Black Mischief
Brudnoy, David
David Brudnoy: Black Mischief From Stepin Fetchit to slaughter (" Jim Brown is Another Black Superman!" blares the New York Daily News): Progress. The Negro has been discovered as human being. He...
...Then the gradual opening up, broadening, humanizing in the 1950s and 1960s-Harry Belafonte, Satchmo, Dorothy Dan-dridge and above all, Sidney Poitier: superspade, the Negro better than most Caucasians, oh-so-sympathetic friend of the young blind white girl in A Patch of Blue, devilishly clever cop in They Call Me Mister Tibbs, super-brainy son-in-law-to-be in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and on and on...
...But people such as the Arab terrorists and their supporters are not going to take such propositions seriously...
...It is not so much that our senses have been benumbed by violence as it is that we have failed to respond with morally justified action...
...Superfly and Slaughter are out of Shaft, abortively...
...Best by faddish radicalism at home (a with-it offspring who chides him for his Brooke-ishness) and restless political power-brokers beating the drums outside, The Man can't "hack it...
...Or, four years hence, vice presidential candidate with someone like Spiro Agnew at the head of the ticket, and then president...
...If the Negro film audience is so witless as to accept these movies seriously, they more or less deserve what they'll get...
...Fortunately, Israel has not been suduced into paralysis by those who lament "man's inhumanity to man" and proclaim that "violence solves nothing...
...Hence: a Negro President, all of a sudden, who decides to Assert Himself...
...Such efforts should include thorough intelligence work to detect Arab terrorists and planned terrorist operations, adequate security measures to thwart terrorist operations that are actually carried out and swift and severe punishment for terrorists who are captured...
...To attack people who conceive and carry out such acts as the murder of the eleven Israeli Olympians is, among other things, to give concrete expression to moral outrage...
...The President, Vice President and House Speaker all go to their reward, simultaneously...
...By repeating propositions like "violence solves nothing," they are trying to persuade others not to use violence...
...The only people who are likely to take such propositions seriously are people who are not disposed to use violence in the first place, and some of these people have the responsibility of coping with the terrorists...
...To the travesty-stereotypes of Negro lethargy, bumbling (Jack Benny's Rochester), cringing ("Feets, if you's ever served me, serve me now...
...What they are aware of is their abhorrence of violence, their commitment to peaceful conflict resolution, and their desire to see violence end...
...Accordingly, daring can more easily prevail, for better or worse, in the theatre cinema...
...An undeniably sad record of misrepresentation, distortion, prejudice-confirming portrayal of colored people in the American film...
...Unfortunately, the result has been not many bold, successful films depicting Negroes in major roles at least as true to life as those depicting whites, but rather a spate of really poor flicks starting probably with Shaft and from there multiplying almost geometrically, getting more frequent-and worseShaft spawned Shaft's Big Score, a lamentably gross rip-off...
...Israel should attack the terrorists and it should receive the support of our government for doing so, not only because it is practically necessary but because it is morally imperative...
...it is paralysis∔paralysis induced by fatuous moralizing...
...Like- all civilized and decent people, the Israelis are reluctant to use violence but they know, from many years of horrible experience, that, if civilized and decent people are to live in peace, barbarians and butchers must not have their way...
...I captioned this piece Black Mischief," borrowing a good title from an Evelyn Waugh book...
...The Man doesn't...
...more will come of that lineage...
...Blacula would be camp, though camp is dead, were it not so unintentially awful...
...The fact of the matter today, and for the forseeable future, is that only a Negro as competent, Establishhment-liberal, and smooth as Edward Brooke of Massachusetts is likely to sit in the Senate...
...Terry Krieger R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...But in both media, producers have failed to produce, to come up with believable Negro characterizations for lead roles...
...He rises to mythic heights of Identity...
...The breakthrough of "I Spy," which almost (but not quite) gave equal billing to Bill Cosby with white Robert Culp, preceded "Julia," a pleasant middle-class fantasy-not that there aren't middle-class Negroes, but simply that "Julia" somehow didn't make it-which was followed by Redd Foxx in "Sanford and Son," a sort of poor relation to "All in the Family...
...To Power...
...Go back, back, way back to early movies, to those medieval times when Negroes were ill-served by carpetbaggers and scallawags a la Hollywood (Birth of a Nation...
...To treat the slaughter in Munich as an example of "man's inhumanity to man" is to deprive the event of its particular reality and make it difficult to determine who is responsible and, therefore, who is to blame...
...The best of a bad and extensive lot of what might be called Black Fantasy films, The Man is nonetheless dismal...
...Although an individual theatre movie usually costs more to make than any one segment of a television series, there are no theoretical limits to the number of movies that can be made, whereas prime-time TV series are necessarily quite a few each season...
...While the same thing can be said for the cinema about the latter point, regretable caricaturing has now become almost standard in that medium in lead characterizations...
...On balance I prefer the sanitized, romanticized, deodorized Negro of yesterday's film to the grossly maligned nigger of long ago...
...Melinda is-well see her, starring Calvin Lockhart and Rosalind Cash...
...It has not been "man" but Red China and the Soviet Union that have given diplomatic support and even directly supplied arms to the terrorists...
...And Flip Wilson has made it to the very top on TV-in comedy...
...Blacula sucks blood...
...EDITORIAL II (continued from page 4) It has not been "man" but specific Arab governments that have allowed the terrorists to operate in and from their states, supplied them with money, arms, and ammunition, and encouraged them to carry on their activities...
...Moral sentiments that are not given concrete expression become inauthentic or extinct, and moralizing is not an acceptable substitute for concrete moral action...
...As the 'black" film perhaps taken most seriously in the last two years, The Man requires at least a bit more discussion...
...He has his new filmic heroes...
...In the highly implausible event of the deaths of those ahead of him in the line of presidential succession, such a man could become President of the United States...
...Laugh-In's" imitators have followed a similar pattern...
...But at least the tube's excesses in starring roles ("Amos and Andy" then, "Sanford and Son" now, for instance) have been minor, and TV's attempts at accurate representation in secondary roles has been notable ("Mod Squad" is superlative in this regard...
...Svperfly is oh my...
...It is not numbness that has set in...
...Yet believable Negro lead characters in straight dramatic roles have not developed on TV to any great degree...
...Violence has spread wantonly in recent years leading some persons to conclude that violence benumbs a man's senses and a nation's conscience...
...Propositions like "violence solves nothing" will not influence the terrorists, but they may inhibit other people from taking strong action against the terrorists...
...A Brooke could indeed become President Pro-tem of the Senate...
...When they say "violence solves nothing," they are not so much stating a fact as declaring a faith and expressing a hope...
...As for the proposition that "violence solves nothing," it is just as meaningless as the proposition that "violence solves everything...
...To do little or nothing but moralize over the slaughter at Munich is not a sign of a higher morality or even of pragmatism...
...The fact that the proposition is meaningless does not trouble the people who utter it, for they are not aware of its meaninglessness...
...Which leaves the President Pro-tem of the Senate, a Negro (James Earl Jones) put there out of fashionable considerations...
...Mourning∔and moralizing∔over dead Jews is an old tradition, but this tradition should at least be supplemented by vigorous efforts to protect Jews and other people from being attacked and killed by Arab terrorists...
...To equality through separatism...
...It is a sign of cowardice and indifference, and such a sign can only encourage the spread of lawlessness, mayhem and death, not only in the Middle East but throughout the world...
...Such a Negro politico would not be The Man...
...Granted, within the past ten years or so, American movies have done somewhat better with Negroes in peripheral roles...
...TV producers fear to make a collosal mistake that will haunt them for twenty or thirty-nine episodes, and so timidity reigns on TV far more than in the movies...
...An abysmal half-century of misuse at the hands of the film industry superseded by an evolved generation of fanciful, albeit complementary, glorification at the de-prejudiced hands of the same film industry...
...The Man is Black...
...Rowan and Martin's "Laugh-In" has been most successful in using Negro comedians in ways that both show off their special talents and avoid tokenism, romanticization, condescension and exploitation...
...Some people argue that it would not be "pragmatic" to put pressure On these states, but a pragmatism that consists essentially of making arrangements with anyone under any circumstances, and that is uninformed by either ends or values, must result in political ruin or, perhaps what is worse, the ruin of the people who adopt it...
...But each twisted reality, though so do most films...
...Origin-nally designed for TV, and showing it, The Man wound up on your downtown picture show screen owing to an accurate evaluation of the level of cinema tastes of the average American film-goer...
...Any honest attempt to picture Negroes in politics at the highest levels, in a film shot in 1972 about the approximate present, might be expected to start with things as they are...
...if white film-goers-and critics-can't bring themselves to excoriate these sillinesses, out of fear perhaps of appearing "racist," they demonstrate in effect, a genuine facet of racism: condescension...
...This is a dangerous misperception...
...For its part, Israel should maintain its determination to combat the terrorists wherever it can...
...Our government and other governments∔if there are any∔ that are neither totally committed to the Arab states nor totally committed to being non-committed can put diplomatic and economic pressure on the Arab states that harbor terrorists and other states that support them...
...the terrified Negro servant to Charlie Chan), smiling, grinning servility ("Aw, Miss Lou, ah don' mind staying 'round to help you"-the Negro maid to Mae West in She Done Him, Wrong, mindless stupidity ("I don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies, Miss Scarlett"-Butterfly McQueen as Prissy to Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind), venality, natural rhythm...
...But since whites are also responsible for some of these films-and almost totally to blame for what occurs on television-the burden of guilt can be spread together and equally...
...An attempt at "fairness" in films marched apace with the same trend on television: with an almost embarrassing fealty to the aim of putting at least one Negro into every TV program's regular cast, the tube gives us a Barney for "Mission Impossible" and a Mark for "Ironside," while the cinema follows suit...
...Soul blood...
Vol. 6 • November 1972 • No. 2
