I've always looked back fondly on this film, but considering some of the language I figured I'd never see it on TV again. I was wrong. It showed up on Turner Classic Movies in a festival of films featuring African American actors and directors. That is probably the only way you could see it today.
Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) plays an (initially) white thirty something insurance salesman. Married with two kids, he has a nice house in the suburbs. He is also not only an outspoken bigot, he is just a loudmouth in general and disliked by everyone. He pinches the behinds of secretaries at work and is rebuffed, and when he tries to invite colleagues over for barbecue they always have an excuse. His wife wants more affection, he consistently rejects her.
Then one day he wakes up black, and everything changes. His doctor tries to get to the bottom of it and concludes that Jeff must really be black - and then fires him as a patient ("You might be more comfortable with a doctor of your own race"). The Swedish secretary at work who did ignore him is now very sexually interested. He starts getting phone calls laced with racial epithets telling him to move out. His boss thinks this "switch" is great because now his office has someone to sell policies to African Americans (not the term he or anybody uses in 1970). His neighbors decide to buy Jeff and his wife out of their house and wind up giving them three times what it is worth - 100K - a princely sum in 1970. And finally, Jeff's wife, a self proclaimed liberal, decides she is not THAT liberal and does not want sex with Jeff for a change. And his jogging routine gets him almost arrested and surrounded by a mob because he must have stolen something to be running through that neighborhood. And there is much more.
So Jeff goes from being disliked to ostracized and abandoned. And yet he is a much better person for all of this because he sees what bigotry is all about. The African Americans he used to joke about he now sees up close and personal from selling them insurance and realizes they are decent people just trying to get by. I'll let you watch and see how this all turns out.
To me, Godfrey Cambridge's makeup as a white guy is just ridiculous. But after all I KNOW it is Godfrey Cambridge, and there is no mistaking his unique style of comedy and sarcastic delivery. This is a good role for Estelle Parsons as Jeff's wife who finds out she is more conventional than she thought. Mantan Moreland shows up in a cameo role, but he is given far more dignity than he got in the 1940s films he appeared in. Note that Erin Moran shows up as one of Jeff's children three years before Happy Days.
This was made in that unique era after the production code was long gone and before political correctness set in, and thus it can take some chances, maybe offend people. But it does a far better job of pointing out the stupidity of racism in a far more effective manner than some preachy but socially acceptable film of the 21st century ever could.
Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) plays an (initially) white thirty something insurance salesman. Married with two kids, he has a nice house in the suburbs. He is also not only an outspoken bigot, he is just a loudmouth in general and disliked by everyone. He pinches the behinds of secretaries at work and is rebuffed, and when he tries to invite colleagues over for barbecue they always have an excuse. His wife wants more affection, he consistently rejects her.
Then one day he wakes up black, and everything changes. His doctor tries to get to the bottom of it and concludes that Jeff must really be black - and then fires him as a patient ("You might be more comfortable with a doctor of your own race"). The Swedish secretary at work who did ignore him is now very sexually interested. He starts getting phone calls laced with racial epithets telling him to move out. His boss thinks this "switch" is great because now his office has someone to sell policies to African Americans (not the term he or anybody uses in 1970). His neighbors decide to buy Jeff and his wife out of their house and wind up giving them three times what it is worth - 100K - a princely sum in 1970. And finally, Jeff's wife, a self proclaimed liberal, decides she is not THAT liberal and does not want sex with Jeff for a change. And his jogging routine gets him almost arrested and surrounded by a mob because he must have stolen something to be running through that neighborhood. And there is much more.
So Jeff goes from being disliked to ostracized and abandoned. And yet he is a much better person for all of this because he sees what bigotry is all about. The African Americans he used to joke about he now sees up close and personal from selling them insurance and realizes they are decent people just trying to get by. I'll let you watch and see how this all turns out.
To me, Godfrey Cambridge's makeup as a white guy is just ridiculous. But after all I KNOW it is Godfrey Cambridge, and there is no mistaking his unique style of comedy and sarcastic delivery. This is a good role for Estelle Parsons as Jeff's wife who finds out she is more conventional than she thought. Mantan Moreland shows up in a cameo role, but he is given far more dignity than he got in the 1940s films he appeared in. Note that Erin Moran shows up as one of Jeff's children three years before Happy Days.
This was made in that unique era after the production code was long gone and before political correctness set in, and thus it can take some chances, maybe offend people. But it does a far better job of pointing out the stupidity of racism in a far more effective manner than some preachy but socially acceptable film of the 21st century ever could.