Black Like Me

James Whitmore gives a good performance as a white man who is given medical treatments to turn the pigmentation of his skin to resemble that of an African American. Based on the fine book by John Howard Griffin he heads off to the south to see what being a black person in the U.S. is like.

The film recently aired on AMC. It is somewhat dated and Whitmore doesn't appear to be any thing other than a Caucasian with dark make up on. The film nonetheless is quite good as it examines his journey through the south. He encounters prejudice at virtually every stop. The film tends to lag at certain points but still delivers a powerful story. Read the book first then see this early 60's picture

Obviously hampered by a small "independent" budget and the casting of James Whitmore (a fine stage actor who, unlike the original author of the book, John Howard Griffin, simply cannot believably pass for a black man) in the lead, director Carl Lerner's screenplay (co-written with Gerda Lerner and an uncredited Paul Green) shuns Griffin's chronological story telling through dated diary entries and rearranges the events Griffin told so well to surprisingly LESS dramatic effect, but it gives a movingly honest portrayal of life in the South near the start of the long over-due civil rights movement.

The year this film was released my (white) family was transferred to a suburb of Atlanta, Ga. from a Virginia suburb of Washington D.C., and enroute we were stunned to see Klansmen in full regalia out on the interstate in North Carolina inspecting cars coming down from the north. It was just one of those things one had to live with at the time - like civil rights workers being murdered and their killers, when caught, being acquitted by all white juries - but this film manages, despite honestly showing the unremitting low grade caution every black person had to live with, and the blatant racism of a few Southern whites, to also be fair to the majority which was merely oblivious to - and sometimes even quietly disapproving of the evil around them - who wouldn't intentionally hurt a black person.

This well meaning majority,unintentionally perpetuating what they saw as "something they couldn't do anything about," eventually came around - and the book helped, even if the movie went largely unseen.

One of the most effecting - but at the same time least persuasive - sections of the film comes late, when Whitmore/Griffin's character tries to justify his actions to a rising young black activist (excellently played to type by Al Freeman Jr.). As it turned out, Griffin's book actually did help in the long struggle for equality, bringing the reality of a shame to the attention of the rest of the nation which needed the reminder as it demanded and helped the South come into the 20th Century, but the film only touches on the screams of outrage from the South at the mirror being held up so honestly to something they did not wish to see.

This was only a few years after the "Stars and Bars" (the old Confederate Battle Flag alluded to so effectively in the opening credits of this film) was pointedly added to the Georgia state flag in protest to Federal Civil Rights legislation. Bigots (self identifying and otherwise) called it an emblem of "local pride and heritage" - realists saw it for what it was in the modern usage and timing: a symbol of hate, rebellion and intimidation.

Times really have changed radically in the 40+ years since this film was made, and today the movie is chiefly valuable as a document of what life was like in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia during Griffin's all too brief (one month) sojourn on the other side of the color barrier. The street scenes and home details are perfectly observed. As one who lived through the period, I can testify the film is not over stated politically or socially.

The movie BLACK LIKE ME does not portray "every white person as a bigot" (though in my years growing up in the South, I never met a bigot who self-identified as one), but it does show how a rotten few can intimidate a complacent majority on any issue. As we let some politicians play "the terror card" to suspend out liberties in the 21st Century, or the pseudo-"religious" and "guilt by association cards" to deny the right to marriage to significant parts of the population at a time when stable relationships are in society's best interest, it is perhaps a lesson worth remembering. The sad thing is that for the most part, the only people who will bother to watch this flawed but decent film are for the most part the ones who already know.

This is the sleepy South as it really was. The pace is deliberate but necessarily so. The direction and acting is gritty and real.

The anger was real. The prejudice was real. The hate was real. The fear was real. The pain was real. It really happened this way.

This movie shows us all that. We walk in the shoes of a white man who looks like a black man...but we will never know. We can only imagine like James Whitmore's character, John Horton. We can only imagine what a man or woman had to endure in the unilluminated history of the United States.

Seeing this, we know, though we have come quite some distance, that we have still a long way to go before the reality is but a memory.

I salute all of those involved in this film and Mr. John Howard Griffin who endured it all and let us know the cruelty of man and helped us open our eyes.

John Howard Griffin was a white reporter who darken his skin to experience life as a black man in the deep South. This is based on his book. John Finley Horton (James Whitmore) from Texas wants to write a series of articles on integration for Eli Carr (Clifton James) but he's afraid of the repercussions. He gets treatments of pills and tanning lamps to darken his skin. Along the way, he reveals the truth to shoeshine Burt Wilson (Richard Ward) and gets his help to pass.

"I changed the color of my skin... now I know what it feels like to be BLACK!" They couldn't get away with that tagline today. No matter how well the disguise, the color doesn't come off of a black man at the end of the day. Its heart is in the right place, but James Whitmore looks like a darkened white man. The eyes are one problem and he needs a good pair of sunglasses. The other problem is that it isn't always a compelling movie. There are scenes of eye opening racism. There are also weird little scenes about race relations. It's put together like a series of disconnected vignettes. As a movie, it doesn't really flow and the acting sometimes fall into melodrama territories. It's still interesting to watch.

For you people who don't know. This movie is based on a book by John Howard Griffin. In real life he dressed like a black man in 1959 and went about in Mississippi for five or six weeks. During this time he also went as himself a white-man, in order to compare certain scenarios. He was treated differently as a black man because that is how the white people decided to treat him. Not because he told them to, not because he did anything wrong. That's just how he was treated. The movie just happens to show what his experiences were. For all the people who believe racism doesn't exist just because they aren't racist (or at least said anything racist out loud) you aren't living in reality or at least America. True it isn't as blatant now as it was then it is real. So if you don't like this movie fine. But don't let your ignorance of how the world (or at least America)works be your reason for not liking this movie.