In Chicago, Bernice, a light-skinned Black woman, is watching her jazz musician brother Chuck get his big break at the Green Cat Club. She is harassed by a white man who assumes that she's white, and this is just the latest in a series of problems she's had all her life: feeling like she doesn’t fit in either a Black or a white social world. Though she's qualified for an office job, when the interviewer finds out she's Black, she's told the best they could do for her is as an elevator operator. Bernice tells her grandmother she's going to go to New York City and live a new life "passing" as white, even though her grandma warns her that people who pass are "living behind lies." Changing her name to Lila, she boards a plane for New York and gets chatted up by white businessman Rick Leyton. It's not quite a traditional meet-cute—he buys her a cocktail but she gets airsick. However, after she lands a job at an ad agency, she reconnects with him at a cocktail party. When he finds out she loves to dance, he rents a dance studio for an hour just for them. After lots of courting and kissing, he calls her at 3 a.m. to propose marriage. She's very happy at first, but decides to keep her racial background a secret, which leads to lots of lies that she tells Rick and his well-off parents who are dying to meet her family and don't understand why no one from her side will be at the wedding—the unlikely story that her folks are in Venezuela won't stand up forever. For a while, things are fine; her Black maid Bertha finds out her secret but tells no one, though eventually both Bertha and Bernice's white friend Sally encourage her to be honest with her husband. When Bernice gets pregnant, she fears the child will be black and starts to freak out. The ending is unhappy, if not exactly tragic, and leaves little hope that Bernice will ever find a place where she feels she belongs.
In its time, I imagine this was controversial, but it lacks power today. For starters, the woman playing Bernice, Sonya Wilde, was not Black (her grandfather was Cherokee, and she occasionally played Native American roles on TV). The blondish James Franciscus is about as white a white man as you could find, which does accentuate Wilde's slightly dark complexion. The two (pictured above) are OK and even work up some believable chemistry, though Wilde's bland performance feels amateurish at times—this was her first film and her career only lasted a couple more years. The handsome Franciscus is not especially light on his feet during their dance scene, but he's always nice eye candy. Isabel Cooley (the maid) and Patricia Michon (the friend) provide good support. The title would indicate that the film was intended as drive-in exploitation, but it's all very restrained and mild, except for two scenes involving Bernice's brother (Lon Ballantyne) in which fights break out over him paying too much attention to the assumedly white Bernice. I didn't know why Bernice spun such a web of lies about her family when the easier thing would have been to just say that her parents had passed away. Dialogue that caused me to laugh: Bernice, talking about her boss who always seems on the verge of sexually harassing his staff: "He's crazy for girls"; Rick: "What's wrong with that?"; Bernice: "Nothing." (YouTube)
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