I rented a really good (if disturbing) DVD last night -- so if you're planning to rent the film and want to be surprised, please stop reading right now, because what follows is what cranky people would call not a film review, but a spoiler.

In my defense, it's hard to discuss a film like this without spoiling it, but it occurred to me that if I didn't name the film I wouldn't be spoiling it. Thinking it over, I decided to put the title below, so that it can't be seen unless you click on "continue reading." That way, the film won't be "spoiled." But be warned! Clicking on "continue" will tell you the name of the film. The rest of you will never know the name of the film being spoiled, although I'm not quite sure how you're supposed to be able to rent the "unspoiled" film without knowing the name. (Er, maybe I'm doing this backwards.)

Anyway, a fine British actor plays an older classics professor with a secret. The secret is that he is a black man who has passed as white since the 1940s. He avoided attention by claiming to be Jewish. The interesting thing about that is that he faced discrimination anyway, but the "buffer zone" provided by his fake Jewish claim distracted people who might otherwise have suspected he was black. Neat trick, and he got away with it. Late in his career, though, a scandal erupts when he is falsely accused of racism for asking whether two absentee students he's never seen in his classroom are "spooks." (He meant ghosts, of course, but the students turned out to be black, and they filed a grievance.) Ironically, all he needed to do to jettison the scandal would have been to tell the truth and admit he was black. But the secret had been kept for too long, and the man was very proud to have succeeded. One of the many ironies was that his struggle against anti-Semitism became a substitute for a struggle which in those days he'd never have won. As he said in a showdown with his mother, had he not concealed the fact that he was black, for the rest of his life he'd have been regarded as "that Negro classics professor."

Finally he falls in love with a woman half his age, and (at least in part because the physical part is enabled by Viagra) it actually works. She's the first person he tells his awful secret, and guess what? This "new generation" doesn't even care!

A fine movie with a tragic ending, as the young lover has a psychotic ex-boyfriend consumed by a passionate hatred for "that old Jew." My dark side loved his Jewish funeral, a literally symbolic burial -- and as honest a burial as circumstances might allow. What's to bury?

I couldn't help wondering about whether passing for white would involve the same tragedy today as it obviously did in the segregated 1940s.

What about the people who are just people? Do they have a duty to their "race"?

Let's suppose you are black, but you look white. I know a couple of people who are like that, and they run around, doing the same things that we all do (of the usual sort of which life consists), and no one asks what race they are. I imagine that the people who don't ask could be divided into two groups: those who care, and those who don't.

Most likely, the former group would consist primarily of bigots, along with a smattering of activists who would feel that there is a "duty" to the world at large to "disclose" one's "race." That to not do this is somehow dishonest. Tiger Woods did not endear himself to the activists when he refused to describe himself the way it was demanded he describe himself, but he did tell the world the full truth about his racial ancestry, which consisted of several races.

There is a deep and bitter debate between people who think race should matter, and people who think it should not. Perhaps I shouldn't call it a debate (increasingly, it resembles psychological warfare), for it isn't a comfortable subject. Anyone who says race shouldn't matter runs the risk of being called a racist, and few want to run that risk, for being called a racist can lead to embarrassment, with possible career consequences. So, the belief that race doesn't matter is these days entertained mostly behind closed doors, in the privacy of one's own home.

Funny thing, though.

I can remember when not caring about someone's race was considered a virtue.