Loud-mouthed, bigoted insurance salesman Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge, playing the first several minutes in white makeup) wakes to discover that he’s now Black. Estelle Parsons plays his suburban housewife who, while progressive on racial issues, asks him to leave. His employer sees this as an opportunity to sell insurance policies to Blacks. Gerber eventually accepts his lot and moves on with his life, albeit a noticeably segregated one.

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles, who was a writer, composer and had made his directorial debut three years prior with a film based on his novel Story of a Three Day Pass with a grant from the French government. Columbia Pictures – opening its checkbook to anyone making money on independent films – sent Van Peebles a script called The Night the Sun Came Out On Happy Hollow Lane by Herman Raucher.

Considered a possible vehicle for Alan Arkin or Jack Lemmon to play in blackface, Van Peebles instead cast a Black actor, the best available to him at the time being Cambridge. The studio was so pleased with the finished product that they signed Van Peebles to a three-picture deal, but the filmmaker had other ideas, taking the studio money and making Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song independently, before his career faded into obscurity.

Van Peebles has never disowned Watermelon Man, blamed the studio or even used the film to explain the genesis of the guerilla-made Sweetback, but his conscience had to have been telling him something was rotten in Denmark here.

Watermelon Man is the kind of supremely awful movie that Hollywood produces at least once every decade, like Showgirls. The ideas are in such bad taste, but on such a grand scale, that it boggles the mind how the project ever got in front of the cameras. Yes, any film that tosses out dialogue like “Negro” or “You’re a credit to your race” can’t help but be uncomfortable to watch today, but Watermelon Man offended me on a filmmaking basis alone.

Raucher’s story is a joke that never deals with its ideas on any type of meaningful level. Van Peebles then got in his own way by casting Godfrey Cambridge, one of the most agonizingly bad, would-be “thespians” of the period. He plays his role like Ralph Kramden with a skin problem, bellowing, mugging and spewing one bigoted line after another.

Since the filmmakers don’t bother concocting a magical explanation for this switch of identity, it would have been interesting perhaps for the character to wake up as if he’d lived his entire life as a Black man, with family, friends, job and residence all reflecting his segregated social status, his other life and the life of the American dream a mirage he finds himself unable to get back to due to the reality of the country’s racial attitudes.

The sad thing about Watermelon Man is that, even though Van Peebles directed, it bends over backwards to play to whites. As in, “Oh, how terrible would it be for us if I woke up Black?” The few Black characters in the movie are as stereotypically buffoonish as Cambridge. Putting “white face” on him was another terrible idea. The opening minutes of the film are uncomfortable enough with the torrent of bigoted dialogue streaming out of him, but the makeup job is so grotesque that you can’t wait for Cambridge to turn Black.

Van Peebles composed the blues flavored score, which is awkward and doesn’t help the movie out at all. Its poster, with a watermelon colored in an American flag under the tagline “The Uppity Movie”, promised something incendiary that this catastrophe never came close to living up to.