Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman(1976) was ages ahead of its time. And then Janet mentions that the men were Mexicans and her dad storms off and her mother says "Why did you have to say that? Your father hates Mexicans." and then it cuts to that big shot of the crowd where we hear them hearing that line and then they all erupt into cheers. I also love the crazy moment right before the dad sings his "Thank God I'm A Man" song, where Janet's family is talking about the Slepstrecky(sp?) boy and how he was caught in a gay orgy and the dad is just completely disbelieving. Also had a catchy musical sequence, because obviously. It's deeply ambivalent about race in a way that, for a film released in 1970, really surprised me.Īnd a year later he did Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, so he was forever "the guy who invented blaxploitation." But I think I liked Watermelon Man better. In the ending, he's dead-serious, doing coordinated martial arts with other Black men in a dojo. Like: in the opening, he's a goofball, doing funny training exercises with medicine balls in his attic.
At the same time, though, he gets this newfound sense of purpose and identity - when you strip away the protection of whiteness, he becomes a more authentic, self-actualized person. You watch as he's beaten down, bit by bit, from a funny, silly character to someone jaded and cold. The direction, to Cambridge's performance, everything. Third, there's this pervasive bitterness to it. Second, he never shot the studio-mandated ending, so the guy never wakes up. first of all, it's a black actor (Godfrey Cambridge) wearing whiteface for the first chunk of the movie. And the script itself is largely hackneyed racial humor, which you get a chuckle from here and there but mostly has you rolling your eyes.īut the way Van Peebles directs it.
White man wakes up as a Black man, hijinks ensue, drama ensues, he wakes up having learned a lesson about tolerance. Like, basic premise: it's written as a blackface comedy, and that's how the screenwriter sold it to Columbia. It's his only studio film and probably his most "mainstream" in construction and presentation, but it uses the format in such a subversive way. I got the Melvin Van Peebles box set from Criterion last year, and while he's absolutely a idiosyncratic director, I feel like Watermelon Man in particular is just.
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