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'Watermelon Man' Grinds Gears

By Steve Wells
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

As any intelligent driver knows,
if you shift gears while your vehicle
is in motion without first
thoughtfully disengaging the clutch
to allow for a smooth transition,
then you're inviting trouble. Well,
crude as the analogy is, the same is
true of films, a fact which a
director named Melvin Van Peebles
would do well to learn.

His new film, "Watermelon
Man," starts as an unorthodox
comedy, the first half of which
degrades blacks in more ways than
one. About forty-five minutes into
the film, however, we realize that
this is far from being Mr. Van
Peebles' intention; his main goal
seems to be to degrade whites. And,
in hopes of achieving this goal,
two-thirds of the way through, he
ceases his flippant handling of the
subject matter, stops striving for
laughs, and, instead, suddenly tries
to be profoundly serious. It doesn't
work.

"Watermelon Man" is about a
happy-go-lucky, athletic, bigoted,
white, upper-middle class insurance
salesman who wakes up one
morning to discover that his skin
has turned black. It's a one joke
premise and the mileage that Mr.
Van Peebles and his screenwriter,
Herman Raucher, get out of it is
disappointingly little.

All the situations that develop
are predictable and reflect stunted
imaginations. First there is the
expected panic, then the frantic
efforts to reverse this mystifying
curse, then the bewildered
double-takes of his acquaintances
(you see, obnoxious white bigots
have no friends) upon seeing the
transformation, then the efforts of
neighbors to force the black man
out of their sparkling white
neighborhood, and finally the
exodus of his wife. And, of course,
the man's ultimate acceptance of
his new condition and race.

Mr. Raucher's screenplay is
filled with leaden dialogue and sick
jokes. Credit for the few laughs that
come must go primarily to the
stars, Godfrey Cambridge and
Estelle Parsons, who do the best
they can with the script, although
Mr. Cambridge isn't at all
convincing before he assumes his
natural color and he does tend to
overact on occasions.

Aside from the grinding of gears,
Mr. Van Peebles' direction seems

too flashy, too apparent. There is
no subtlety whatsoever. True, he
does ultimately make a statement.
It is that all blacks are beautiful and
that all whites are opportunistic
bigots, which is, in itself, a puerile
generalization which makes me
wonder if Mr. Van Peebles isn't, in
his way, just as bigoted as the
whites he condemns.

(Now at the Barracks Road)