Customer Reviews

I Passed for White

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I saw this movie 47 years ago when I was age 7. It is memorable and is an early attempt to show the injustice created by a society which insists races cannot mix. Not only do I remember scenes from the movie, but I remember the tears running down my mother's face as the movie concluded with a predicable end. I have long awaited the release of this movie. I will soon see it for the second time after 47 years!

This film had every chance in the world to make a meaningful statement about racial prejudice and threw each one away. Sonja Wilde's part, where she is obviously white or pale, is not very believable when she tells an employer she is part black so she can't get a job. James Franciscus overacts as her racist husband, but his script is at fault. The story needed some compelling event where she could admit she was part black and he could try to accept it (ex. the baby lived and resembled him as the real father) but instead he only rants and raves that she shouldn't socialize with black people. A bit too long where our bride must lie about her black father with no DVD extras to relieve the tedium.

Having waited many years to see this film, I was anticipating a great quality DVD print for the price. Imagine my surprise when I sat down to enjoy it for the first time and noticed scratches and tears (think the opening credits of John Cassavete's Johnny Staccato. The full frame format makes it impossible to read the credits without losing half of the
names.
You would think such a rare gem as this would deserve to be remastered and preserved.
Having said that. Sonia Wilde and James Franciscus give excellent perormances and the supporting cast are fine.

Waited a long time for this one! Cover design on box is really bad abnnd they should have used the wonderful original poster design. The print is in really bad shape, alot os scratches and sound jumps, but it is alot of fun to watch. No extras and the box was all torn on the copy I paid for.

This "anti-passing" film has the usual racist message advocating the myth of white racial "purity." I was surprised to find that the heroine was sympathetically portrayed (as opposed to the mixed-white girl in the 1950's "Imitation of Life," for example). I was also surprised to find the realistic scenes of sympathetic "pure" whites who advise the heroine that she is, after all, really "white" and would be foolish to call herself a "Negro." Bravo! That stigma has no more ethnic validity than the "Aryan/non-Aryan" idiocy of the Third Reich.

The film was consistent with other "anti-passing" films in showing only "Negro" relatives for the heroine in order to imply that she is only a mutation and not a descendants of whites. The relatives who look like her are conveniently absent. I was surprised that the grandmother (the ubiquitous "mammy" figure)said that she was "married" to "a white man" (the heroine's grandfather). Where is he? What happened to him? In "Imitation of Life," the cop-out is that she was married to a man who only "looked white." (If it looks like a white, it's a white!). The grandmother makes up for her "mistake" by saying that she wouldn't do it again and that "interracial" marriage is wrong "because of the children." Yeah, right. If that's true, then people like the heroine SHOULD marry other whites and not blacks so the children won't be so confused with all those different colors in the family.

It's very easy for a mixed-white like the heroine to be part of the general white society. It's trying to pretend to be a lighter version of "Negro" that is hard and "living a lie." It was surprising that the film did show some of the latter, but of course it had to stack the deck against the heroine in order to frighten other potential "passers" (the real purpose of the movie). The "pure white" husband of the heroine has to be from a family of wealthy American aristocrats with "blue blood" obsessions as opposed to regular folks. The heroine doesn't have a single relative with a Euro phenotype who can make an appearance to the in-laws. The heroine is fearful of the "black baby throwback" myth (a genetic impossibility in her case). There is a disturbing scene on the dance floor in which the writer seems to be implying that the heroine's love of dance and dancing skills are somehow related to her "Negro blood." The heroine allows her husband to think that her ridiculous fear of a "black baby" means that she was unfaithful to him. He does not deduce that his wife has mixed ancestry.

Movies like this never point out that Hispanics, Arab-Americans, Melungeons, Lumbees, etc. totally ignore the stigma and open secret of their partial African ancestry with total impunity. If this is admitted, the racist "lesson" of the film looks like the racist idiocy that it truly is. Fans of this film would be better off reading books like Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise And Triumph of the One-drop Rule, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, Interracialism : Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law,An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New,Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race,American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity,Racially Mixed People in America,Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Studies in the Legal History of the South),Pell Mellers: Race and Memory in a Carolina Pocosin,Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungenons of Appalachia (Melungeons (Series).).

I am a 52 year old women now, and the first time I saw this film I was 9 years old, I always remember it, and I vowed that when and if I got the chance to purchase this I would, IIIIIIIIIII got it now, Woo Whoo, yippy.

I saw this movie with my Mom and Aunt when I was a little kid, and it really stayed with me. I would be interested in seeing what it's like to me NOW. My Mother constantly asked me to find it, and I never could, now I see it's on DVD and she's in a nursing home. I might have to drag a DVD player there and get this movie! I also remember how it affected my Mom and Aunt that day, maybe that's why it's so memorable to me. I'll have to review again AFTER I see it again.