Jungle Fever

Their own race and race relations play integral parts of both Flipper Purify and Angie Tucci's lives whether or not they either know or acknowledge it. In a loving marriage to biracial Drew, a buyer at Bloomingdales, with a young adolescent daughter Ming, black Flipper lives an upper middle class life in Harlem. He grew up in a strict Baptist household, his retired preacher father, an evangelical, referred to as The Good Reverend. The youngest of two, Flipper is considered the golden child, while his older brother Gator, a crack head, has been banished from the family home, although their mother still secretly gives him money whenever he asks in her unconditional love for their first born. Flipper laments being the only black architect working in his firm. Brought up Catholic, Italian Angie still lives at home in Bensonhurst with her strict widowed father and her two brothers, all three who treat her more like a housemaid, domestic duties which they all expect her to do and which they expect her to do for her husband whenever she gets married. That husband they expect will be Paulie Carbone, a candy shop owner/operator and childhood friend who also lives in the neighborhood and who indeed does expect eventually to ask her to marry him, arguably as what he sees as a natural evolution of their situation. Flipper and Angie meet when she is hired by Flipper's two partners as the temp in their office, much against his wishes in he specifically requesting someone black for the job solely in his want to support his community. Those race issues hit another level when it comes to light to almost everyone in their lives that Flipper and Angie have a sexual encounter with each other.