Pinky [VHS]
It used to be called "miscegenation," and it hasn't been a scandalous or taboo subject for several decades now. (Every other prime-time TV series seems to have an interracial romance going, and nobody bats an eyelash.) These welcome social changes have stranded Elia Kazan's 1949 weepie about a light-skinned African American woman (played less than convincingly by lily-white Jeanne Crain) who tries to "pass"---and falls in love with a white man. Director Douglas Sirk mined similar territory, and got a lot more juice out of it, inImitation of Life. To his credit, perhaps, the director ofOn the Waterfrontjust doesn't have cheap soapsuds in his blood, and he makes the fatal mistake of taking a solemn and high-minded approach to this overheated material. The picture isn't even a hoot. Ethel Waters is the aunt who raises Pinky, while concealing her true lineage; it's a strong performance with a simmering subtext of anger.David Chute