These two French productions from director Claude Bernard-Aubert tackle race relations in a well-intentioned yet exploitative manner, and must have seemed campy even at the time of their original release. In MY BABY IS BLACK (1961), a young beatnik woman in Paris falls for a handsome black medical student. When she becomes pregnant with his child, she has to fight her own parents, who try to force her to get an abortion. CHECKERBOARD (1959) focuses on a small southern town called Cicada, where Bob, a young army veteran, asks an attractive black woman to the local dance. When he is attacked by bigots, the violence is blamed on the town`s black community, and a lynch mob gathers; fortunately, Bob is able to hold them off by hurling his artificial leg at them. Both films, which have their hearts in the right place, are simultaneously fascinating and ridiculous.
