Watermelon Man

No Image

Country:United States of America

Director:Melvin Van Peebles

Program:Parallel Pathways

Year: 
1970

Summary:

Melvin Van Peebles, prior to making the groundbreaking film, SweetSweetback’s Badaaaaass Song, was risked to make Hollywood studio film which proves to be a randy experiment that expresses complex ideas about race and racism and made certain that “he would never work in that town again”--so he had better produce his own damn movies! We meet Jeff Gerber (a bizarre incarnation for actor Godfrey Cambridge) who has a wife, two preadolescent kids, a nice home with a manicured lawn, is something of a health nut, regularly uses a sun lamp, shows himself to be racist and a male chauvinist, but something unusual happens--he wakes up in the middle of the night as a black man.