Melvin Van Peebles

(On Cable TV, July 2022) In many ways, Watermelon Man feels like a film far ahead of its time when it presents a vision of a white suburban bigot who wakes up black one day and must learn to cope with very different perceptions of him. As a sharp satire of middle-class American racism, it’s worth remembering that it predates much of what we feel is modern black cinema—even the blaxploitation movement which directly followed. And I mean this literally: Director Melvin Van Peebles took his pay and experience on this film to create Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and the rest is blaxploitation history. Satires of contemporary life were never uncommon throughout Hollywood history, but Watermelon Man is very specific in its criticism of American racism—and especially racism from so-called allies to the cause. Much of the jokes still land uncomfortably well today. If the first minutes of the film feel a bit grotesque, it’s because the lead role is played by Godfrey Cambridge in uncanny-looking whiteface—it’s only after the transformation that Cambridge is back to his natural look (It’s worth exploring how whiteface challenges whiteness-as-default, but I’m not smart enough to make that argument. Instead, read the always-excellent Raquel Gates on the topic of the film.). The film’s comedy quotient sharply improves once the lead character goes through the usual stages of grief—denial gives way to anger (“I DON’T WANT TO BE A N—” is a sentence that the closed captioning doesn’t even bother concluding), bargaining, depression (especially once the wife leaves with the kids) and some sort of cut-short acceptance. The film is certainly uneven, and its comic tone keeps shifting into absurdity that harms the film’s dramatic arc. (An example: the interlude with the protagonist working manual labour, which gets a few laughs but ultimately blurs the protagonist’s evolution toward independence in setting up his own insurance company.)  The ending is also abrupt and unsatisfying, with a few crucial dramatic subplots left unresolved—reportedly, the result of behind-the-scenes wrangling between Peebles and the studio, which wanted an unpalatable “it was all a nightmare” scenario. Still, the film is still biting today and Peebles’ subtle but undeniable stylistic touches make the film deeper than the cheaper comedy it could have been. Watermelon Man remains quite a movie, and it earns a place in any in-depth history of black film.