Watermelon Man (1970): A Scathing Indictment on White Power Structures

How had we never heard of this movie before?

Just kidding, we know how. Probably for the same reasons we hadn’t heard of Melvin Van Peebles, a keen-eyed director and master of saying exactly what he wants to say. He’s best known for a film that became a key ingredient in the genre that would later be called "Blaxploitation,” Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. But before then—and I mean right before then—he broke into the Hollywood mainstream with his second-ever feature film: Watermelon Man.

We found out about this gem from Behind the Slate podcast’s Tiktok about the wild ride that is this movie’s production. Right off the bat, the premise was evocative of something you might see a guilty white liberal write: A bigoted white man wakes up one morning to discover he’s become Black overnight. And you’d be half right! Watermelon Man wasn’t written by Van Peebles, but rather a white man named Herman Raucher. By happenstance, Columbia Pictures got wind that their competitors had been trying to stay “fashionable” and “trendy” by doing this neat trick called “hiring Black people to do key production work,” so they decided Raucher’s screenplay was the perfect opportunity to jump in and get some of that sweet, sweet prestige.

Enter Melvin Van Peebles, who had just finished an extremely successful festival run with his first feature film, The Story of a Three-Day Pass. Not one to pass up the opportunity to make themselves look even better, Columbia fixed their hopes on Van Peebles and made concessions that I’d be surprised to see in 1970 under any other circumstances. For example, when Columbia wanted to hire Jack Lemmon or Alan Arkin (both white comedians) to play the protagonist, Jeff Gerber, in blackface. Van Peebles flatly refused. They relented and allowed him to cast his own choice for Gerber, an incredible and truly unappreciated actor named Godfrey Cambridge. Van Peebles signed the contract.

Of course, Columbia wasn’t interested in allowing Van Peebles full creative agency. Once he was locked into a contract, the studio cut his production time from the standard 60 days to 31 and left Van Peebles relatively to his own devices (aside from executive input on creative decisions, of course). They instructed him to make a comedy that poked fun at white culture without alienating white audiences—and they didn’t care much what happened next. If the movie flopped or was unfinished, they could justify avoiding Black directors in the future. If it was a hit, all the better for their image.

Van Peebles, to our complete lack of surprise, was smarter than the Columbia execs. He picked his battles, bided his time, and made creative decisions that seemed unimportant to the studio—and ultimately undermined their instructions to not alienate white people. He made changes to the script and added subtle directorial sparks of genius to communicate his own experiences as a Black man. He undermined Raucher and Columbia’s initial ending—which saw Jeff Gerber awake one morning to find that the whole thing had been a dream—and lied to executives’ faces to ensure that his own ending (which sees Gerber embrace his Blackness and join a black power combat training group) was the only option. He made the movie exactly what he wanted it to be: an indictment of whiteness and the misery it inflicts on everyone (including white people), and a reminder to Black people that there’s nothing desirable about conforming to their insanity.

We go into more detail about what that means in practice, but suffice to say Van Peebles knew how to maneuver every obstacle Columbia threw at him and his team. The culmination is a ceaseless rage against the machine, a film that uses every tool at its disposal to target the arbitrary, uncomfortable, and actively harmful falseness of white power structures and unapologetically shout that the solidarity, authenticity, and community inherent to Blackness is actively more desirable.

Every moment of this film is rich with meaning. Not a moment is wasted, not a line of dialogue out of place. Every element is deliberately and carefully crafted to address the hatefulness and hypocrisy of white “culture” and reassert Black agency in a world that actively tries to stifle it. Watch this movie. Internalize it. If you’re white, remember that it isn’t made for you. If you’re not, enjoy a master at work perfectly crystalizing a moment in history that transcends time and punches whiteness right in the face.