Watermelon Man, Melvin Van Peebles (U.S., 1970)

For a few months some movie exec must have thought Melvin Van Peebles, the soon-to-be director of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, was white. Why else offer him a film featuring a white insurance salesman who wakes to find he’s black, but played by a white actor in blackface? The studio wanted someone like Jack Lemmon. Luckily, Van Peebles won out, substituting the darkly sarcastic Godfrey Cambridge as the bigoted suburbanite. No amount of scrubbing can remove the “black” and finally this sudden “negro” ventures out to a world permeated with racism, at work, on the street, in his own neighborhood. And the humor? It’s only skin deep.

—Steve Seid

• Written by Herman Raucher. Photographed by W. Wallace Kelley. With Godfrey Cambridge, Estelle Parsons, Howard Caine, D’Urville Martin. (97 mins, Color, 35mm, From Sony Pictures)