Watermelon Man (1970)

A bigoted white man makes the unlikely conversion to a brother in Melvin Van Peebles’s uproarious race-relations satire Watermelon Man (1970). The star and director of blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) tackles racism head-on in a film that centers on a Kafka-esque transformation. Godfrey Cambridge plays a wisecracking salesman who wakes up one morning with a new shade of skin. Flummoxed and distraught, the anti-hero wises up about his prejudicial ways after weathering one injustice after another. Van Peebles’s film has been described as a “cinematic howl of rage,” but he also encourages a howling of a different sort by casting Kay Kimberley as the central love interest. Her interracial love scene boasts a heavenly bounty of T&A.