Black like Me Reviews

A very good idea that was technically lacking, and the overdoing of several scenes put it into the exploitation category. BLACK LIKE ME is the true story of John Howard Griffin, a white man, who masqueraded as a black in order to see what it was like. A Texan by birth, Griffin (Whitmore) had a point to make with his book, and it stood as a trend-setter in the early 1960s. All of that is lost in the pallid screenplay. Whitmore wears nice clothes, carries luggage Vuitton might envy, has plenty of money in his pocket, and has a makeup job that looks as though it was done by an old minstrel show artist. Anyone who wasn't blind could spot that this was not a black man. It's too long, the sound is hard to hear, the hand-held camera only serves to annoy rather than heighten any attempt at realism. Jump cuts prevail, and it's not easy to know when we're in the present or the past since there is no delineation of flashbacks. In later years, Whitmore was to achieve some of his greatest success doing stage biographies of Harry Truman and Will Rogers.