Watermelon Man (1970)

I thought I'd start this blog off on the right foot with a review of a movie I recently watched for the first time: Melvin Van Peebles' first Hollywood movie, Watermelon Man.

Made a year before Van Peebles kick-started the blaxploitation era with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the film is all about a middle-class white racist who, one morning, wakes up black. Van Peebles did not come up with the premise - it had been floating around Columbia Pictures for a while - but he made one crucial change. It had originally been conceived as a vehicle for someone like Alan Arkin or Jack Lemmon: i.e., a white actor who would play much of the film in blackface. Noting that the character is only white for about ten minutes of the movie, Van Peebles argued that he should be played by a black actor who would start the film in whiteface. Therein lies the genius of Watermelon Man: the whole film has Godfrey Cambridge (a black actor) presenting a merciless caricature of whiteness, whilst simultaneously growing into a figure of socially-conscious and militant blackness.

At first, I found van Peebles' direction a little off-putting, with it veering too much into broad farce for my liking. Then things started to get a little stranger, and closer to the discordant jazz style of Sweet Sweetback. I then realized that the farce was all a put-on, and that Van Peebles had been mocking the style of middle-class white suburban sitcoms – in much the same way Godfrey Cambridge's performance was satirizing middle-class whiteness. As the film progresses, Van Peebles increasingly interrupts the whitebread sitcom style with experimental use of jarring editing rhythms and a contrapuntal soundtrack that draws on African-American styles. These interruptions mirror the growing acceptance by the main character of his blackness, and his move towards direct action in the civil rights movement that he couldn't have cared less about at the start of the film.

Columbia Pictures apparently liked the movie, but Van Peebles walked away from them to make Sweet Sweetback independently. On the surface, Sweet Sweetback seems the far more uncompromising film – both aesthetically and politically – and it has had much more longevity and cultural impact as a result, but Watermelon Man should not be overlooked, and is in its own way just as subversive. I highly recommend it, preferably as a double feature with Putney Swope.