Directed by Melvin Van Peebles
Written by Herman Raucher
Starring Godfrey Cambridge, Estelle Parsons, Howard Caine, D’Urville Martin, Kay Kimberley, Mantan Moreland and Erin Moran
USA, 1970
This was Melvin Van Peebles' first and only Hollywood movie, a comedy with an intriguing premise: an obnoxiously privileged (and racist) white insurance salesman wakes up one morning to find out he has magically become a Black man. He assumes he sat under his tanning lamp too long, but even with that assumption it takes a while for him (and his wife) to adjust to their new situation. The kids take it in stride, though.
So, this premise coupled with Melvin Van Peebles’ name, sounds promising, but the movie as is had me scratching my head regarding the tone. The tone is very over the top and cartoonish, even in the early scenes in which Godfrey Cambridge, a Black actor, is playing a white man in white face, before he transforms into a Black man. I thought this broad comedy was an odd choice, even with the fantastical premise, because if you start out in the realm of the wacky, when something wacky actually happens, it loses its impact, a little, right?
Well, I had a little “aha” moment when I read about the film’s production after I was done watching it – turns out Van Peebles did not write this movie, he only directed it, specifically because the studio felt they needed a Black director to pull this material off. They were probably right, but they could have used a Black writer, too, because it turns out the screenplay was written by a white guy – specifically, the white guy who wrote SUMMER OF ’42, Herman Raucher.
Apparently, Van Peebles attempted to mold the movie into something more befitting of his point of view, and was constantly at odds with the writer and the powers that be at the studio. Knowing this, I began to understand the conflicted tone of the movie. If Raucher had gotten his way, the movie would be a straight forward satire specifically about a white guy turning into a Black guy, from a white guy’s point of view – in other words, the movie this white guy (me) expected to see. With Van Peebles behind the wheel, he treated the whole thing as a joke from the get go, portraying our white protagonist as a cartoonish buffoon from minute one, because to him, the joke was on Raucher and the studio, not on the white main character.
So, this perspective helped the whole thing come together for me a little more clearly, and fits the movie more snugly into Van Peebles’ filmography.
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