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MY BABY IS BLACK

Ever since I saw the trailer on YouTube a few years ago, I've been wanting to see

My Baby is Black!

At the very least is was bound to be packed with interracial intercourse and obscene 1960s exploitation, right? Great, huh? A couple of weeks ago I ordered it and waited to be scandalized. Watch this. That's what I saw. That's why I paid $8.48for a company in America to package a DVD and ship it across an ocean for me. And guess what? The trailer lied.

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It starts off well. A woman's in hospital about to give birth. The doctors look evil, throwing each other suspicious, sinister glances like they're about to murder her. They brandish surgical tools like knives. There are ominous drums on an already terrifying soundtrack. And as it all builds to a climax, it happens. The doctor holds the baby in the air like a bag full of shit: The baby is black. BLACK. Cue title card: MY BABY IS BLACK! Immediately after the opening credits, we get a woman, who we learn is some sort of social worker, discussing the "negro" problem with an older man. "They live with their lice," she rants. "And their dirt. Believe me, I know them well. Nothing works against their stubbornness, their laziness. Besides, they're sneaky, and liars. They should be isolated. And disinfected too." But this is a trick. This is not the film we're going to watch. We pull out to find we're in college; the film we've just been watching is part of a class on racism. The lecturer lambasts the bigoted old sow, setting the tone for the rest of

My Baby is Black!

, which turns out to be a well-meaning but tiresome paean to love and harmony. A massive fucking disappointment, basically. We meet our hero and heroine: a joyless black guy and an empty shell of a white woman. For no discernible reason, they fall swiftly in love, and for about an hour (bear in mind the film is only 77 minutes long), nothing happens. Our lovers hang out with their useless beatnik pals in a bohemian get-up with guitars. Their love is deep and passionate. Well, it isn't, but the dialogue tells us it is. There are hopeless arty shots of shoes and puddles. She spends the entire film swooning at him and making uninspired romantic declarations. He talks here and there about the prejudice he encounters as a black man, but she's not really interested. All she knows is she's in love, disapproving French 1960s society be damned. "The smell of chestnuts is my whole childhood. Is there a smell which you identify with?" she asks, gazing into his cold eyes." It is the smell of need, of want," he replies. "You'll understand when you get to know me better." Unlikely. This woman doesn't grasp much and that sounds quite conceptual.

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This being the 1960s, their sexual relationship is represented by a time-lapse shot of a flower blooming, next to a skull with a pipe in its mouth. There's another odd moment where they're talking in his bedroom, and throughout the conversation she's clutching a golliwog.

Eventually their love creates life, and her parents aren't too chuffed. Meanwhile, the black dude has been arrested for hitting a butcher who locked a black kid in the meat locker as a joke. But in a surprise turn of events, we get a happy ending. She defies her parents, has the kid, all her cretinous hippie friends turn up at the hospital, and he appears with a big bunch of crappy flowers. Which is all very nice, but what happened to the sensationalist piece of schlock I thought I was getting for my hard-earned $8.48? What happened is

the film was in fact the work of French director Claude Bernard-Aubert, who was a photo-journalist in the French army scarred by having his first film,

Patrouille de Choc

(Patrol Shock), banned by the authorities. As a reaction he then made heavy-handed socially concious films like

My Baby is Black!

. Only it wasn't actually called

My Baby is Black!

, it was confusingly called

Les Lâches Vivent d'Espoir

(Cowards Live in Hope), but was retitled and repackaged (with the above trailer) by America for the drive-in exploitation audience. Needless to say, it wasn't a hit, as people expecting what I was expecting got what I got: an hour of limp romance and shots of puddles. FYI: Claude Bernard-Aubert spent the 1970s making porn, under the pseudonym

Tranbaree Burd

. People don't make any sense.

ALEX GODFREY