As pathetic as this movie may seem I've noticed alot of my Black male friends really relate to the character "Cambridge". What are your thoughts after watching this film. It makes me laugh and feel good about myself as a white female. Hell! I didn't know Black men acted like fools for white skin. We dodn't even have to try hard..just be white and we're alright. Thanks Black guys..I guess I can forget about my diet because my Black hubby likes me BIG. I have a picture to share with everyone if they don't mind.

Have a nice day,
Megan

By Lightbulb (137.148.55.64) on Friday, October 12, 2001 - 11:22 am:

This Week's Première Review

The Watermelon Man (1970)

What could be funnier than an
"outrageous-yet-poignant" comedy about an
insufferable Archie Bunker-ish bigot who somehow
turns into a black man overnight?

Uh, maybe a minstrel show at a KKK barbecue?

Actually, tap dancing and public lynchings are among the very few targets that
The Watermelon Man misses in its scattershot approach to "with-it" racial
hilarity, circa 1970.

Stand-up comic Godfrey Cambridge plays the pigment-challenged lead. Abrasive
in any color, his manic one-note performance makes one yearn for the subtle
nuance of, say, Moms Mabley or Jimmie "Dyn-o-mite!" Walker.

Forced to play the first quarter of the film in
grotesque white-face, Cambridge looks less like a
Caucasian than a recovering burn victim. When his
sitcom-like family (including a pre-Happy Days Erin
Moran, as his daughter) gathers for a meal in the first
scene, you halfway expect this clod's clan to dive
under the table in horror. Instead, they groan as our
chameleonic protagonist cavalierly switches off television coverage of a race
riot, explaining "I'm going to have my dinner without watching a bunch of uppity
darkies jigging up and down on my TV screen!"

Did someone say "dark portent?"

The next morning, when he wakes wakes up black, all Harlem breaks loose.

Slathering his head with skin bleach and hair-straightener, he screeches, "These
creams don't work--no wonder Negroes riot!"

Liberal wife Estelle Parsons, meanwhile, takes a real shine to hubby's new look.
While her slack-jawed daughter witnesses one of Dad's fly-aparts, she calmly
announces, "C'mon, Janice--you don't want your ham hocks to get cold."

Funny in ways that the studio never intended, this appalling mess goes on for so
long some viewers will think they're watching a Roots-length episode of Love,
American Style. Cambridge sings "Camptown Races," cons his neighbors into
paying an inflated price for his house and even has an affair with his busty
secretary--who, after he fails to live up to his brethren's stereotypical virility,
calls him a "nigger."

Better she should have called the audience a cab--and preferably not a Checker.

The Watermelon Man fun fact: The year after directing this sad-ass farce,
director Melvin Van Peebles (Mario's dad) had considerably more success with
the trail-blazing blaxploitation indie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.