Sapphire (1959)

During the murder investigation of the titular character, a pregnant, mixed race woman who was passing herself as white, a number of suspects come to the forefront, including her white fiancé Paul Massie and his disapproving family. After seeing him in They Gotta Have Us and The Message, I had been looking at the filmography of Earl Cameron, who plays the woman’s darker skinned brother, and was intrigued by its exploration of race relations that weren’t American-centric. Cameron is strong in a rather small role, but the film remains interesting as a way to see racism that is very different but also quite the same as the American variety. The character of Sapphire is only seen as a corpse or in pictures but she lives and breaths in the reactions of her death by everyone who knew her.