the NEW NEGRO on screen
Dworkin, Martin S.
the NEW NEGRO on screen by MARTIN S. DWORKIN This is the third of a series of articles by Mr. Dworkin on "The New Negro on Screen." The concluding installment by Mr. Dworkin, a distinguished...
...Equality in imagery—if not in actuality—may be truly achieved, perhaps, only as Negroes reach with all others beyond equality towards grandeur...
...The scene may herald a day, we may hope, when Negroes will be so securely, democratically drawn on screen, that they may be permitted to make ordinary mistakes, and suffer ordinary penalties...
...That the figure he portrays is a stereotype of an exaggeration is a dramatic deficiency—but an historic milestone...
...The soldier (Woody Strode) is presented as less cowardly than embittered by a life of poverty and prejudice...
...Making the brainy one among the recruits a Negro is an embarrassingly obvious irony —until one delicious moment, that may be one of the important turning points in the history of the representation of Negroes on screen...
...The point, however, is being made here for realism, rather than melodrama—and in Milestone's treatment is no more false than a wish that what did happen on countless occasions to redeem men riven by doubt and fear, might happen again...
...But they are always present: figures of inescapable reality, comprising a chorus before whom representations of the most ordinary lives of a certain time and place take on meanings as dramas of significant, sometimes tragic decline...
...In the heightening crisis—outside the theaters—of reidentifying what is an American, the new images of Negroes on screen indict the traditional fantasies of a glorious past, and enforce an exaggerated candor concerning the decadent residues in a dynamic present...
...Its story of a sergeant who assumes direction of a platoon of Marines in an isolated action retells what is the hardiest of all perennial fables about the military: the battle of a new, unpopular commander to win mere obedience and something more from his men...
...All are unmistakably related in theme and symbology—as exemplified by The View from Pompey's Head (1955), Baby Doll (1956), God's Little Acre (1958), The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Fugitive Kind (1960), Wild River (1960), and Desire in the Dust (1960...
...The faddism of the Civil War "buffs," the collectors of weapons and miscellaneous souvenirs, the members of special societies, book clubs, and mock militia who reenact great battles over monumented fields—all these are a celebration of an invented conflict—with an outcome that is neither victory nor defeat...
...The interpenetrating images on screen of decadent white Southerners and newly visible, palpably advancing Negroes reflect a complex of attitudes about the place of one special regionalism in American culture, political and social life...
...In this crisis of belonging or identity, the Civil War itself has been transmuted into a precious fiction of unity...
...Negroes usually served as well as did whites...
...One of the details making Lewis Milestone's Pork Chop Hill (1959), from the factual account of S.L.A...
...as always, good units, well organized and commanded, had good soldiers of whatever color...
...The soldier's participation in the last-ditch battle could have merely mirrored the innumerable climaxes of films about rehabilitated cowards...
...In his study, Le Mythe de la Femme Dans le Cinema Americain, Jacques Siclier speaks of the character of Blanche as "Scarlett maudite": an aging heroine of romance cursed by fraudulent memories of grandeur, and flung by inexorable change into a "snake pit" of modern ungilded sensuality, with its reactive misogyny...
...His character is deliberately placed and presented to effect vicarious identification, according to the ways in which audiences have been trained since the first days of the movies...
...Made from the stage musical that opened on Broadway in 1949, just as the first postwar cycle of films about problems of color was spinning, South Pacific emphasizes race relations as one of the great issues of the war...
...The images of the modern South as snake pit emerge to the accompaniment of a tremendous fanfare of popularization of the Civil War...
...Among cineastes and others eggheaded enough to be concerned with serious meanings in the people's entertainments, her metempsychosis signified profound changes in the American imagination...
...Greater acceptance hath no man than this, in this man's army...
...As the centennial of the Civil War approaches, the nation formed in that great agony of unification is clearly experiencing a second era of Reconstruction, again contending over the fundamental constitutional issue of whether the Federal government has the right and power to impose conditions of national citizenship upon localities...
...But there came a moment when new flags began to be manufactured, to be flown at patriotic celebrations," election rallies, and football games—with Northerners quite frequently and happily joining in what seems to be only harmless nostalgia, or comfortably absurd ceremonials...
...Such realism, portraying Negroes as fallible human beings, rather than as either minstrel grotesques or sentimentalized supermen, may require a considerable background of routine realism...
...Films made in the 1950s about World War II, when the services were still largely segregated, are limited in having to show Negroes, however prominently, as chiefly orderlies, truck drivers, cooks, or other service troops...
...In this film, more than in others much more worthy in which he has played leading parts— particularly The Defiant Ones (1958) —Poitier is presented as the quintessential movie star in all his hero-ness...
...The image characterizes a "school" of concern with Southern decadence which forms, despite a wide range of intentions and qualities, the most easily apparent grouping in American writing, including Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Hamilton Basso, Calder Willingham, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and, especially, Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner...
...The gallant Johnny Rebs of the South as undefeated Lost Cause are maintained at the cost of having the dehumanized red-necks and corrupted families of the South as snake pit...
...The mystique of ante bellum glory persists in popular culture at mid-century, proclaiming forever that the Old South, in an idealized picture of aristocratic, leisured life—based upon Negro slavery —was actually the nobler cause, against the vulgar, materialistic, immigrant-saturated North...
...heart, the platoon in training inevitably includes a Negro (William Hairston)—with an equally inevitable Indian (Maurice Jara) for good measure of good intentions...
...In contrast, one of the least credible films about the Korean War may be the most significant, as far as the depiction of Negroes is concerned...
...Attitudes towards miscegenation create the dramatic conflicts in both of the central romances, although Negroes are not directly involved...
...In what may be an historic crisis in the American conception of what it is to be American, the popular arts in general and the movies in particular are deeply and crucially implicated...
...Marshall, the most realistic fiction film about the war is its candid and dramatic treatment of a Negro turned malingerer under fire...
...The only bad guys are bushwhackers, irregulars—as in a significant genre of semi-Western films with Civil War flavor, ranging from perennial program melodramas about Quantrell's guerrillas in bloody Kansas to occasional epics such as The Jay hawkers (1959), and John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959...
...Most of the time, the Negro behaves like a liberal script-writer's notion of a worthy cause: reading serious poetry, manifesting education on unlikely occasions, personifying the superior intellect intelligent enough to be democratic...
...A whole genre of American literature had come to be pervaded by metaphors of disillusion, of which the modern South as snake pit is surely a paramount example...
...The meaning of Poitier in the part is his vicarious posture: that the audience, white and colored, reaches to associate with him, gaining empathic fulfillment in his representation on screen...
...In the few films depicting this behavior, such as Prisoner of War (1954), Negroes are either absent or carefully inconspicuous...
...Many are based, directly or indirectly, upon novels and plays by authors of the Southern "school...
...When A Streetcar Named Desire was made into a film in 1951, no one was allowed to ignore the significance of Vivien Leigh's reappearance in the role of Blanche...
...A significant exception is South Pacific (1957), based on the most successful of the nostalgic entertainments about the war...
...But it is precisely because it is so typical a vehicle that the film is significant...
...After the Negro has at last managed to behave like the raw rookie he is, the drill sergeant (Richard Widmark) thrusts out his jaw in the best Quirt tradition, and administers as egalitarian a chewing out as anyone could ask...
...Johnny Reb" and "Billy Yank" are both good guys, fighting for the side of right— which never loses, but triumphs as either permanently magnificent Lost Cause or manifestly victorious national destiny...
...But such realism as the Negro Seabee joining in the opening chorus of "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame," as if he, too, was able to feel lonely for the opposite sex, could not fail to be as arresting as it was intended to be...
...That the increasingly realistic portrayal of Negroes on screen is involved in the crisis of American identification is forcefully illustrated in films about the armed services...
...These new images are developing along parallel, often converging, and eventually combining vectors of realism and heroic enlargement...
...For the protagonist is a Negro— played -by Sidney Poitier, who, with Harry Belafonte, proves unmistakably in every role how profound has been the revolution in the projection of Negroes on screen...
...By the 1930s, the popular taste for gaudy disenchantment had advanced to a point where it was appropriate to contrast the crinolined sweetness of Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland) with the silken bitchery of Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), and the courtly virtue of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) with the parvenu opportunism of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable...
...Since World War II, the presence of Negroes in military films is well-nigh obligatory—perhaps reflecting service policy governing cooperation with the movie industry as much as Hollywood sociology...
...For many years, Southerners flew their old Confederate flags in reaction against the "bloody shirt" waved by Northern politicians to keep the resentments of the war alive...
...The shock of All the Young Men is not in seeing a Negro facing down a Southern bigot, or brawling fiercely with whites and overcoming them—even if the climactic fight is against so institutional a movie hero as Alan Ladd...
...But there are always the choral figures of Negroes, in the representations of both history and contemporary society...
...Films made after the integration of the services, and especially those laid during the Korean War, begin to stress the equality of Negro servicemen—sometimes sacrificing realism for nobly intended exaggerations...
...But for the legions of unreconstructed Southerners, the sentimental triumph over actual defeat carries inexorable penalties in ambiguities of the popular imagination...
...Nobody is right or wrong, nobody is a traitor firing on his nation's flag...
...In their works, Negroes frequently come into primary focus, albeit rarely as protagonists...
...Dworkin, a distinguished student of the movies, will appear in the January issue__The Editors...
...All the Young Men (1960) is a hackneyed melodrama of stock characters in banal situations, replete with ancient narrative cliches...
...In Take the High Ground (1953), a rehash of old hash about a drill sergeant with a tough, G.I...
...A typical movie hero who is a Negro is an image of revolutionary force, out of a course of development that is a revolution in the popular imagination...
...But Negroes also malingered, surrendered, and turned traitors under duress as well as did whites...
...By the 1940s, the contrasting figures could be amalgamated and transformed, becoming Tennessee Williams' images of the declasse aristocrat, Blanche Du Bois, and of the brutal proletarian, without tradition—without even debased gentility, Stanley Kowalski...
...His lieutenant (Gregory Peck) brusquely orders him to be the man he assumes himself to be when he demands equality—and pointedly puts him under guard by a Negro corporal (James Edwards), who observes coldly that the malinger must be his special concern...
...In the books, comic strips, and movies of this new Reconstruction era, the old enemies are distinguished by their essential similarities...
...The war, still a puzzling and frustrating "police action" for so many Americans, was the first test of the new integration policy of the armed services...
...By the late 1950s, punctually at the time when the images of Negroes on screen are gaining new explicitness and even emphasis, a number of films exploiting subjects of Southern decadence begin to form a distinct band on the thematic spectrum of the screen...
...Ageneration separates the images of Southerners in The Birth of a Nation from those of Gone With the Wind: a period of swinging frenzies of naive hope and sentimental disillusion, in the wake of world war and depression...
...In films about the Korean War, it is simple journalism to include Negroes in almost every platoon and squad...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
