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I find that the 1950's were very frank in the dialog about interracial sex in American films. Sirk ( Imitation of life, All that heaven allows) pointed at interracial love as a laudible way of becoming a social norm. Films like cassavetes shadows were also very normal about the existance of and attitudes towards interracial love. Even the southerners got into the act with films like To kill a mockingbird. I guess it reflected the attitudes of the post war Beat generation and the jazz clubs of harlem. I then see a concious movement in popular films in the sixties (that coincides with the beatles generation and the fall of phil spector...or louis armstrong/ miles davis from pop culture grace) towards justifying race based love (ie gentle or active discouragement of love between the US concept of race(white/black) while simultaneously glorifying "intra race" love as an all pervading force..ie, the WASP falls gloriously in love with an Italian on the wrong side of the tracks in a show of rebellion in Love Story..,The scions of the jets and the sharks go at it in The West Side Story, A middle class WASP falls in love with Michael Corleone in The Godfather ). It's difficult to say wether the industry thought it was taking baby steps in racial reconciliation by doing this or if it was sublimating the impulse of people to fall in love outside (what are really) artificial and mutating racial boundaries in the US(after all the meditteranian "races" were just recently "white" in the sixties), by starting relatively close to the shades of "white" in the spectrum. Maybe it tried to do both, thus effectively postponing debate until the society was willing to show more maturity. The effect however was to put the elephant in the room amidst a deafening silence on the issue of race in film. Ramesh.