Presentation 3: Chapters 4

1
Presentation 3 Chapters 4 5

• Abram Piper
• Dani Johnson
• Denae Johnson
• Tim Nelson

2
Chapter 4 The Interlude Black-Market Cinema

• Race Movies
• After the release of Birth of a Nation in 1915
  there was a public outcry in regards to the
  racist content of the film.
  
• This became a time in American films where the
  African-American began to be portrayed in a more
  positive view than in previous films, but still
  was not a significant improvement.

3
Independent Films

• The introduction of independent films allowed
  producers to take interest and progress into the
  market that existed in black films entertainment.
  
• Were also called race films
• These films offered employment for a great number
  of actors including Paul Robeson, Lena Horne,
  Eddie Anderson and Spencer Adams

4
William Foster

• Pioneered the black film industry
• A veteran in show business
• Press agent for black comedy shows

5
Lincoln's Dream

• Was retitled Birth of a Race
• It was considered a counterattack to Birth of a
  Nation that hit the country by storm

6
Lincoln's Dream

• was quoted as the greatest and most daring of
  photoplays...the story of sin...a master picture
  conceived in the spirit of truth of and dedicated
  to all of the races of the world

7
Lincoln Motion Picture Company

• Staff Lincoln Motion Picture Company, 1916

• 1916, based in Nebraska
• Found famous black actor Noble P. Johnson
• Its entire output was aimed directly at African
  American viewers
  

8
The Reol Motion Picture Corporation

• Emerged post WWI
• Call of His People (early film)
• The Man Who Would Be White by Aubrey Browser
  theme the Negro light enough to pass for
  white.
  

9
Oscar Micheaux

• The one filmmaker who survived the flu epidemic,
  the competition from the Hollywood studios, and
  even the financial pinch of the Depression was
  Oscar Micheaux.
• Worked on The Exile, one of the first all-talking
  motion picture made by a black motion picture
  company.

10
Oscar Micheaux (Contd)

• For 30 years Micheaux was pronounced the
  Greatest Negro photoplay of all time.
  
• Micheaux casted his actors based on Hollywood's
  classic white characters. He personalized them
  and made them famous through their black
  versions.

11
Oscar Micheaux (Contd)

• Micheaux's promotional tactics and his cutthroat
  manner made him the most successful movie maker
  of that time period.
  
• His last movie was The Betrayal, 1948, it opened
  at a white theater in New York and the critics
  were all over, mostly for good reviews. After
  all was said and done the movie was considered a
  failure in the box office
• In 1951 Micheaux died in Charlotte, North
  Carolina into obscurity.

12
Lorenzo Tucker

• Black Valentino he was then dubbed the colored
  William Powell.
  
• Micheaux used to boast about how Tucker could
  play any role he put him in. He would also make
  it clear that he would put him in his next
  films.

13
Spencer Williams

• After Micheaux's death, Williams took the
  reigns.
  
• All of Williams' films spread into audiences over
  the country
  
• Directed
• The Blood of Jesus
• Go Down Death
• Juke Joint

14
Negro Problem Pictures

• took over racial themes in the late 1940s
• Independents were out of business against
  Hollywood's big hits.
  
• Independent black filmmakers have earned their
  respect for keeping the faith as long as it was
  reasonably possible and fashionable.

15
Chapter 5

• The 1940s the Entertainers, the New Negroes,
  and the Problem People

16
The Entertainers

• Filmmakers began to establish special scenes for
  the negro entertainer outside of the movies
  story line. This worked out for filmmakers
  because it pleased the black community and if the
  movie was being shown to communities that had a
  bias against blacks, the scene could be removed
  without disrupting the film.

17
Hazel Scott Miss Proper Middle-Class Lady

• Born in 1920 in Port of Spain,Trinidad to an
  academic father and a mother who was a musician
  and an aristocrat.
  
• Scott was a brilliant child. She was reading by
  three, singing with perfect pitch by three and a
  half , playing the piano by four and had mastered
  the classics by five.

18
Hazel Scott Miss Proper Middle-Class Lady

• Hazel Scott was known for her nightclub
  performances. By age twenty she debut at a club
  in Greenwish Village. In 1943 she was filmed
  playing the piano to be put in a columbia
  pictures film called Something to Shout about.
• She was very confident and was not afraid to
  stand up for what she believed in. She would not
  appear before segregated audiences and would not
  be typecasted into the role of a whore or maid.

19
Hazel Scott Miss Proper Middle-Class Lady

• In the mid-1940s her movie career came to an end,
  when she argued with a Columbia Pictures
  executive over stereotypical costumes.
  
• She died in 1981

20
Other Hazel Scott Films

• I Dood it (1943),
• The Heats On (1943),
• Broadway Rhythm (1944),
• and Rhapsody in Blue (1945).

21
Lena Horne Black Beauty in Residence

• Born in 1917 in Brooklyn, New York
• At age sixteen, she had performed at the Cotton
  Club, Lew Leslies Blackbirds of 1939, and
  appeared at Café Society Downtown.
  
• Thought to be the 1940s greatest Negro
  attraction.
  
• NAACP Secretary Walter White felt that she could
  change the way Negroes were represented in
  American movies.

22
Lena Horne Black Beauty in Residence

• First Hollywood film Panama Hattie (1942). She
  sang, danced then exited. First Big all-star
  musical Thousands Cheer (1943)
  
• Filmmakers tried to typecast Horne into the
  sex-object syndrome, but she was too much of a
  lady to be a believable whore.
  

23
Lena Horne Black Beauty in Residence

• By the end of the 1940s Lena Hornes career went
  downhill. Her relationship with a white musician,
  Lennie Hayton, her friendship with Paul Robeson,
  and her ties with the Council for African
  Affairs, upset entertainment conservatives
  including MGM.
• She is still viewed as the black leading lady of
  the war era, today.
  

24
Other Lena Horne Films

• I Dood It,
• Swing Fever
• Cabin in the Sky (1943)
• Broadway Rhythm of 1944,
• Two Girls and a Sailor (1944)
• Ziegfeld Follies (1944)
• Till the Clouds Roll by (1946)
• Words and Music (1948)
• Duchess of Idaho (1948)

25
Cabin in the Sky

• One of the 1940s big all-black movies
• MGM was nervous about putting out an all-Negro
  film because of the financial risks, but allowed
  Arthur Freed to produce it.

26
Cabin in the Sky

• Lead Cast Ethel Waters-the good wife, Petunia,
  Eddie Anderson-Little Joe Jackson, Lena Horne-
  temptress Georgia Brown, Rex Ingram-Lucifer, and
  Jr. Vincente Minnelli directed.
• Although the film was charming, it still put
  Negroes in the same storyline as earlier films
  Good Colored Boy... Leaves... Christian Good
  Woman to take up with Bad Black Girl.
• Sadly, the stereotype that films perpetuated was
  embedded in the minds of most Americans, so if
  the movie had been made realistically, people
  would have thought it unbelievable.

27
Stormy Weather (1943)

• It was a review of Negro entertainment from
  1918-1943 seen through the eyes of Bill
  Robinson.
  
• Robinson and Horne fall in love, beak up, and
  then fall back in love again in an extravagant
  grand finale .
  
• The Movie represented wartime escapist
  entertainment at its peak

28
Bits and pieces of Black Action

• The entertainment syndrome endured a bit during
  the 1940s, eventually wearing thin and dying out.
  Though from this came big talents and stars.
  

29
Nicholas Brothers

• Harold and Fayard
• Movies
• Pie Pie Blackbird -1933
• Down Argentine Way 1940
• Sun Valley Serenade -1941
• The Great American Broadcast 1941
• Orchestra Wives 1948
• Caroline Blues -1944
• The Pirate 1948

30
Nicholas Brothers

• Captivated audiences with their stylized
  acrobatics and proved themselves the greatest
  dance team ever to work in American movies.

31
Katherine Dunham Company

• The leader was a attractive leader with a
  anthropologist and lecturer Ph.D.
  
• Movies
• Star-Spangled Rhythm -1942
• Casbah -1948
• Mambo-1955

32
Katherine Dunham Company

• Katherine Dunham lived with the people in Jamaica
  and she analyzed their dance and rhythms to later
  incorporate them into her movements.

33
Hall Johnson Choir

• Considered by many the greatest choral company
• Movies
• The Green Pastures
• Lost Horizon 1937
• Way Down South 1939
• Swanee River -1940
• Lady for a Night
• Tales of Manhattan -1941

34
Individual Performers

• Duke Ellington
• Reville with Beverly 1943
• Dorothy Dandridge
• The Hit Parade of 1943
• Cab Calloway
• Louis Armstrong
• Lester Young
• Ben Carter
• Avon Long
• Pearl Bailey
• Billi Holiday

35
Song of the South1946

• It was a live-action spectacle with clever
  animated sequences interspersed throughout.
  
• Theme Pastorl Old South (Familiar Terrain)
• It took place on an Atlanta Plantation, servents
  toiled joyously
  
• Hattie Mcdaniel was the Mammy, James Baskette
  was dear old Uncle Remus he sings while animated
  birds and butterflies whiz past. Everythings
  just zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

36
Song of the South1946

• In 1946 it was seen as a corruptive piece of Old
  South propaganda put together to make money.
  
• Animated Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were a
  delight, an example of clever animation. But
  their escapades were a showcase of the Disney
  speciality rather then any comment on the old
  Negro characters philosophical outlook.
• The Manhattan Council of the National Negro
  Congress called on people of Harlem to run the
  picture out of the area, then out of New York
  State.

37
Song of the South1946

• The NAACP joined the criticism. They said it gave
  an impression of a idyllic master-slave
  relationship which is a distortion of the fact.
  
• This film signaled the demise of the Negro as
  fanciful entertainer or comic servant. Neither
  the songs nor the savants had worked. Afterwards,
  Hollywood ignored them both.

38
The New Negroes An Interim

• Between the entertainers and the problem people,
  there was an interim period in American motion
  pictures, during which the New Negroes came into
  being.
• The Depression had unearthed social ills and
  injustices, threatened by fascism in Europe. Many
  people experienced a liberal urge to right old
  wrongs, often they were corrected in a
  patronizing or condescending manner. But change
  did come about

39
The New Negroes An Interim

• FDR in 1941issued Executive Order 8802 this
  forbade racial and religious discrimination in
  war industries. The first Army Air Corps squad
  for Negro cadets started.
• The New opportunities benefited the entertainers
  while paving the way for the emergence of
  sympathetic Negro character roles in feature
  films.
• Sympathetic Negro characters appeared before
  1940s but they were very few

40
New Negro Films

• Leigh Whipper
• Of Mice and Men -1940. Played Crooks, the
  crippled battered old man who aids the derelict
  heroes
  
• Ox-Bow Incident 1943. Played a preacher
  Sparks, Film dealt with three men wrongly accused
  of a crime and lynched for it by an unruly mob.
  

41
New Negro Films

• Ernest Anderson
• In This Our Life 1942. Anderson portrayed an
  intelligent young law student arrest on a
  hit-and-run charge. He maintains his dignity
  despite badgering, until Bette Davis admits her
  guilt. This lastis the one exceptional compont
  of the filmthis brief but frank allusion to
  racial discrimination, and it is presented in a
  realistic manner uncommon to Hollywood by the
  depiction of the Negro as an educated and
  comprehending characterErnest Anderson is a
  remarkably good as the Negro boy.
• Deep Is the Well -1951
• 3 for Bedroom C -1952

42
New Negro Films

• The films The Negro Soldier 1944 and the Negro
  Sailor -1945 both government filmed, were to
  praise the wonderful work the nations Colored
  boys were doing for the war effort.
• In Hitchcocks Lifeboat -1944 a man is called
  Charcoal until it is revealed he saved a white
  women and child from drowning then he is Joe

43
New Negro Films

• Canada Lee. He remains one of those strange
  cinematic character presences who brought quite
  strength and sensitivity to all his roles
  
• Lifeboat -1944
• Body and Sould -1947
• Lost Boundaries -1949
• Cry, the Beloved Country -1952
• Most popular New Negro was a shy little piano man
  who sung and played As Times Goes By in
  Casablana -1942

44
Huckfinn Fixation

• A good white man opposes the corruption and
  pretenses of a dominate white culture. He becomes
  an outcast. The other man is a trusting black who
  never competes with the white man and who serves
  as a reliable ego padder.

45
Huckfinn Fixation

• Casablanca -1942
• Foxes of Harrow -1947
• Moonrise -1948
• The Member of the Wedding -1952
• Edge of the City -1957
• Something of Value -1957
• In the Heat of the Night -1969
• Alices Restaurant -1969

46
The Problem People

• After the war, people were ready for more.
  Crossfire and Gentlemans Agreement each focused
  on anti-Semitism in America and discrimination.
  It condemned them both.

47
The Problem People

• The Negro films had their color stamped indelibly
  upon them, they suffered, struggled, bled yet
  endured.
  
• Home of the Brave -1949
• Launched the cycle of problem pictures
• It described the emotions of Private Peter Moss.
  As he undergoes examination by a sympathetic
  medic, he reveals his tale of racial incidents.
  
• In the end the war is over and the easygoing
  white soldier offers him a partnership in a bar
  he hopes to open. Moss accepts.
  
• It was seen as Ridded and false, Mingos
  gesture is Noble yet it is only believeable in
  a Hollywood sense.

48
Lost Boundaries Tragic Mulatto

• Written by Louis de Rouchemont
• Directed by Alfred L. Werker
• Based on a true story of a New England Negro
  family passing for white for 20 years
  

49
Lost Boundaries Tragic Mulatto

• Starred Mel Ferrer and Beatrice Pearson, who were
  both white.
  
• Movie was racially compromised because it used
  white actors to play mulatto roles.

50
Pinkys Tragic Mulatto and Its Strong Black Woman

• Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck
• Directed by Elia Kazan
• About a light-skinned Black nurse, Pinky, who
  returns to the South after passing in the
  North. Her grandmother commits her to care for
  an old white woman, Miss Em.

51
Pinkys Tragic Mulatto and Its Strong Black Woman

• By working for the old woman, Pinky attains her
  maturity and stature.
  
• When Miss Em dies and leaves Pinky her decaying
  mansion, Pinky converts the house into a black
  nursing clinic
  
• Another movie that casts a white actor (Jeanne
  Crain
  
• However, Ethel Waters portrayal of Granny
  brought humanity to the previously standardized
  Mammy/Aunt Jemima type of character.

52
Intruder in the Dust and the Defiantly Proud Man

• Brought a close to the 1940s cycle of problem
  pictures.
  
• Filmed in Oxford, Mississippi
• About a proud black man, Lucas Beauchamp, who is
  accused of killing a white man. The black man
  befriends a white boy, Chick, whom he previously
  saved from drowning. With the help of Chick and
  an old schoolteacher, Beauchamp isd found
  innocent of the crime.

53
Juano Hernandez

• Born in 1901
• Son of a Puerto-Rican seaman
• Worked in a Cuban Circus and later in America he
  did vaudeville

54
Juano Hernandez

• Acted in stage productions of Show Boat (1927)
  and Blackbirds
  
• Was most successful as a radio actor.

55
Juan Hernandez Films

• Intruder in the Dust (1949)
• Stars in My Crown (1950)
• Young Man With A Horn (1950)
• The Breaking Point (1950)
• Trial (1955)
• Something of Value (1957)
• St. Louis Blues (1958)
• The Pawnbroker (1965)

56

• Thank You