The author of TCM's forthcoming book Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers, selects four groundbreaking movies for Black History Month--and the months to follow:

In 1949, Hollywood underwent a significant change in its depiction of African Americans. In the past, mainstream movies presented (with a few rare exceptions) portraits of Black characters as fundamentally contented carefree servants, who often performed dim-witted antics and provided many a film with much-needed but often enough cringe-worthy comic relief. The Black actors were always solid entertainers, able to make the most of their screen time. But the movies were reluctant to comment on the nation's long-festering racial divisions and conflicts: a fundamental racism that was eating away at the fabric of American life. That changed in 1949 with four striking motion pictures that zeroed in on the nation's race problem while offering talented Black actors and actresses a chance at meaningful and challenging roles. Here are those four films that broke new ground and led to powerful films of the 1950s and 1960s. Perfect films to view during Black History Month or at any time.

Home of the Brave, directed by Mark Robson, produced by Stanley Kramer, and based on a play by Arthur Laurents (which originally dealt with anti-Semitism), told the story of a Black soldier, Peter Moss, who has suffered an emotional breakdown. A military psychiatrist works with the soldier to undercover the events that led to the collapse. What emerges is a tale of sound and fury that signifies much about the American way of life. While serving on a special mission with a small unit of white soldiers on an island in the South Pacific, Moss finds himself the target of racial taunts and slurs, all the more shockingly ironic because they occur while all the men are supposedly fighting for the land of the free and the home of the brave. Most traumatic for Moss is when his best friend from school--also on the mission--reveals his long-buried racism as well. That--as well as the friend's death on the mission--sends Moss over the brink. But during his sessions with the psychiatrist, it is also revealed that even before his experiences in the military, Moss has suffered such taunts and discrimination. In a sense, racism is deeply embedded in the nation's DNA.

Starring as Moss was newcomer James Edwards, who precedes Sidney Poitier as the screen's first sensitive, intelligent, new style Black hero/leading man. Edwards is such a startling presence--unlike any Black movie actor who came before him--that you may feel certain that stardom awaits him. He appeared in such movies as Bright Victory, The Steel Helmet, The Manchurian Candidate, The Sandpiper, and Patton (his last film) and also had a long career in television. But the big movie roles went to Poitier. In many respects, Edwards' dilemma revealed that Hollywood was really ready only for one Black lead at a time.

Also in the cast are Lloyd Bridges (as Moss's friend), Frank Lovejoy, Douglas Dick, Jeff Corey, and in an effectively vicious characterization, Steve Brodie. The movie ends with problems resolved and a supposedly redemptive theme of interracial male bonding as the soldier played by Lovejoy extends his hand in friendship and wants Moss to be a partner in a new business venture. Though today viewers are bound to feel the ending is rigged, it touched on some of the optimism of the post-World War II era. Of course, things did not work out that way as evidenced by the turbulent Civil Rights movement of the 1950s/1960s. But Home of the Brave sets the stage for other interracial male-bonding dramas to follow such as Edge of the City and The Defiant Ones.

Also appearing in 1949 was producer Louis de Rochemont's independent production Lost Boundaries, directed by Alfred Werker. Here was the story of a young light-skinned Black doctor and his light-skinned wife. When a Black hospital in the South declines to hire the doctor because he looks too white, the couple moves North--to a white community in New Hampshire. There, the couple "passes" as white for some twenty years. The doctor sets up a successful medical practice. The couple raise two children as whites, and generally, their lives moves ideally---until, of course, the day when their deep, dark secret is revealed. The couple and their children find themselves rejected by their once friendly neighbors. Lost Boundaries earnestly sets out to expose and explore the community's racism as well as the family's self-examination, especially the children who have adopted some of the attitudes of the community and must now struggle to understand themselves as African Americans. The son goes to Harlem in search of his roots. The film ends on a note of racial reconciliation when the town's white minister preaches a sermon about tolerance, and we're led to believe the community is ready to "forgive" their former friends for that having drop of Negro blood.

Though based on a true story, Lost Boundaries doesn't ring true the way it's dramatized. One cannot imagine that their light skin would have led to a rejection by the Negro community of the time. Perhaps the greatest compromise is that the major Black characters are played by white actors: Mel Ferrer, Beatrice Pearson, Susan Douglas, and Richard Hylton. But the actors work hard at investing their characters with an emotional truth, and despite the casting, the movie is otherwise fundamentally sincere and works steadily at uncovering some nasty aspects about the nation's race problems. There are also two performances by real African American actors that jolt the viewer. In the Harlem sequence, Canada Lee plays a police lieutenant and William Greaves is cast as someone who tries to help the son during this troubled time. Like James Edwards, both usher in new depictions of African American men: articulate and intelligent. Lee appeared afterward in a lead role in Cry, the Beloved Country, and Greaves, who had worked as a leading man in such post-War race movies as Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin, became an important documentary filmmaker.

Twentieth Century-Fox's Pinky, directed by Elia Kazan, focused on racism in the deep South. Here was the story of a light-skinned young Black woman called Pinky (played by white actress Jeanne Crain) who, having studied in Boston where she has "passed" for white and also has had a love affair with a white doctor who wants to marry her, returns home to the South to visit her grandmother, played by Ethel Waters. But now as a Black woman in the South, she is subjected to repeated humiliations. At one point, a pair of locals attempts to rape her. Ultimately, Pinky must decide if she will remain in the South or will she deny her racial heritage and return North.

Pinky was a troubled production that was a great challenge for Ethel Waters whose career stretched back to the teens and 1920s when she was a popular slinky blues singer, at first known primarily in the African American community. In time, she introduced such hits as "Am I Blue?" and "Stormy Weather" that reached a large mainstream audience. In the 1930s, she emerged as a Broadway star in such musicals as As Thousands Cheer and At Home Abroad, then as an acclaimed dramatic actress in Mamba's Daughters. In the 1940s, she appeared in such Hollywood films as Cairo and Tales of Manhattan. During the filming of MGM's 1943 Cabin in the Sky--in which she headed an all-star cast that included Eddie "Rochester" Anderson--she felt the director Vincente Minnelli was giving preferential treatment to the younger Lena Horne. Throughout, her complaints and outbursts on the set of Cabin in the Sky contributed to her reputation of being difficult. (Broadway producers and directors were already familiar with Waters' temper.) Afterward Waters said that she went for six years without a movie role.

Twentieth Century-Fox had her test for the film. Originally, Pinky's director was John Ford, but he and Waters clashed. Fox chief of production, Darryl F. Zanuck, was impressed enough with Waters that he took Ford off the picture and replaced him with Elia Kazan. "Ford's Negroes were like Aunt Jemima. Caricatures," said Zanuck. "I thought we were going to get into trouble." Kazan had reservations about the film. He felt that white actress Jeanne Crain was wrong for the part of Pinky; she seemed disconnected from her character. Interestingly, later Kazan felt that disconnection somehow became appropriate for the character, who is torn between two worlds: white and black. Still, the casting of a white actress in this role was the film's greatest dishonesty. The same had been true of Lost Boundaries. Kazan, however, had no major problems with Waters. She appeared to need a director who took her seriously. In the end, she turned in a sensitive characterization, though the conception of the role as written retained the familiar devoted servant traits.

Despite flaws, Pinky touched on the dilemma of an educated, forward-looking young African American woman in battle with a society which appears to have no place for her. The film also presented the prospect of an interracial romance though of course it permitted the audience to accept the relationship because there was no real interracial couple on screen. "The story may leave questions unanswered and in spots be naïve," wrote the reviewer for Variety, "but the mature treatment of a significant theme in a manner that promises broad public acceptance and b.o. success truly moves the American film medium a desirable notch forward in stature and importance."

Pinky became the most commercially successful of the Negro Problem Pictures, with a cast that also included an older Nina Mae McKinney, Ethel Barrymore, and Frederick O'Neal. Pinky garnered three Oscar nominations: one for Jeanne Crain as Best Lead Actress and two Best Supporting Actress nominations, for Ethel Barrymore and, most significantly, Ethel Waters. Though Pinky won no awards in those categories, Waters became the first African American nominated for an Oscar since Hattie McDaniel, who won for Gone with the Wind ten years earlier.

Of the Negro Problem Pictures, perhaps most unflinching was the 1949 MGM release Intruder in the Dust, based on William Faulkner's novel and directed by Clarence Brown. Many were surprised that MGM, the studio that prided itself on presenting a wholesome brand of entertainment, released this hard-hitting film. Also surprising was Brown at the helm. No one could ever question the talent of this director, whose well-made and engrossing films had featured such major stars as Garbo, Crawford, Gable, and the young Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. But in Intruder in the Dust, he stretched his creative muscles and crafted an emotionally involving and racially provocative film that examined racism in the deep South.

When a black man, Lucas Beauchamp, is wrongly accused of having killed a white neighbor, some in the community want to lynch him. The man himself, played magnificently by Juano Hernandez, refuses to be cowed by the community's racism. He's so assured that he doesn't feel compelled to prove his innocence. Ultimately, he makes the community examine itself, similar to Lost Boundaries but in a far deeper manner. Such actors as Claude Jarman Jr., Elizabeth Patterson, Porter Hall, and Will Geer gave fine performances. The movie was shot in Faulkner territory, Oxford, Mississippi. Real townspeople played roles. It was reported that director Brown was drawn to the Faulkner novel because he himself had once witnessed a lynching in Atlanta. Intruder in the Dust falls into a trap of stereotyping in a sequence with a frightened young Black character. Otherwise it's gripping and realistic.

Born in Puerto Rico, Juano Hernandez had begun his career in such race movies as Oscar Micheaux's The Girl from Chicago and Lying Lips. Later he appeared in such films as Young Man with a Horn, Breaking Point, Stars in My Crown, and most startlingly, in Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker, which starred Rod Steiger. He was uniformly praised for his magnificent performance in Intruder in the Dust. But like James Edwards, Hernandez never had the kind of stardom that his talent deserved. Nor did the film have the success it merited. The New York Times named Intruder in the Dust one of the year's best films, "brilliant" and "stirring" and "one of the great cinema dramas of our time." But MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer disliked (hated is a better word!) Intruder in the Dust and did nothing to promote it. The film died at the box-office. But it has been rediscovered in recent years.

All four films had compromises. In a covert manner, they still relied on modified stereotypes and tropes, such as the tragic mulatto and the mammy. Also promoted was an idealized theme of ultimate unity between black and white. Nonetheless, Hollywood had an awakening. Ralph Ellison said, "They are all worth seeing, and if seen, capable of involving us emotionally. That they do is testimony to the deep centers of American emotion that they touch." The studios now also acknowledged that black performers could be cast in serious, dramatic leading roles, and that movies could reflect racial dynamics (even if compromised) in the nation. The 1934 Imitation of Life had suggested there was a race problem in America. The Negro Problem Pictures indicated there was a race problem in the country and led the way to others that would come in the next decade.

by Donald Bogle


To pre-order Donald Bogle's Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers, releasing on May 2nd, or to learn more, visit: www.runningpress.com