My Favorite Melvin van Peebles Movie

I'm showing my own biases here by picking "Watermelon Man" as my favorite Melvin van Peebles movie.  "Sweet Sweetback" had a far larger and more lasting impact, and Van Peebles had far more creative control.  However, it was a film made for black Americans.  "Watermelon Man" was a studio comedy aimed at white audiences and the lead character is for all intents and purposes a white man.  And even though I'm not white, I found myself relating more to his view of the world than the black hero of "Sweetback."  

Godfrey Cambridge spends the first twenty minutes of the film in whiteface playing a caricature of a white American bigot named Jeff Gerber.  And initially, "Watermelon Man" is a rare satire on white America from a black point of view.  The film was marketed as a broad comedy and the filmmaking often reflects this, with its colorful stylistic touches and TV sitcom visuals.  However, one morning Jeff wakes up with dark skin, and the film becomes more earnestly critical of the state of American race relations.  This is especially clear in the second half, when all the physical hijinks involving Jeff trying to undo the transformation are dispensed with, and he has to confront the change being permanent.     

From the outset, Van Peebles is fearlessly confrontational about the subject of race, and "Watermelon Man" is a good time capsule of the prevailing attitudes of the early 70s.  The bulk of his criticism is reserved for the characters who seem friendly and tolerant, but either prove to be different in private or have ulterior motives.  Jeff may be a bigot, but he's honest about it, while his liberal wife is not.  Because he's so used to speaking his mind, he calls out every hypocrisy and absurdity attempting to camouflage racism that he encounters.  It's funny at first, but less and less so as the film goes on.  Jeff doesn't become a better person when his skin turns black, but he's forced to become a very different one, inhabiting an entirely different reality.  And Van Peebles shows that he doesn't fully become a black man until he's lost everything - including his ability to deny reality.  The final image of his enthusiasm for self-betterment morphing into a revolutionary impulse is both sobering and electrifying.

This was a very different picture of race in America than the more polite, more restrained discussions found in movies like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."  What is so striking about "Watermelon Man" is that it's so self aware of what it's doing, often brimming over with tension and barely disguised pain, hidden just underneath the laugh lines.  The dialogue is full of wry little observations about life as a black man, and subversions of common Hollywood narratives.  There's a major action sequence built around Jeff being chased by a mob because they think he stole something - why else would he be in a part of town that no other African Americans frequent?  The most gutting moments are the most intimate, such as when Jeff realizes that the white secretary who is so eager to sleep with him only does so because she's fetishizing his blackness.  And consider the casting of Mantan Moreland, who was famous for playing stereotyped servant characters in the blackface era, as a counterman who looks down on Jeff once he's black.

Melvin van Peebles is a fascinating figure in American cinema, who went to extraordinary lengths to direct films.  He's revealed in interviews that behind the scenes of "Watermelon Man," writers and executives wanted to tone down the messaging and give the film a "happy" ending where Jeff's experience as a black man was all just a dream.  The director resorted to outright sabotage to ensure that this didn't happen.  "Watermelon Man" was Van Peeble's only studio project, and it was a box office success.  He could have gone on making more films in this vein, but quit in order to make the far more risky and rebellious "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" independently.  And the rest is history.

There's a tiresome claim that you couldn't make movies with controversial content like "Blazing Saddles" today.  I'm sure you could update "Watermelon Man" for modern audiences, but I don't know that you'd need to.  After over fifty years, the state of American race relations had barely changed.  Most of the attitudes of the white characters are depressingly familiar, and the jokes about racial stereotypes and the use of the n-word still work just fine in context.  Just substitute the "race riots" with the BLM movement, and nobody would blink an eye.  

What I've Seen - Melvin van Peebles

The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968)
Watermelon Man (1970)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
Don't Play Us Cheap (1973)
Gang in Blue (1996)

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