The True Colors Of Old Hollywood

Throughout its history, America's cinema has played an instrumental role in popularizing variegated racial stereotypes of black people. Images of blacks have gone through a number of significant changes which, historically, reflect the mores, values and beliefs held in society concerning blacks as well as the evolving status and reemergence of black people within contemporary America.

It would be shamefully the case, during the age of the silent-film, where roles intended for black actors were instead portrayed by white actors in theatrical blackface makeup, similar to the grease paint that was applied to the faces of  entertainers in 1830's minstrelsy and were depicted in terms of the American Southern plantation tradition, usually as comic slave types and family retainers. It was during this period that the traditional stereotypes of the Uncle Tom, the Mammy figure and the comic-relief black type were firmly established in the cinematic mythology. Come the late 1930's, Hollywood tended to stress relatively benign images of blacks in subservient roles. The Romantic Old South genre continued strongly, reaching a pinnacle in Gone With the Wind (1939), for which Hattie McDaniel won a groundbreaking Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as the headstrong but loyal 'Mammy' to Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara. It marked the historical first time a black actress would receive the honor.

As late as the year 1965, Laurence Olivier would don blackface to portray Othello

The post-World War II period saw the onset of a new liberal attitude in the Hollywood system. The emphasis would shift towards relatively positive images; as more films started to depict black-white relations within an infinitely more humanistic framework. Clarence Brown's 1949 film version of William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust would introduce to the screen the figure of the proud and noble black. The liberal attitude was informed by a sense of social equality, and conveyed a strong commitment to racial tolerance. One of the recurrent patterns of the 1950's films of a liberal nature - is the black-white confrontation motif, in which the black hero is pitted against an intolerant white. The first appears in No Way Out (1950), where the central conflict between Sidney Poitier's character and the recalcitrant bigot played by Richard Widmark, is eventually resolved with the black triumphantly rising as the moral victor. The acceptable black in liberal films eschewed violence - which was the domain of the racially intolerant figures both black and white. A number of films, however, developed the racial-tolerance theme along the lines of mutually hostile black-white confrontations, gradually shifting into mutual respect: in Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958), the Poitier and Tony Curtis characters are escaped cons who are shackled together and therefore forced to work through their opposing attitudes and dispositions at extremely close range.

Sidney Poitier  in a groundbeaking achievement ,would be the first black actor to garner an Academy Award

The Fifties decidedly more liberal image of blacks revolved almost exclusively around Sidney Poitier (b.1926); yet given this new stance, there were never to be women filling the principal role of the archetypal noble black. Indeed, they dealt with highly personalized forms of interracial male relationships. Many blacks voiced profound antipathy towards the generalization of a 'noble black' image; it was also argued that the stereotype itself preempted any concept of black individualism and self-determination

Gallantry in the Ghetto - 1963's The Cool World  (dir. Shirley Clarke)

By the mid-Sixties, the black civil rights movement was making a tremendous impact on every level of American society. The general trend was now clearly shifting towards militancy and separatism. Blacks reexamined and reworked their position in society and would develop new self-images, in which blackness was an emphatically positive sign of opposition. These social and political developments had a broad effect on the Sixties images of blacks in films; what emerged was  the black as an individual struggling against society at large, or simply against his own conscience. The personal qualities of the central black figure provided the focal point of the drama. During this period, blacks would now appear in a wider variety of story situations, as well as genres. and their characterizations were fully developed. The incorporating of blacks into otherwise white movies articulated an image of a plural society, where race relations were part of the complex of human relations. And this was to be dramatized in a number of films concerning a band of men, which included a black, whose common objective - such as robbing a bank - was perpetually challenged by personality differences.

Thus the 1960's were a period of maturity, not only in terms of the types of racial thematics explored in film, but yet in the sense that human qualities were now an integral part in black characterizations. It was now very well possible for films to construct black characters that possessed some dramatically significant human weakness, without its being interpreted as necessarily pejorative. Norman Jewison's In The Heat of the Night, one of the last Hollywood liberal films, explored this theme of the flawed back hero with resounding effect. Low-budget 'art' films such as John Cassavetes' Shadows in 1960, Shirley Clarke's The Cool World (1963), Larry Peerce's One Potato, Two Potato and Michael Roemer's Nothing But A Man (1964) were particularly interesting for their realistic and sensitive approach to racial subjects. But they also tended to express a somewhat cynical observation of the black world, and of interracial relations that would place them outside mainstream conventions. Occasionally this outlook was taken to extremes, as in Robert Downey's satire Putney Swope (1969) involving a coup by the blacks of a bias advertising agency.

Like Daddy, Like Son - Gordon Parks Jr. directs the Shaftesque Superfly (1972) - Ron O'Neal and potential assassin pictured.

The latter portion of the 1960s would see an emergence of political themes in Hollywood, when a good number of films would concentrate on some aspect of the new militancy. Once blacklisted director Jules Dassin produced Up Tight! (1968) a dramatization of the schisms that arose between the separatist militancy and the integration of non-violence in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr's April 1968 assassination. Hollywood Ten director Herbert J. Bilberman's Slaves (1969) would depict the corruption of plantation life and slave rebellion. In The Last Man (1969), Sidney Poitier played a black militant. Generally, Poitier continued to represent the black middle-class image of acceptability. His films were especially popular with white audiences, he was the first black actor to win an Oscar in 1963 for his performance in Lilies of the Field and he remained Hollywood's top black star  well into the Sixties. But he ceased to have the monopoly over the black image as was the case in the prior decade.

Sdney Poitier has some unfinished ecumenical matters to contend with in Lilies in the Field (1963)

The proliferation of new themes and images of the Sixties opened the way for other black actors and actresses; and this led to other kinds of black types being depicted. One of the more popular was the black male machismo figure, then best represented by ex-professional football star Jim Brown. It was to become, in the Seventies, the principal black male stereotype and highly controversial Black women also came to the fore in the Sixties, with such actresses as Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, Abbey Lincoln and Diahann Carroll appearing in numerous films, racial and non-racial playing relatively intelligent roles. But very few films would look at black male-female relationships. Nothing But a Man and romantic comedy For Love of Ivy (1968) starring Beau Bridges both notably being of the exception.

For Love of Ivy (1968) one of the few films of it's era depicting black couples in love.

The Seventies would witness the sudden surge in black exploitation, or 'blaxploitation' films. Their subject matter, characters and milieu were such that they would appeal primarily to black audiences who, for the first time were now a major audience. The films were highly commercially successful and concentrated mainly on black super-hero types - super-hip, super-slick, super-cool characters capable of super heroics! And they invariably contained a fair amount of sex and violence and blacks were shown as always coming out ahead of the game and on top.

Cotton Came to Harlem and so did Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, (pictured above - Godfrey Cambridge & Raymond St. Jacques)

Director Ossie Davis' Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) relied almost entirely on the iconography of the ghetto - its sub cultural styles in dress, speech patterns of behavior and attitudes - for its effect. The ethnic morality embodied by the two black detectives who doubled as heroes, expressed for example their antipathy towards slick hustlers (white or black) trying to work the people of the community and this would be an old familiar theme to come in subsequent films.

Power to the Peeples.

This brand new tone of the black-slanted film was wonderfully conveyed in director Gordon Parks' Shaft (1971) and that would be one of the most commercially achieved of the cycle. The film itself worked within the conventions of the private-eye detective genre ; but it nonetheless succeeded in firmly establishing its mythos and the sophisticated black super hero. Director Melvin Van Peeples' anthemic Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) was impressive despite lacking the sheen of the more mainstream contemporaneous efforts. But the scenes in which the fugitive antihero partook in bizarre sexual adventure and the overall image of the black man triumphing over the corrupted white establishment, made the film attractive to both black and white audiences. It was a roaring success, and established the now stereotype of the black super-stud. Gordon Parks Jr. responded with Superfly starring Ron O'Neal and it furthered the mythology of the street-savvy hustler slash cocaine supplier, a figure that has become a fixture of the most popular and controversial of black hero archetypes during the blaxploitaion period.

The brilliant Roger E. Mosley as Leadbelly, Parks' 1976 bio-pic of the blues legend.

Only a minority of black-oriented films concerned actual black people of stature - notably the Billie Holiday biography Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Gordon Parks' Leadbelly (1976) - or viewed as some aspect of black history. Sidney Poitier's directorial debut - Buck and the Preacher (1972) gave light to a neglected part of America's history: the era following the Civil War when freed slaves emigrated west to find homesteads, but were tracked down and forced to return to the South.

The Black Panthers in protest against 'Blaxploitation' cinema on September 27,1972.

A bulk of the Seventies blaxploitation releases were set in the urban milieu: they would glorify the ghetto as a poetic jungle and romanticized the underworld of pimps and dealers. The street-hustler thus became the proverbial anti-establishment, individualistic hero of the period. This image of the black world would spur moral indignation in many black-rights organizations and professional bodies. In the year 1972, the National Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) formed a coalition to attack what they had felt became an intolerable situation. The controversy continued through the Seventies blaxploitation period. A number of black-owned production companies were set up to satiate the demands for a more responsible approach to black films. But most of the writers, producers and directors of black-slanted movies in any case were Caucasian; and the essential white-owned capitalist structure of the trend remained firmly intact.

The Learning Tree (1969)

A recurrent theme in the anti-blaxploitation lobby was that the films were both psychologically and socially harmful to young blacks in their impressionable years who made up a large percentage of its audience. Certain films were singled out as representing meaningful and positive images of black life. Among this set were Gordon Parks first feature; 1969's The Learning Tree, based on the autobiographical novel about growing up in rural Kansas during the Thirties; Martin Ritt's Sounder (1972) another period-piece set in the 1930's that concerned a young boy's experiences in the South; Ossie Davis' Black Girl (1972); and director/animator John Korty's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), an ambitious televisual film in which Cicely Tyson expertly portrayed a 100-year old black woman who ruminates over her life from the time of slavery to the civil-rights years. These films would signify a sense of humanity in the image of blacks - which many held the belief were lost in the shuffle during the post-civil rights Seventies.

Cicely Tyson's lends a staggering performance in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

The blaxploitation fad would peter out in the late Seventies. At the same time,an independent black filmmakers' movement was gaining momentum, re-visiting ethnic themes with the gusto of creative intelligence and a sensitivity.

Mr Pryor steppin' in for Poitier.

In the Eighties, Poitier would become the most successful black director in Hollywood's history, as he had been equally its most acclaimed actor and he was for several years virtually the only black star in Hollywood. Poitier specialized in comedies aimed at black audiences but Stir Crazy (1980) was a cross-over that was so successful - it would garner more than $58 million in domestic rentals alone. It's star Richard Pryor, had briefly taken over Poitier's preeminence, with the addition of a scathing sense of humor, but would soon be challenged by the blander yet crowd pleasing young comic Eddie Murphy in 1982's 48 HRS. Trading Places (1983) and Beverly Hills Cop (1984).

Is it Idi Amin or is it Memorex?

And on the other end of the spectrum Texas thespian Forest Whitaker (b.1961) the son of a novelist - would embark on his celluloid journey - the first stop with a nominal role as a teenager in the 1982 sex-romp  Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He was hard to forget in his eye-opener of a performance one decade later in The Crying Game as a kidnapped English soldier; and a haunting portrayal of dictator du jour Idi Amin in the 2006 bio-pic The Last King of Scotland in which Whitaker received an esteemed and well-deserved sixteen awards, among them the Oscar for Best Actor. And though it would appear that Hollywood is a mite more fair and balanced and a touch more color blind of late - it  probably could stand to acknowledge just a tad more of the grey matter.