is essentially Van Peebles and Cambridge taking Hollywood to task for ignoring and diminishing African Americans on the screen, and all of them take on their roles in ways that they arise above stereotypes that they could have just stayed as is, had the film not had ambitions to be honest about race.
The end result is a film that presents what has to be the best demonstration of “white privilege” ever put to film. It stays a comedy as it finds something funny in telling the story even as the topic about racial injustice gets a heavy, unfiltered look, while Cambridge gives the audience a character that can’t be easily forgiven yet earns our empathy.
The film did not lead to more such daring projects like this from the studios, though. After suffering through the fights he had on this pic, Van Peebles turned down a three-picture deal with Columbia to present films without compromise, which led to his next pic being Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
Much like Watermelon Man, Van Peebles’ follow-up film was unflinching in what it had to say about race in the US. Both films had strong criticism for a country that hadn’t done enough to live up to its ideals, criticisms that tragically can still be noted today.
Both resonate now as they did then because some things never leave us, especially our mistakes…
