Viewed 60 years later, this 1960 movie raises so many questions that it's hard to know what to make of it. It's not even clear if this is supposed to be a satire or a serious exploration of important issues. But it shows how much has changed since then.
A young, light-skinned African-American woman, tired of discrimination, decides to move away from home and pass for white, as the title says. With lightning speed she gets married to a wealthy white man, but, predictably, gets tied up in knots trying to hide her past. Her new in-laws get suspicious about the fact that they never get to meet her family, or even talk to them on the phone--not even after she gets pregnant. Things get worse when everybody notices that she's too good a dancer for a white woman, or, um, maybe "good" isn't really the word for what she does on the dance floor. And why, O why does she always seem to be on such good terms with all those traveling "" jazz musicians, who aren't allowed to fraternize with the white customers in the jazz clubs she keeps dragging her husband to?
But, of course, the biggest tension in the film is her increasing anxiety about what color the baby's going to be. We all know what it would do to an upper-class white family if their white daughter-in-law, who inexplicably knows too many jazz musicians, had a black baby . . . .
But the greatest mystery of all is: How do you get to a happy ending out of all this? And did she? Hmmm . . . .
