Chronicling this unusual odyssey through a flashback structure and a semi-documentary visual style, writer-director Carl Lerner and co-screenwriter Gerda Lerner introduce Horton as a dark-skinned man already pursuing his goal, then go back in time to reveal facts about his background and his reasons for undertaking his difficult and often dangerous odyssey. As a native of Texas, he grew up surrounded by everyday racism that he eventually overcame and renounced. He returned from wartime military service with injuries that badly impaired his vision for several years; his sight came back after a while, but temporary blindness reinforced his awareness that physical traits are literally skin deep. Horton agrees with Martin Luther King that what counts is not the shade of one's complexion but the content of one's character. He undertakes his journey as a black man in order to write about minority issues from the inside, as a subjective participant rather than just an objective observer.
After darkening his skin with help from a cooperative dermatologist, Horton goes to New Orleans and befriends an African-American man who runs a shoeshine stand, enlisting his advice on how to talk, behave, and even think in ways that won't give away his white identity. One of the first lessons is not to drink water during the day, since "colored" restrooms are few and far between. Before long he encounters what he comes to think of as the "hate stare," aimed at his black skin by white people he has never offended in any way and have no earthly reason to dislike him, much less hold him in contempt.
The movie traces Horton's travels through the South, where his hitchhiking conversations, job-hunting problems, and sojourns in flea-bitten dives put him into contact with a nasty succession of white bigots - many of whom have a creepy fascination with interracial sex - and occasionally with a white person who has warm, sympathetic leanings. The story's climax comes near the end of his journey, when he tells the truth about himself to a fiery young African-American activist who explodes with anger at the notion that temporarily passing as black has anything in common with permanently being black in a society organized by a white majority determined to maintain its dominant position at all costs. This is certainly a built-in flaw of Horton's experiment, but one still has to admire the bravery, creativity, and good intentions that underlie it.
Griffin, the real-life prototype of the semi-fictionalized Horton, was even more remarkable than the movie acknowledges. He was a brilliant child with a photographic memory, a flair for languages, and talents ranging from science to music. Frustrated by the slow pace of his schooling, he managed to enroll at an advanced high school in France, where he studied classical languages and literature. He entered medical school but dropped out to fight with the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation, smuggling Jewish children to safety in the ambulance he drove as an intern at a mental institution.
During his years of blindness Griffin concentrated on musicology, intensively studying Gregorian chant until his sight failed altogether. He also cultivated his writing skills, remaining a serious writer when his vision returned. The events detailed in Black Like Me began in 1959, culminating in a series of magazine articles and then a book-length treatment published in 1961. Later in the 1960s he continued writing, developed his gift for photography, and gave hundreds of lectures supporting the civil-rights movement, although he eventually stopped speaking on the experiences that produced Black Like Me, realizing that in the final analysis the only authentic commentators on black American life are black Americans themselves. His health grew progressively weaker, however, and he died in 1980 at just 60 years old.
Black Like Me is the only feature directed by Lerner, who was primarily a film editor with such noteworthy pictures as Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery (1956), Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957), John Cromwell's The Goddess (1958), William Friedkin's The Boys in the Band (1970), and Alan J. Pakula's Klute (1971) among his credits. He directed Black Like Me in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner, unfolding the story with few needless flourishes or digressions. Whitmore brings the same spirit to his sincere, unglamorous portrayal of the protagonist, supported by a splendid secondary cast including Roscoe Lee Browne, Will Geer, Clifton James, David Huddleston, Heywood Hale Broun, and Al Freeman, Jr. as the young militant who confronts Horton at the end.
Made on a modest budget but with a lot of heart, Black Like Me is not great cinema. It's a compelling time capsule, however, offering a rough-and-ready sketch of the powerful passions and noble purposes that propelled the civil-rights movement in the crucial year of 1964.
Director: Carl Lerner
Producer: Julius Tannenbaum
Screenplay: Carl Lerner, Gerda Lerner
Cinematographers: Victor Lukens, Henry Mueller II
Film Editing: Lora Hays
Music: Meyer Kupferman
With: James Whitmore (John Finley Horton), Sorrell Booke (Dr. Jackson), Roscoe Lee Browne (Christopher), Al Freeman, Jr. (Thomas Newcomb), Will Geer (truck driver), Robert Gerringer (Ed Saunders), Clifton James (Eli Carr), John Marriott (Hodges), Thelma Oliver (Georgie), Lenka Petersen ((Lucy Horton), P.J. Sidney (Frank Newcomb), Billie Allen (Vertell), Sarah Cunningham (Mary Saunders), David Huddleston (man in car), Raymond St. Jacques (burial insurance salesman)
BW-105m.
by David Sterritt
