Two Evenings with Donald Bogle
One of the best things about Turner Classic Movies is our ongoing association with some of the world’s best film scholars. One of the best of the best is our friend Donald Bogle.
Over a career spanning six decades Bogle has established himself as one of, if not the supreme authority on the fascinating and important subject of African Americans in film. He has published nine books on the subject and taught at many major universities.
2023 marks the 50th anniversary of his first book “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film.” This landmark study was the first of its kind, exploring the different (though often stereotypical and limiting) characters and stories which African American actors and filmmakers have portrayed over the course of Hollywood history. The book also discusses how these actors and filmmakers managed to bring complexity to their portrayals and gradually broke through barriers and changed movie history.
For two nights, Bogle will be joining Ben Mankiewicz for a series of important films featured in his book.
In Imitation of Life (1934), Claudette Colbert plays Beatrice, a struggling widow and single mother in 1920s New Jersey who starts a successful pancake business using the family recipe of her African American housekeeper Delilah (Louise Beavers). As both women’s wealth and status rise, Delilah’s fair-skinned daughter Peola (played at different ages by Sebie Hendricks, Dorothy Black and Fredi Washington) tries to pass as a white girl to avoid the racist limitations of the time. This denial of Peola’s heritage devastates Delilah. This film was based on a then-groundbreaking and successful novel of the same name by Fannie Hurst, inspired by her own friendship with African American writer Zora Neale Hurston. Universal bought the film rights to the book almost immediately but faced many hurdles with the censorship of the times. The production code strictly prohibited any depiction of what was then called “miscegenation” (relations between people of different races or ethnicities) and objected to the racial slurs in the original novel. The film is still not without its problematic elements, with its depiction of Delilah still living in a maid’s quarters even after she and Beatrice have achieved financial success and with its depiction of racial self-hatred. Despite these limitations, the film remains ahead of its time for its depiction of two women succeeding in business together, of single motherhood and for its casting choices. Actress Fredi Washington received both praise and criticism from both white and African American audiences for her portrayal of Peola. Some thought it brave for the actress to take on the complex role, while others thought it wrong for her to play a character who is ashamed of her racial heritage. In real life, Washington became known as a great advocate for Civil Rights, co-founding the Negro Actors Guild of America (NAG) and becoming heavily involved with the NAACP.
Intruder in the Dust (1949) was another film version of another timely best-selling novel that dealt with African Americans’ struggles against discriminatory societies of times past. William Faulkner’s novel tells the story of Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) an African American landowner in post-war Mississippi who is unjustly charged with murdering a white man. Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr.) is the young boy who pleads with the town lawyer (David Brian) to defend Lucas in court and against a potential mob. Stories of this kind which portray African Americans as people who can only be helped by the kindness of white people are now referred to as white savior movies and are still being made as recently as the 2010s with movies like The Blind Side (2009) and The Help (2011) which have problematics of their own and show how slow progress in depicting African Americans on film has been. Afro-Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez had been a prolific actor on the stage and in films as far back as the silent era and yet his performance in this film earned him a Golden Globe Nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. Though there was still a segregated South in 1949, director Clarence Brown insisted on shooting the film on location in Oxford, Mississippi where Faulkner had lived. Juano Hernandez had to spend the entire shoot living in different hotels and dining in different restaurants than the rest of the cast.
A landmark, not just in the depiction of African Americans on film, but in the entire genre of musicals is the film version of the Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Carmen Jones (1954), adapted from the opera “Carmen” by Georges Bizet. In the role that earned her the first Oscar nomination for Best Actress given to an African American actress, Dorothy Dandridge is electric as the title character. The Carmen of this modernized version of the opera is a fiery temptress who has set her sights on Joe (Harry Belafonte), a naive young soldier already engaged to the sweet Cindy Lou (Olga James). Joe cannot resist Carmen and it may delay his engagement and his entering the Korean War. As hard as it is to believe, director Otto Preminger was unsure about casting Dorothy Dandridge in the lead because he wasn’t sure if she could be seductive enough because thus far, she had only been cast as more innocent characters. Needless to say, she proved to him and the world that she could be a temptress. Though both Dandridge and Harry Belafonte were very capable singers, both were dubbed by the more operatic sounding Marilyn Horne and LeVern Hutcherson. Singer/Actresses Pearl Bailey, Olga James and Diahann Carroll were still allowed to sing in their own voices. Many scholars of Black Cinema, including Donald Bogle, have cited this film and particularly Dandridge’s performance as having a major influence on how they personally began their interest in the subject.
One of the greatest stars of all cinema is Sir Sidney Poitier and one of his best early vehicles was the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s acclaimed play A Raisin in the Sun (1961). This story tells of the Younger family who have just lost their patriarch and are conflicted over what is the right thing to do with his $10,000 life insurance policy. Widow Lena (Claudia McNeil) feels that she should put a down payment on a home for the family. Ambitious son Walter Lee (Poitier) and his wife Ruth (Ruby Dee) want to use the policy to open a cash grabbing liquor store. Younger daughter Beneatha (Diana Sands) would like to use the money to pay for medical school. All family members have reasons why they think their plan is the best and why they feel the others are wrong. Not unlike their characters, the cast felt the screenplay and direction to be more steered and sympathetic to their point of view. This friction went back to the original play. Poitier, McNeil, Dee and Sands all originated their roles in the original Broadway play in 1959 and Lorraine Hansberry received her only film credit for adapting her play for the screen. This was all done at the insistence of director Daniel Petrie who had seen and been especially moved by the work on stage. The play had been the first Broadway show with an all-African American cast and with an African American director. Hansberry based her story on an actual court case of Hansberry vs Lee, a case which had gone all the way to the Supreme Court and helped propel the Fair Housing Act of 1934.
These and so many other films have not only enriched Black cinema, but all cinema and all art. It is scholars like Donald Bogle and organizations like Turner Classic Movies who help bring awareness.
