THE NEW NEGRO ON SCREEN

...cummings prophesies, "deeds cannot dream what dreams can do...

...In 1959, a movie version, directed by Philip Leacock, was made (with Johnny Nash, Estelle Hemsley, Frederick O'Neal, and Ruby Dee...

...But the treatment is in the manner of the affectionate fictions of picturesque Negro life fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s—as Negro contributions to American culture and history were being at once tentatively and aggressively asserted, during what Alain Locke and others called "the Negro Renaissance...

...And who can say or predict with certainty what may be the consequences for race relations of the acceptance and more of Negroes as singers and heroes of the songs and fictions of our most intimate imaginings...

...In its course, it pointed emphatically to what has been the richest Negro contribution to popular culture: the music, ranging from spirituals and blues to jazz in innumerable forms and idioms...

...They are becoming figures of vicarious association, for others besides the Negro members of audiences...

...Far more consequential in this context, however, are some examples of the peculiar "Somebody Story" rituals wherein the movies attempt to create myths—and usually succeed in confecting fables...

...The motionless magnitude and almost palpable detail conflict with the demands for stylized unrealism inherent in the conception...

...In sports, music, and even public affairs the process of heroicizing Negroes is so advanced as to suggest that the new movie stars are its beneficiaries...

...The latter's mother serves the meal with much clucking and motherly banter —marking another momentous triviality of movie etiquette...

...Poitier is meant to be a star who does not appear in roles prepared to provide separate, but as nearly equal facilities as possible for Negroes making use of the public imagination...

...This interpretation, for which the testimony is so overwhelming, carries suggestions of awesome consequences...

...Laid in a working-class district, Edge of the City presents the fundamental situation and denouement of innumerable "classic" Western movies, with the difference that the cow-pokes are stevedores—and one, the one with the family who is unjustly killed and must be avenged, is a Negro...

...There is inexorable seeking, as well as transient fulfillment, in the fantasies projected on screen...

...Adapted by Robert Alan Aurthur from his television play, A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, and directed by Martin Ritt, this film is a melodrama of the growth to courageous responsibility of a decent but indecisive young man (John Cassavetes...

...Here, in the mass of trivia and treasure on screen, may be better evidence than in archly orchestrated questionnaires—or even in continued prejudices and violences of bigots and Bourbons—that white people everywhere are preparing themselves for more than statutory equality of races...

...According to this measure of significance, a modest little movie, Bright Road (1953), may mark another point of transformation of the imagery of Negroes on screen (see "State of the Cinema: Bright Road," in The Progressive, July 1953...

...The sentimentalism of the story may have as much to do with its general appeal as has the applicability of the basic situation—attested to by productions in numerous languages, including Yiddish, Norwegian, Chinese, and Japanese...

...There remains, however, a sharp illumination of a particular phase of the Negro problem—and perhaps the most realistic and credible depiction of a Negro family so far in cinema...

...Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and—for at least one decade—Paul Robeson...

...This Porgy and Bess, a climax of the representation of Negroes on screen, is a very modern work, and its wide-screened, Techni-colored, stereophonically-sounded Negroes are not so easily accepted as simply genre characters—as intentionally unrealistic as, say, the Italian Egyptians of Aida, or the French Spaniards of Carmen...

...A scene in which a white doctor, with unostentatious courtesy, helps the colored teacher with her coat, is a little revolution in the iconography of cinema...

...The imagery of the Negro stars, as well as of Negro performers generally, follows upon the celebration in the popular imagination of such figures as Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson...

...But there was momentous novelty in depicting Negro school children as children, and in observing a Negro family at Christmas dinner behaving as any poor but decent family may be supposed to behave...

...The Peterson play, while treating the color problem with unique candor and penetration, does so precisely because its characters are firstly genuine—and also because it does not preach or offer easy diagnoses or remedies...

...The case of Anna Lucasta (1959) has special pertinence, as the original play had dealt with a Polish immigrant family, in dramatizing the hypocrisy and pathos of an attempt to marry a prostitute daughter into a life of respectability...

...But aside from the few and minor producers of occasional quickies for exclusively Negro audiences, movie industrialists have not been encouraged to purvey distinctively colored tickets entitling bearers to differently colored dreams in the theaters...

...There are intricate, mysterious, but implacably real relationships between the rise of subservient classes and peoples in modern times and the evolution of the technological arts of popular entertainment...

...In the most practical terms of added box-office insurance, it testifies to his magnitude as a true star—that is so clear an evidence of change in popular conceptions of Negroes...

...This transformation has been of decisive importance in the development of the form of musical theater that so far is the most original and vigorous—if perhaps not the most desirably serious—American contribution to the arts of the stage...

...The success of Porgy and Bess on stage, however, may be a leading factor in the manner whereby it was brought to the screen—that has raised some of the old claims and counter-claims concerning racial disparagement, as well as new criticisms of content and technique...

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...In the huge Todd-AO screen format, the production by Samuel Gold-wyn, directed by Otto Preminger, is massively static...

...In its broadest aspect, Take a Giant Step deals with the travail of adolescence as the perpetual reenactment of the struggle to be oneself and to belong among others...

...The matter of race is scarcely mentioned, but is emphatically present in the least detail...

...The story itself, based on the Du Bose Heyward novel, Porgy, is a retrospect of Negro life in Charleston around 1912...

...In the films of the 1950s, including several presenting Negroes only or chiefly, colored people appear together as lovers, husbands and wives, parents, and plain human beings— with both significant attempts at realism, and even more significant heroic exaggeration...

...But the criticisms added heavily to the initial difficulties of a work conceived by its composer as grand opera, forced by show-business conventions into presentation as musical comedy—and received favorably by critics .and panjandrums of drama, rather than music...

...It is in the house of the Negro (Sidney Poitier) and his wife (Ruby Dee) that the footloose young man finds both physical and spiritual anchorage...

...It is true that the opera by George and Ira Gershwin is rooted in the rhythms as well as in the attitudes of the era in which it was created...

...The new Negro imagery on screen signifies and substantiates a revolutionary metamorphosis of the popular imagination—as artists and entrepreneurs of this quintessential medium of our century seek to create what will be desired and appreciated...

...Dworkin is a distinguished film critic whose articles and reviews have appeared widely in this country and abroad.—The Editors...

...Particularly, it describes the special pain of a colored boy who finds there is no longer any place for him in the community of white boys with whom he grew up—in a middle-class neighborhood of a New England city — and the alienation he feels, as an outcast neither child nor man, within his family...

...This may be true even with reference to one so attractive as that in Edge of the City (1957), a film which has made an especially favorable impression beyond the United States...

...Author Philip Yor-dan had made two adaptations for a Negro cast, the later one adding much comedy and a happy ending, to become a success on Broadway in 1944, and a perennial of repertory since...

...Negro musicians have been essential figures in films since the introduction of sound—too often, to be sure, with mutilated dignity...

...This success unquestionably prepared the way for better plays—and films—about Negro families, of which two first efforts by Negro writers, Louis Peterson's Take A Giant Step, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In the Sun, are the best...

...The play clearly intends to say something about growing up and belonging in general from the particular instance of the life of one adolescent Negro...

...The key to this larger intention is the figure of a Jewish boy, in whom the young Negro eventually sees reflected his own anguish, recognizing that there are others who must struggle as he has done, to make the desperate, giant step towards maturity...

...The separate songs of the score became popular favorites immediately...

...The conflicts here—between father and son, husband and mother-in-law—are to much more serious dramatic purpose than those in Anna Lucasta...

...The images of Negroes in the movies since World War II have developed along parallel, crossing, and merging vectors of heightening realism and heroic exaltation...

...A crucial reduction of the character of the Jewish boy considerably narrows the meanings of the movie...

...Made on a few studio sets with a small cast (with a single white actor), Bright Road moves, tentatively but definitely, as far from the best of the pre-war all-Negro films, Hallelujah (1929) and The Green Pastures (1936), as these had advanced from the comic-darky one-reelers of the nickelodeon era...

...This development, to be sure, is not unique to the screen, but is taking somewhat longer than in other areas of culture, popular or select...

...And, in its own way, this real family may make more effective propaganda for the dignified representation of Negro family life than romantically ennobled households...

...Many of the same imputations of condescension or unwitting disparagement that were leveled against Hallelujah and The Green Pastures have been made against Porgy and Bess since it first opened on Broadway in 1935...

...There is an ironic significance in the miscasting of the handsome, robust, non-singing Sidney Poitier in the role of the homely, crippled Porgy (Robert McFerrin provides his dubbed-in voice, as Adele Addison does for Dorothy Dandridge as Bess...

...The Jackie Robinson Story (1951—with the athlete playing himself), and The Joe Louis Story (1953—with Coley Wallace), dramatized—and inevitably sugared —the careers of men who, perhaps more than any others in this century, personify the transformation of popular attitudes towards Negroes...

...Adapted by Emmett Lavery from the book, See How They Run, by Mary Elizabeth Vro-man, the film tells a simple story of the regeneration of a "backward" schoolboy (Philip Hepburn), through the patience of a new teacher (Dorothy Dandridge...

...A movie version, with Paulette Goddard, was produced in 1949...

...The play had a short, troubled Broadway run in 1953-54, was subsequently on tour, and had a successful "off Broadway" revival in 1957...

...Several films of the period carry the implications of equality even further, treating the color of the characters as either incidental, or as particular proof that the story being told has more than segregated meanings...

...Of course, the indignations themselves recognize the affection and at least incipient respect for Negroes motivating all such efforts...

...In an earlier film, Go Man Go (1951), celebrating the Harlem Globe Trotters basketball team, there was a scene of related intention...

...A sense of anachronism similar to that of Anna Lucasta has accompanied the most elaborate all-Negro film yet made, Porgy and Bess (1959) —albeit for other reasons...

...It is revealing that a number of Negroes whose accomplishments lay outside the movies were subjects of biographical or panegyrical films before there were Negro movie heroes...

...Turning the talk firmly to marriage and respectability, she elicits from the young Negro his plans to wed a girl with whom he had gone to school—and accomplishes her purpose in chiding her son: "Abe, why don't you find a nice girl...

...The plot is hardly novel—except for the fundamental irrelevance of the skin color of the characters...

...In any case, by the late 1950s the original point of playing white folks in blackface had been blunted, and the novelty of Negroes bungling and bickering in the manner of ordinary families had been worn down—partly, to be sure, in the long runs of Anna Lucasta itself on so many stages...

...The opera itself has risen to American glory and international eminence since its revival in 1940— pruned of most of its sung recitatives and other operatic elements by Cheryl Crawford...

...This is at base surely more a failure of cinematic imagination, however, than of any lingering racial disrespect...

...There were more grounds for relief than for disappointment in the film's hesitation to pioneer beyond the mere hint of a conventional movie romance, between the pretty teacher and the handsome school principal (Harry Belafonte, in his first screen role...

...The integral involvement of Negroes in the most characteristic music of our era simply indicates their implication in the entire complex of popular culture...

...The information agencies of the government, for example, produced in the 1950s a series of short documentaries dealing with such personages as Carver and Bunche, Booker T. Washington, Edith Sampson, Marian Anderson, and Louis Armstrong...

...In the purviews of politics and market research, the bloc of Negro consumers may have grown to a certain strategic grandeur...

...The arrival on screen of the all-Negro version of the play (with Eartha Kitt, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frederick O'Neal, and Rex Ingram), proved more anti-climactic than punctual...

...Where once the moralizing melodrama acted by Negroes had topical force, now the accepted irrelevance of color made the story all the more mawkish on screen...

...The Negro stars beginning to scintillate on screen in the 1950s and 1960s are more than successful colored entertainers...

...Such portrayals of Negro family life and aspirations as vital and worthy enough to be models for white folks are striking transmutations of venerable cliches—and may be reflections of profound changes in the sociology of Negroes beyond the screen...

...Since the war, however, they have been represented with fervent veneration, as of the highest priesthood of the people's most sacred liturgies—for example, in the main stream of the "Somebody Story" romances about real people, including The Glenn Miller Story (1954), The Benny Goodman Story (1956), The Five Pennies (1959)—with Danny Kaye as Red Nichols), and The Gene Krupa Story (1960...

...By 1959, the same forces that had worked to bring Porgy and Bess to the screen had made the latter the lesser likelihood...

...One of the players on the team (Sidney Poitier) comes to have dinner at the home of the Trotters' impresario, Abe Saperstein (Dane Clark...

...Again, it is the more than racial meanings in these works that give them their true force and validity— and attest to the depth of the continuing transformation of the image of the Negro in the popular imagination...

...George Washington Carver and Ralph Bunche...

...Louis Blues (1958) memorialized composer W. C. Handy (Nat "King" Cole) with admirable respect but stupefying unrealism...

...And as movies characteristically eliminate the physical distance from audience to performers, here, too, the distance in time essential to the work is largely lost or foreshortened...

...It is on their life of affection and mutual respect that he presumably will pattern his own, when he marries the pretty school teacher (Kathleen Maguire), who has been waiting for him to settle down and become a man...

...Most reverential of all have been numerous films, some of very serious, avant-garde pretensions, that have sought to fuse cinematography and jazz—beginning with Gjon Mili's Jammin' the Blues (1946), and reaching a culmination that is related to the pictorial treatment of jazz in the magazines of the 1950s, in Bert Stern's apotheosis of the Newport Festival, Jazz On A Summer's Day (1960...

...Except in one or two numbers, the gigantic images on screen overwhelm the magnificent music...

...The old problems of movie operas are exaggerated, as the vitality of the Negro performers (including Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Pearl Bailey) is generally confined within elaborate theatrical settings...