Sapphire (1959)

 I more or less stumbled onto this movie. 'Sapphire' is a 1959 British feature, filmed in that bold, unique kind of color that I associate with the works of Michael Powell. The body of a young woman, a music school student, is found in a public park. In time it is discovered that she was pregnant. In time it is discovered that, despite outward appearances, she was black. 

A weird mixture of things, this movie is exploitation, police procedural, melodrama, and a social issues picture. Two detectives, Nigel Patrick (who is fair), and Michael Craig (who is kind of racist) work the case. They discover that the dead girl, whose name is Sapphire was passing for white, that she seemed to have two lives, one amongst the jazz clubs frequented by Britain's Caribbean ex pat population, and one at school. She also had a white fiancé, a promising architecture student whose family and home life are emitting decidedly stressed out vibes. 

Casual racism is addressed in an open and matter of fact way that would have been foreign to American pictures of the time. It can be an uncomfortable watch, there is a lot of hate, indifference, and self justification on screen. The acting can be uneven at times, the picture sometimes feels like it's just wandering, and despite taking on the subject of racism the black characters in this all feel more like types then real people. So while surely risk taking then, the movie feels disappointingly retrograde now. Even the heroic black doctor character feels like a lesser version of someone Sidney Poitier would have played around the same time. **1/2