Watermelon Man

Melvin van Peebles is understandably more famous today for Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song than for this comedy made for Columbia one year before. Nevertheless, this 1970 feature is a fascinating and fearless snapshot of race relations in the years following the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., wherein a racist insurance salesman played by Cambridge in whiteface wakes up one morning to discover his skin has turned black. His subsequent odyssey takes him from entitled suburbanite to token Black employee, and ultimately towards radicalization—but as always in a Van Peebles film, nothing comes easy.