Pinky
Reprinted by permission of Donald Bogle from his film reference
work, Blacks in American Films & Television: An Illustrated
Encyclopedia (Simon & Schuster)
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In "The Shadow and the Act," his now-famous essay on
Hollywood's problem pictures of 1949, Ralph Ellison wrote that
although such films as Home of the Brave and Lost
Boundaries were laden with absurdities, "they are all worth
seeing, and if seen, of involving us emotionally. That they do
is testimony to the deep centers of American emotion that they
touch...It is as though there were some deep relief to be
gained merely from seeing these subjects projected on the
screen."
Clearly, that is true of Pinky [1949], a
compromised film that has moved audiences nevertheless. The
story is of a light-skinned young black woman, Pinky, who,
while studying nursing in the North (Boston), has passed for
white. Upon returning home to her grandmother (Ethel Waters),
Pinky is forced to face the debilitating plight of being a
Negro in the Deep South. Humiliated, abused, and caged in, she
plans to return to the North where she can live as a free
(white) woman. But eventually Pinky comes to a new maturity and
racial awareness, ironically brought about through a terminally
ill, crusty, aristocratic white woman (Ethel Barrymore), who,
intuitively aware of Pinky's dilemma, dies, leaving her estate
to this troubled mulatto. Pinky is forced to go to court to
hold onto this inheritance. Against all odds, she wins. When
her white fiance from the North comes to take her away, she
realizes she's been running from herself. Deciding to remain in
the South, she converts the property left to her into a school
for young black nurses. The film ends with a saddened Pinky,
standing alone, melancholic and misty-eyed, facing a future
with a new racial pride but having lost personal happiness with
the man she loved. She is, of course, a tragic mulatto.
Whether we live it or not, at every turn, there is something
affecting and engrossing about Pinky, its undercurrents
and its subtext disturbing and intriguing us far beyond our
expectations. As the stoic, kind-hearted, Christian
grandmother, Ethel Waters infuses what could have been no more
than an appallingly dated stereotype with genuine warmth,
integrity, and an overriding sense of committment. For her work
in Pinky, Waters was nominated for an Oscar® as Best
Supporting Actress of 1949.
Still one cannot overlook the film's basic dishonesties.
Foremost was the casting of white actress Jeanne Crain as the
Negro girl. Because there are interracial romantic sequences
between Pinky and her white doctor boyfriend (played by actor
William Lundigan), the studio found it then unthinkable to use
a real black woman in the part. It was assumed audiences would
be in an uproar. Not until Dorothy Dandridge's appearance
opposite white actor John Justin in the 1957 movie Island in
the Sun was the film industry "daring" enough to have a
real interracial couple on screen, although, again, the
compromises were apparent. One also cannot ignore the basically
patronizing attitude inherent in Pinky: the black girl
finds herself, not through the advice of her black grandmother
but through the aid of a white aristocrat. Finally, in
Quality, the novel by Cid Ricketts Sumner on which the
film was based, after the heroine had won her court case to
keep the mansion left to her, the place was burned to the
ground by the Ku Klux Klan. This unhappy and more realistic
ending was entirely scrapped by the studio.
Within the movie industry, many feared the picture would fail
commercially because southern exhibitors would refuse to run
it. That indeed did happen. In Marshall, Texas, a
self-appointed censorship board banned the film. But a feisty
exhibitor named L. Gelling showed it anyway, then found himself
arrested. He fought the case, which eventually wound up in the
Supreme Court. The decision, as reported on June 3, 1952, in
The New York Times: "The Supreme Court today struck down
a motion picture censor ordinance by which the city of
Marshall, Texas, disapproved the showing of the film
Pinky."
So Pinky did break ground. Variety wrote: "The
story may leave questions unanswered and in spots be naive, but
the mature treatment of a significant theme in a manner that
promises broad public acceptance and b.o. [box office]
success truly moves the American film medium a desirable notch
forward in stature and importance." As it turned out, later
Variety reported that Pinky was one the top
grossing films of 1949.
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Director: Elia Kazan
Screenplay: Philip Dunne, Dudley Nichols
Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald
Film Editing: Harmon Jones
Art Direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle Wheeler
Music: Alfred Newman
Cast: Jeanne Crain (Patricia 'Pinky' Johnson), Ethel Barrymore (Miss Em), Ethel Waters (Pinky's Granny), William Lundigan (Dr. Thomas Adams), Basil Ruysdael (Judge Walker), Kenny Washington (Dr. Canady).
BW-102m.
 
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