THE NEW NEGRO ON SCREEN

...It was said by Peter Noble, author of several studies of Negroes in the movies: "This film made history as the first important featurelength production to give a colored actor a co-starring part with a white star...

...Apart from entertainment films, Negroes had figured in numerous service training films, and in several official documentaries made specifically as patriotic propaganda, including The Negro Soldier (1944), The Negro Sailor (1945), and Negro Colleges in Wartime (1945...

...Except in historical dramas, where traditional figures of Nubian slaves or plantation-house darkies may appropriately appear, the Negro as servant or laborer is becoming more and more clearly an employe...

...Continental distances extend from the shuffling, g'whining retainer of Stepin Fetchit or Willie Best, to the shrewdly self-confident, intelligently picaresque "Rochester" of Eddie Anderson, to such a dignified, dramatically important figure as the butler of Juano Fernandez in Ransom...

...In this film of a kidnaping, in which the embattled father's stubborn refusal to pay ransom to immorality is understood only by the butler, the Negro servant figure is still sentimentally drawn...

...Several studios had already announced films on the Negro problem...

...But if it were true, as the worldly innocents would have it, that Stanley Kramer saw no scandal in putting money in his purse in the movie business, it grew clearer, as his career progressed with such films as The Men (1950), Death of a Salesman (1952), High Noon (1952), The Defiant Ones (1958)—perhaps the most effective dramatization of the new Negro on screen since the war—and On the Beach (1959), that he did belong among the small but ultimately influential group of film makers who try to associate success and serious purpose...

...For this, he was sneered at as an opportunist almost as much as he was admired as a prodigy and as an entrepreneur with something more than profit as his goal...

...The films themselves, with their worthy but slightly sugared solutions of somehow equivocated issues, surely carried their own letdown for people reentering the world outside the theaters...

...For the great public, perhaps, there had been too much dead earnestness, administered too quickly...

...In general, the movies began to manifest at least as much sensitivity toward the dignities of differentiated linguistic and racial characteristics as, say, the growing number of international assemblies, from the Nuremberg Trials and the United Nations to congresses of salesmen and philatelists, that adopted the earphones of simultaneous translation systems which are becoming little symbols of our times...

...Prejudice itself was not black or white, like traditional movie evils, but a matter of individual and social pathology, to be cured by mental and political hygiene...

...Dworkin will appear in the November issue.—The Editors...

...it was a lesson to Hollywood...

...Only wartime war films perpetuated the spurious speech of caricatured foreignness—American and British films, for example, indulging in the various accents of that special movie dialect we may call "Villain-English," to represent Germans or Japanese talking to each other...

...But the wishful imagery more than ever expresses respect, and another order of commitment...

...In postwar war films, even the enemy came more and more to speak his own language, and audiences understood that he was saying something that someone could seriously understand...

...In the panic of the sinking of the great ocean liner in The Last Voyage (1960)—for which Andrew and Virginia Stone actually scuttled the grand old He de France—it makes all the difference for the sharpening of suspense that one employe of the ship is a Negro...

...The screen of the 1950's came to reflect new and different images of Negroes and of the fatally interconnected lives of white and colored people...

...The early emphasis upon speech encouraged the expansion of national industries, sounding the particularities of spoken languages...

...Again, in significant scenes of a modest boy-and-dog film, Goodbye My Lady (1956), the backwoods Southerner, Walter Brennan, and his grandson, Brandon De Wilde, resort unhesitatingly to the information and guidance of a young Negro, again played by Poitier...

...In the first impact of talking pictures, the universality of the silent era had been fragmented...

...And in the case of the latter, it is more accurate and less partisan to say that the ferment of attitudes of the war years affected Hollywood much more profoundly and permanently than the example of a single British film that was seen by few people in the United States...

...In fact, the more virtue accrues to those acts beyond the strict call of the job which are the mark of his romanticized devotion—because they are the more clearly voluntary in this age of the rights of labor and of social security, rather than feudal paternalism...

...At least until redubbing began to supplant subtitling in the late 1940s, audiences everywhere heard actors of any country speaking their own languages...

...Kramer, it could be said, had got his quickie in while the getting was good...

...And while Kramer could not be credited with lonely prescience, he did perceive the force and direction of the incipient trend, and did manage to outspeed the others...

...There appeared to be no more to the Negro films as signs of serious intentions in the movies than the catchpenny conscientiousness of a new "Boy Wonder" racing to anticipate the hardened philanthropists of Hollywood...

...A Negro, Robert Adams, played a leading role in Thorold Dickinson's British film of race relations, Men of Two Worlds (1946...

...In the separate climactic moments when the Negro shows that he has committed himself to these people, both abandoning other duties and risking his own life, there is added to the drama elements that would not have been present if the particular character had been a white man...

...Involved is a transformation of that perennial character of Occidental narrative: the faithful Negro retainer, typically gigantic if male, and buxom and motherly if female...

...But more and more they served the requisites of simple realism about orders in society, rather than of comic disparagement...

...The producer, Stanley Kramer, was hardly thirty-six years old, and already spotlighted in the growing industry trend towards independent production, following the minor and major successes of his So This Is New York (1947) and Champion (1949...

...The Negro soldier, James Kitzmiller, of Luigi Zampa's To Live in Peace (1946), during the first flush of Italian neo-realism, was made to represent all Americans, and even the Allies, in his good-humored fraternizing with an equally war-weary German...

...1956...

...In the movies, and especially since the addition of sound, the blackface and dialect comedians, the grotesquely accented gangsters and villains-—even the conveniently inarticulate Red Indians—have gradually been neutralized under the plural pressures of groups all equally jealous of their hard-won equalities...

...The conventions of show business exploitation, however, never quite exhaust the subliminal urges, good and evil, that are roused to seek fulfillment, complete and symbolic, in the forms of entertainment made famous and available...

...With so much less expected of him as a free agent...

...Instead of sporadic bursts of pro-Negro sentiment, as noble and as evanescent as surges of conscience, there came on screen a gradually growing realism in depicting colored people—and most significantly a heightening dramatic stature...

...The films of the 1950's reveal a willingness—or, at least, a readiness —to picture and to accept the Negro as a figure of strength, decency, or even a wishfully superior attainment...

...But the feelings presumed by the fad persisted...

...Significantly, the Negro is consulted on a matter of such traditional backwoods expertise as the breeds and characteristics of dogs...

...But, after all, the appearance of the new, particular movie heroes and heroines made the possibility of heroism newly universal...

...By the time it arrived, and by the time of No Way Out in 1950, the cycle had spent its force to attract audiences—not only in the United States, but almost everywhere...

...Until nearly the end of the film, he can find only one crew member to take this single case of emergency into account: the giant, superbly muscled Woody Strode...

...Both judgments are dubious...

...While not the first film to treat Negroes seriously or with sympathy, Home of the Brave, which like Champion had been directed by Mark Robson, was unmistakably of a new order...

...Movie cycles by their very nature are wasteful of the enthusiasms they are meant to encourage and take profit from...

...The frantic father, Robert Stack, seeking to rescue his little daughter and his wife, Dorothy Malone, who is pinned under a crumpled bulkhead, is surrounded by people concerned with the safety of the whole ship, or of themselves...

...The momentum of wartime attitudes impelled the production of films such as Crossfire (1947) and Gentleman's Agreement (1948), dealing, respectively, with the pathological and genteely hypocritical aspects of anti-Semitism...

...Home of the Brave was followed shortly by two films concerned with the problem of Negroes "passing" as white: Lost Boundaries, produced independently by Louis De Rochemont, and Pinky, directed by Elia Kazan, who had made Gentleman's Agreement...

...Amid the mannered violences of Blackboard Jungle (1955), for example, Sidney Poitier's Negro was deliberately realized as the boy with the best mind and strongest character...

...The sort of cultured cynicism that affects suspicion of any motive for making movies other than that of economic suicide could find corroboration in the short spin of the first Negro screen cycle...

...But the best film of the 1949 Negro cycle, Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust, from William Faulkner's novel, did not...

...In 1949, at a strategic moment of the postwar revival of serious themes in die popular arts, a young film producer, working swiftly and secretly, brought out a modestly-budgeted movie, Home of the Brave, that bravely dramatized the problem of anti-Negro prejudice...

...In overview, the converging forces of the century have imploded nowhere with greater meaning than in the changing imagery of the popular arts...

...But if the changes in American life and attitudes following the depression and the war made possible, if not inevitable, an open attack on the particular prejudice against Jews, they more surely and inexorably drove towards a confrontation of race prejudice in its most widely visible form...

...Sahara (1944), with Rex Ingram as a noble Sudanese sergeant-major...

...with his own safety so easily attainable by means of his superior strength, the Negro's decision to be loyal is quite distant from the old conventional devotion of darky retainers, so precious a fiction for the benignly prejudiced...

...But was it only coincidence, or the conscious, romantic symbolism of a politically liberal imagination that the dog herself, amazingly superior in endurance, hunting prowess, and intelligence, turned out to be a Basenji, imported from Africa...

...Films made during the war had carefully included Negroes, often in principal roles, and unmistakably revealed a new temper of representation—for example: Casablanca (1943), with Dooley Wilson at the cafe piano as "Sam...

...And the deep currents of feelings that the films of the postwar Negro cycle touched and released were not simply evaporated after the transient saturation of the screen...

...The changes in the relations of the races on the job and in the neighborhood that had evoked the feelings continued their subtle revolutions...

...It seemed quite in keeping with the fabled Hollywood sense for following the fastest buck that Home of the Brave had transformed the original theme of Arthur Laurents' stage play from one of anti-Semitism —already passing as profitably "controversial"—to anti-Negroism, which so many were betting on as the coming cause...

...Immediately following the war, several Continental and British films portrayed colored people favorably or heroically in arguing generally for peace and brotherhood—and in more than incidental awareness of the changes in the relations of races that the war had accelerated...

...The new concern was- the direct and even logical extension of the continuing wartime patriotism regarding matters of race and religion...

...The fad for specifically Negro themes on the screen passed in less than a year...

...In its story of a hospitalized Negro soldier reenacting the psychic causes of his paralysis, racial friction was viewed through eyes that had seen world depression and war, according to the fashionable framing and perspectives of sociology and psychoanalysis...

...The Negro, James Edwards, was represented as superior in intellect and training to many of his white comrades...

...Lifeboat (1944), with Canada Lee as a heroic merchant seaman...

...Moreover, and more to the general point, for all the selfishness that may start or ride a rush of films following one theme or another, the motive is always based upon a sense of what people care about enough to want to pay to see...

...They did well at the box office...

...The film had evident punctuality, but it was not truly Kramer's part to pioneer...

...The transition, to be sure, may say something about the general elevation of the modern menial, as well as about the rising position of colored people...

...Negroes, the last to arrive at the love-feast of popular pluralism, continued to appear chiefly as servants in the movies...