Screen Picks

How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)

by Sam Adams

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How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) (Wed., Feb. 14, 7 p.m., free, International House, 3701 Chestnut St. ) There's no doubt that Melvin Van Peebles shares much in common with his most famous creation, the hard-fighting, hard-loving hero of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Like Sweetback, Van Peebles is a self-styled revolutionary, answerable to no one but still devoted to his own brand of justice. Both are handy with the ladies, and allergic to any form of confinement, be it physical, social or even spiritual. But where his laconic character hardly speaks a word, Van Peebles talks a blue streak, his utterances at once profane and profound. And where Sweetback responds to the constraints of a racist society with violence and instinctive cunning, Van Peebles has fired back with every weapon in his formidable arsenal, which is a long way of saying that while Van Peebles may be Sweetback, Sweetback is far from all there is to Van Peebles.

Joe Angio's documentary does its best to capture Van Peebles in all his complexity, a Herculean task that gives the movie a somewhat ragged shape and dooms it to at least partial failure. It might well be impossible to do justice to Van Peebles' career as filmmaker, playwright, novelist, recording artist and social critic within the bounds of a 90-minute film, to say nothing of his career as an Air Force navigator, San Francisco cable car operator and mid-'80s turn as a stock trader. Apart from Sweetback, few of Van Peebles' ventures have been financial successes — even his Broadway musical Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, which was nominated for seven Tonys, barely met its weekly production costs — but he is living, breathing proof of his own unwillingness to compromise.

Van Peebles' tenacity is his most formidable asset, allowing him to blast through obstacles that felled many before, and after, him. Unable to get a job at an American movie studio — where, he has said elsewhere, he was offered the post of "elevator operator" despite having directed three well-received short films — he emigrated, first to Holland (where he added the superfluous "Van" to his name) and then to France, where he ingeniously took advantage, in every sense, of a program designed to help "French writers" adapt their work for the screen. Van Peebles spoke no French, and had never written a novel, but no matter: He began to publish in French, and by 1967 he acquired a director's card to turn his novel, La Permission, into his first movie, The Story of a Three-Day Pass.

In one revealing moment, Van Peebles tells a French interviewer that the novels he published in France were not considered sellable in the U.S. because, essentially, they weren't "black enough," which is to say they reflected Van Peebles' middle-class, college-educated upbringing rather than the stark realities of ghetto life. It's worth nothing, although Watermelon does not, that Van Peebles' most successful works essentially repudiate the art-house sophistication of his earliest films in favor of a deliberate primitivism. That Sweetback and its follow-up, a filmed-on-stage version of Van Peebles' musical Don't Play Us Cheap, were made without the support of the Hollywood system accounts in part for their vibrant crudity. But you also have to conclude that Van Peebles learned that he could communicate better with his intended audience (which was definitely not the film-festival set) by speaking from the gut rather than the head.

Critic Elvis Mitchell says that one of Van Peebles' greatest achievements was learning how to treat "blackness as a commodity"; contemporaries like Gordon Parks and Ossie Davis were smuggling their wares into Hollywood, Van Peebles was busy branding himself as an outsider, famously marketing Sweetback as "rated X by an all-white jury" (a tag he liked enough to recycle as the title of one of his albums). Of course, he was an outsider, but rhetoric aside, Van Peebles was no revolutionary; unlike Davis, he never allied himself with any political movement that did not have as its primary goal the advancement of Melvin Van Peebles. In essence, he says his goal was to lead by example, to live free, like Sweetback, and let others follow his lead. But rather than a true rule-breaker, Van Peebles seems like an archetype of the all-American hustler, gaming the system, and his audience, at every turn. He is his own greatest work of art.

(sam@citypaper.net)