THE NEW NEGRO ON SCREEN
Dworkin, Martin S.
the NEW NEGRO on screen by MARTIN S. DWORKIN This is the fourth of a series of articles by Mr. Dworkin on Negroes in the movies. The concluding installment will appear in the February issue. The...
...But in those films directly, if not primarily,- treating the problem, it is significantly unnecessary to insist upon tragic—or at least mortal —endings...
...But that this punctuality was possible had to do directly with timing within the changing movie industry, offering at least a clawing, scrambling chance for an independent producer to make a film treating a controversial subject, and to win commercial success without star performers...
...Traditionally, such heroines are safely tragic, frequently of races other than Negro — including some of dubious ethnography, and almost always of such diluted "blood" in any case as to make the premise of sexual attraction at least visually uncomplicated by considerations of race, thereby equivocating in effect any apparent contravention of the Code...
...But also implied, albeit hesitantly, is a notion that his mixed blood has something to do with his contribution to Southern literature...
...By then, it had become industrially, as well as aesthetically, possible for one of the stars to be a Negro, Sidney Poitier...
...In the privacy of audience imagination, to be sure, any pigmentation could be given the heroine—as well as any behavior, according to the skill with which the film makers have reached into the secret centers of fantasy...
...Some point is made that this division represents the best that can be hoped for, in the present state of attitudes of both races towards intermarriage...
...In Island in the Sun there is neither concealment nor revelation of the love affair between the colored labor leader (Harry Belafonte) and the charming white widow (Joan Fontaine)—or, for good measure, of that between the island governor's aide (John Justin) and the lovely mulatto shopgirl (Dorothy Dandridge...
...The girl, against his mother's machinations, has to prove that she is colored, under the guidance of a Negro attorney (James Edwards), before the couple can be reunited...
...Even King Vidor's celebrated Hallelujah (1929), purporting to depict Southern Negroes on their own terms in their own locale, in large measure continued what film historian Lewis Jacobs calls "the conventionalities of the white man's conception of the spiritual-singing, crap-shooting Negro...
...And the ending, in which the two bitter antagonists are burned to indistinguishable cinders, has a simple, pointed irony...
...As a writer, celebrated and vilified for his gamy representations of life in the South, he is deliberately intended to form a combination of Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner...
...This convention is curiously analogous to that of white actors working in blackface, although to different purposes of vicarious involvement — and allowing white heroes to make love on screen without violating anything more serious than codes of morality...
...An exception, one of the characters in The View from Pompey's Head (1955), is in perfect contrast, as he (Sidney Black-mer) is presented as an aged, sickly figure beyond romance—although not beyond considerable significance...
...But this partially hysterical and fully confused melodrama, purporting to attack prejudice, is plainly a film of the new racial consciousness...
...The loudest tick of Stanley Kramer's timing with Home of the Brave (1949) may have been the punctual connection of the theme with movements of events, ideas, and attitudes —as daily realities and reflections on screen...
...Most of these films, until the new imagery following World War II, are appalling patchworks of the worst stereotyped caricatures—the more to be disparaged for the characteristic waste of performers of great talent and international reputation...
...An attitude towards race mixture that seems to be rising towards open suggestion here is surely more romantic, at least, than all the erotic liberations of lightly colored women and white men in movies such as Night of the Quarter Moon...
...Here may be one reason why colored actresses have not risen to stardom, beyond top billing as singing and dancing performers...
...Attitudes of both races toward this problem are ambiguous, having roots in vagarious social prejudices, ancestral erotic fantasies, abysmal ignorances concerning heredity and race in general—and ambivalences of pride and shame in apparent ancestry and racial identity...
...And again, the golden powers of commerce somehow strove to serve the mercurial forces of popular imagination...
...The distribution of moments of vicarious association between the co-stars of The Defiant Ones is still unequal...
...The Woman, of course, is a principal problem in the development of colored heroes on screen...
...For easy recognition, however, he is tricked out in a white beard like that of the common man's image of the Great Writer, Ernest Hemingway...
...Significantly, when Kramer returned to the theme of Negro-white relations with The Defiant Ones (1958), it was with leading performers who were stars, in billing, compensation, and audience response— although no longer in fealty to studios according to the ancient iron usages of the industry...
...to the trashy sensationalism of I Passed For White (1960...
...But in showing Negroes as protagonists of drama, and as manifesting ordinary human emotions in dealing with one another, the film may be regarded as a milestone on the road towards dignified representation...
...What formulary "romance" or "sex appeal" there is in the film is projected via the experience of Poitier's co-star (Tony Curtis) with a swampland temptress (Cara Williams) — who is simply and completely denominated "The Woman...
...As for Negro men and white women—that perennial nightmare corrupting dreams of racial equality, from New Orleans and Little Rock to Johannesburg and Notting Hill— the movies in their new enlightenment hardly approach in candor stage plays such as Othello and All God's Chillun Got Wings—or Strange Fruit and Deep Are the Roots, both reaching Broadway in 1945, when the young Negro lieutenant in the latter work could both describe and prophesy in saying: "Things are changing, Mama...
...But it is Belafonte who has come closest to acceptance as a romantic protagonist— probably at least as much for his lighter complexion and more Caucasian cast of features, as for the background of his primary career as singer of romantic folk-songs and popular love ballads...
...Screen treatments inevitably display a wide range of intentions and qualities — from the commendable seriousness but sweetened evasions of Pinky (1949) to the maudlin tear-jerking Imitation of Life (1959)—an even soapier remake of the 1934 movie of Fannie Hurst's bathetic novel, which was shrewdly reshown in 1946...
...The mysterious attraction of invisible taint may help to clarify the otherwise obscure necessity for Julie London, playing a quadroon, to bare large portions of her skin as evidence in a courtroom scene of Night of the Quarter Moon (1959...
...Once again, momentums of change were choosing coincidences of events to be utilized—or creating them...
...Red-neck Southern bigotry has rarely been more caustically portrayed on screen...
...Early in 1948, a few months before the Hollywood film companies began racing to bring out movies with Negro themes, the entertainment trade paper Variety took note of a change of mind and mechanics in the industry, cautioning that "Stars Ain't What They Used to Be...
...The Negro is a thoroughly romanticized figure out of the new movie imagery: handsome, aggressively decent, educated, and completely versatile in the knowledges and skills of modern technological civilization...
...The elimination of this stricture as part of the general revision of the Code in 1957 is another punctual factor affecting the inexorable transformation of movie images of Negroes...
...No longer "was the presence of even a galaxy in the cast of a film sufficient to secure its success...
...The series has run longer than scheduled because of the author's difficulty in coping with his massive researches on the subject.—The Editors...
...The girl's closing enforcement of truce without resolution becomes at best a meretricious evasion, the more pointless as it violates the integrity of fantasy, wherein anything—even truth—is possible...
...With the introduction of a third survivor, a white man (Mel Ferrer), however, the significance of the drama is totally blurred, and the several symbolisms either dissipated in melodrama, or given other, dubious meanings...
...Poitier, to be sure, is not yet a true movie "hero" in The Defiant Ones...
...Even Belafonte has not yet been granted the minimum of overt love-making that goes with being an ordinary movie hero— except with another Negro (Dorothy Dandridge) in Carmen Jones (1954...
...Colored heroines are another matter in the history of the movies — at once in spite of and because of the provision of the old Hollywood Production Code prohibiting themes of miscegenation...
...The entire industry, to be sure, would never again be what it was before the war—and before the cataclysms of postwar change, especially television, the statutory separation of studios and theater circuits, and the diaspora of masses from cities to suburbs and ex-urbs...
...If race is no longer an issue, as the predicament warrants and the white man himself insists, then neither are several other strictures or customs of abundantly populated civilizations...
...Of the new Negro stars, Poitier has achieved the higher dramatic stature, appearing in more demanding, generally more significant roles...
...With considerable cinematic eloquence—especially in depicting the terrible vacancy of New York City, the metropolis of the world, empty of living things—the film goes to deliberate lengths to establish the good sense, human necessity, and romantic validity of a full relationship between the two young people...
...This film, from Oscar Hammerstein's jazz revision of Bizet's opera, is in the line of musicals such as Hearts in Dixie (1929), Cabin in the Sky (1943), and Stormy Weather (1943), that have been the most successful examples of the genre of all-or-nearly-all-Negro movies, providing a kind of segregated entertainment since the low-darky and high-nigger short subjects of the first years of the century...
...Gentleman's Agreement, 1948), and the Negro problem...
...The theme of a white man marrying a girl with Negro blood may not be new...
...Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) — both with Harry Belafonte...
...His first film is a noteworthy example of the new imagery —and of its limitations in imitating conventional melodrama...
...Following the line of least vicarious resistance — and most erotic appeal — movie treatments of "passing" almost always focus upon women...
...The situation could encourage good business gambles on the persistence of wartime good intentions...
...The problem is stated even more radically in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959)—and even more seriously equivocated...
...Belafonte formed his own producing company after The World, the Flesh, and the Devil — which he strongly condemned for its waste of opportunity...
...It is the colored man who turns away, sadly but firmly, from the white woman — while the aide, a writer and probably somewhat Bohemian anyway, takes his colored shopgirl off to London and putative marriage...
...The discovery by a young lawyer (Richard Egan) of the long-buried truth that the writer's mother was a Negro serves to deflate exaggerated Bourbonism, represented by his wife (Marjorie Rambeau...
...The film thus falls in with a significant, and apparently growing, number of movies since the war that have dealt with the ancient alternative open to lightly pigmented persons of "passing" as whites...
...A similar judgment may be placed upon the most famous of all-Negro works of stage and screen, The Green Pastures (1936), from Marc Connelly's play, for the very affection —however patronizing at base—with which the stylized angels and sinners of "De Lawd's" world are depicted...
...This could permit and quite often encourage associations of conventionally romantic symbols on screen with ancient erotic imageries out of folklore and forbidden literatures of the Occident, wherein Negresses and other colored females are figures of special imaginings...
...That they remain apart — chiefly because of the man's punctilious patience—seems an artificial convention for maintaining suspense...
...and even All the Young Men (1960), in which Poi-tier is both star and hero...
...But making the Negro so clearly and sympathetically the good-guy-turned-unwilling crook is an integration of cliches of dubious virtue — although of some significance is the rise of Negroes to heroic imagery on screen...
...The mixed romances are bravely hinted at in long, self-conscious talk, relieved by intimations of more talk...
...The drama, of a white man and a Negro physically and symbolically chained together as they try to escape from a prison gang, provides the bluntest confrontation of the new genre of films which deliberately emphasizes violent clashes of the races, including Edge of the City (1957) and Something of Value (1957) — both with Poitier...
...Themes, as much as star personalities, were merchandised in the flurry of relative seriousness over such problems as alcoholism (The Lost Weekend, 1945), rehabilitation of veterans (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946), mental disturbance (The Snake Pit, 1948), anti-Semitism (Crossfire, 1947...
...The new movie audiences evidently were developing new habits in seeking entertainment, even as the old mechanisms of supply were altering or running down...
...Dorothy Dandridge, perhaps, has come closest —but in no way matches the box-office meaning of Poitier or Belafonte...
...In Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), a Negro (Belafonte), and a psychopathic Southern racist (Robert Ryan), join in an attempted bank robbery with a cashiered detective (Ed Beg-ley...
...A Negro man (Harry Belafonte) and a white woman (Inger Stevens) alone in a deserted world is a proverbial situation...
...But there is at least a dismal'novelty in leaving the lovers alive at the end...
...Here it is given plural symbolism by making them survivors of an ultimate radioactive holocaust, which has mysteriously and sanitarily obliterated all signs of life in destroying it...
...It is a mark of irresponsibility, if not plain childishness, to stage such a situation only to turn it into a mere movie rigamarole of rivalry over a girl, complete with armed chases and gunplay in the streets, gangster or Western style...
...A host of white actresses, from Bil-lie Dove to Susan Kohner, have appeared as heroines of mixed blood...
...In fact, precisely who is patronizing whom becomes a clouded question, in the case of a work wherein Negroes are made to represent all mankind, the hosts of heaven, and God Himself...
...No embraces or caresses are ventured on screen...
...Not only is the young man (John Drew Barry-more) knowing and willing, in the face of the no longer terrible truth...
Vol. 25 • January 1961 • No. 1
