Written by: Kevin Bisch
Release date: 2005
A star-studded cast includes: Will Smith, Eva Mendes, and Amber Valletta
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 118 Minutes
Hitch: The Plot
A male "consultant," Alex 'Hitch' Hitchens (played by Will Smith), teaches socially inept men how to attract beautiful women. In three dates, he promises, these men will win the hearts of the (previously untouchable) women they most desire. When it comes to his own love life, however, Hitch just hasn't gotten...well, hitched! A chance meeting with Sara (played by Eva Mendes) - an anti-dating journalist for a gossip magazine - quickly reveals that it's not always as easy to practice what you preach.Behind the Scenes
Will Smith quickly attracted international attention when during a promotion tour for his movie, he made visible, the usually invisible issue of hollywood's handling of race when he said, "There's sort of an accepted myth that if you have two black actors, a male and a female, in the lead of a romantic comedy then people around the world don't want to see it. We spend $50-something million making this movie and the studio would think that was tough on their investment. So the idea of a black actor and a white actress comes up - that'll work around the world, but it's a problem in the US."Apparently, given the romantic nature of the relationship between the two main characters, Hollywood felt that a Black leading male and female would have immediately relegated "Hitch" to "Black Movie" status. Actress Nia Long acknowledged this issue when she said, "two black characters equals a black film and not just a movie about two people." On the other hand, a Black leading male paired with a White leading female would have outraged the American public. And so, they went with a member of the largest minority group in America - a beautiful Latina actress whose looks are exotic enough to draw attention from men across all demographics, light enough to ensure her origin would not be confused with that of an African-American, and yet, dark enough that her relationship with an African-American male would not threaten those whose feathers would otherwise be ruffled by such a pairing.
Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, a writer for points to the continued influence of D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" - a 1915 controversial film that shaped the handling of race, especially as it pertains to interracial sex.
- "Set during Civil War Reconstruction, the film dramatizes a perceived threat to white womanhood and, by extension, white culture as a whole from black men. In addition to spiking membership in the Klan, the film sparked enormous protest for its depiction of black men as sexual predators and is credited with establishing the stereotype of the "black buck" (Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd Edition 1994). The image of black masculinity as sexually out of control is one that mainstream black actors have had to contend with ever since."
You might argue that other movies have casted African-American males opposite White women, but have you really paid attention to the nature of their relationships in those movies? I remember watching Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts in "Pelican Brief," waiting the entire movie to see if they would eventually kiss. Their hug in the final scene was hugely disappointing and terribly frustrating as I strongly suspected that had Denzel been White, the movie's ending would surely have been different. Dezel, was again paired with another Hollywood siren - Angelina Jolie - in "Bone Collector." This time, his quadriplegic status resolved any confusion about how to handle the romantic aspect almost any other casting arrangement might have had.
Article continues...read about other movies that have featured interracial couples