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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 5, 30 January 1950, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In rapid succession Hollywood has produced four Grade A movies about Negroes. Whether it will continue to use the running social sore of the Negro question as material for its studios remains to be seen. These four pictures – Home of the Brave, Host Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust – have been seen and will be seen by tens of millions of people in this country’s movie houses, and presumably also by people abroad.
Labor Action has had excellent review and comment on some of these films. We will in this article attempt an evaluation of the job Hollywood has done in all four and of the possible impact of these films on audiences.
Home of the Brave, the first of these films, tells the plausible and dramatic story of a young Negro soldier who, overcome by a sense of guilt at the capture and brutal death of his white buddy, succumbs to a psychomatic lameness. No less gripping than the incidents in the South Pacific jungle are the scenes between the army doctor and his patient, in which the former tries to treat the latter by rational methods.
The final cure, however, comes only with a sort of shock treatment when the doctor shouts “Walk! You yellow-bellied n........r!” This foul name is the crux of the whole situation. It is these words – “You yellow-bellied n..........!” – used by the white buddy and changed to “nitwit,’’ too late to undo the damage, which unloosed the psychosomatic stream in the Negro. His sense of guilt stemmed from what he thought was his revengeful satisfaction at his buddy’s capture.
One wonders why the guilt feeling of this Negro soldier should become the central theme of practically the first movie involving the Negro question. No doors of understanding of the social issue are opened to us by this theme, for the simple reason that it is too singular and individual a story.
It is a different kind of guilt feeling on the part of Negroes that often enters into the complexities of the social question, namely, that manifested by those Negroes who feel there are too many “bad” Negroes and that if only more were “good,” white people would treat them better. This is a combination of religious self-flagellation and Uncle Tom orientation, and it could indeed be the central theme for a powerfully revealing movie.
Again, since Negroes are more sinned against than sinning, the whites more naturally fall heir to a guilt feeling. One can imagine, almost in the identical war context of Home of the Brave, a twist of events resulting in guilt feeling on the part of one of the white soldiers of a more normal kind, rooted in the human being’s repudiation of his own anti-human conduct.
The above criticism does not imply that Home of the Brave may not have positive value. People learn in devious ways. The easy comradeship between the Negro and his white buddy radiates a warmth good for people to feel, and the latters’ “You yellow-bellied ni........” may produce real consternation in audiences. (Those who know something about the background of racism know how deep are its roots.)
Perhaps the most impressive propaganda against racism, is made indirectly. The ex-businessman in the group is the most outspoken Negro hater. The antagonism aroused against this low character – who is a loud-mouth, has no sensitivity, and is in general a louse – can extend itself to opposition to racism as well.
More of this kind of emotional impression is made by the crippled white soldier who has a quiet, matter-of-fact humanism. When he goes off with the Negro, perhaps to open a business with him, and the Negro quotes from a poem, “Coward, take a coward’s hand,” this demonstration of friendship can be stirring.
Some critics have said that this film bears out the false contention of anti-Negroes that Negroes would not stand up in combat. This did not occur to me, although I can see how some might react in this way. Actually the film shows the Negro to be the only real volunteer in the group, to be as brave and as competent as any. His situation is presented as rising not from lack of stamina in combat – as the phrase goes – but from deep hurt and confusion as a member of a Jim-Crowed race. His impassioned “Nigger, nigger, nigger" as he beat the ground in desperation evidences this point.
In summary, while the subject matter of Home of the Brave may be justly criticized, the impact on an average, well-meaning but somewhat anti-Negro audience might well be for the good in the sense of arousing some emotional approval for friendship between black and white.
While Home of the Brave presents a purely personal crisis in the life of one Negro soldier, Lost Boundaries has a wider scope. Dr. Carter, the white Negro of Lost Boundaries, sets up as a white doctor in a New England town, keeping the family’s race origin even from his children. Economic forces are shown to be the battering ram finally beating down his resistance to crossing the color line.
For Dr. Carter the opportunities were even more limited than for the man of whose race there is no doubt. For those hospitals that employ Negro doctors want them to look like Negroes, and those that bar them bar also Negroes who look like whites.
The white Negro, torn between loyalty to his suffering race and the lure of less suffering for himself if he crosses the color line, is indeed caught in the maelstrom of racism as are all Negroes. Though sympathy goes out to him, we must be aware that only if he himself treats his plight as part of the whole race question does it take on social importance. And as Dr. Carter does not do this, the film consequently deals with only a specialized and peripheral aspect of the whole Negro situation.
Since Lost Boundaries is told as a true story, criticism must be directed first against Dr. Carter. It is his character that reduces his story to something of little weight in the present situation. His whole concern was with himself and his family, in the narrow materialistic sense, aiming to be accepted as a good doctor and a good member of this New England community – on its side of the color line. The problems of his race were neatly swept from his door as was even the closer personal problem of what might happen to his children if they discovered their origin.
Dr. Carter is an escapist who tried to salve his Negro conscience by secretly giving some time to a Negro clinic. It comes almost as a deserved nemesis when the banished race question reappears and upsets his apple cart after the U.S. navy rejects him on the ground of race.
Hollywood chose this story presumably as an object lesson in what is called race tolerance. The New England town, under the guidance of its pastor, does not oust its white Negro doctor when his secret is discovered. Admittedly this community exercised “race tolerance’’ and suppressed its prejudices in order to keep its doctor. But what is the impact on an average, well-meaning, somewhat prejudiced audience viewing this film?
The Negro here is not just any Negro. He is a white Negro. He is an educated professional man. There is no competition for his job as doctor. He has not come to plague the townspeople with the Negro question and with social solutions. All he wants is to be allowed to remain quietly at his job. He is a nice, respectable white Negro, of whom the superior whites can find it in their hearts to be tolerant.
Hollywood may retort that this is a true story and why not tell it. Why not? Well, because it tends to draw distinctions between nice, respectable Negroes and others, between white Negroes and black Negroes. What of the uneducated Negro worker who competes with white workers for jobs, whose clothes are shabby, who lives in a slum, whose skin is black?
The lessons to be taught are those of social equality, not of tolerance for “nice” Negroes – nor of “nice Jews” who are “our friends.” Did Hollywod make an honest bad choice – or did it know the score?
Pinky is another film about race loyalty, about crossing the color line. The heroine, Pinky, is a white Negress whose very black and very hard-working grandmother sends her North to become a nurse, so that she can help her own people.
Up North Pinky falls in love with a white doctor. It is only when he proposes marriage – which she fears because of her race origin – that she returns home. So horrible is the treatment she is subjected to as a Negress in the South, that she determines to go back North. Neither the plea of her grandmother nor the appeal of the local Negro doctor to stay has any effect on Pinky. The illness of the white lady for whom her grandmother works does, however, finally influence Pinky.
What follows is a truly Hollywood-ish, connived, and unrealistic denouement. The white lady, whom Pinky nurses, dies and leaves her big house and grounds to Pinky, expressing the confidence that she will know what to do with it. Pinky, of course, knows that she must stay in the South and establish a health center on the property left to her by the grand white lady.
Not only does this fancy ending stretch credulity to its breaking point, not only is it an elaborate evasion of the problem of race loyalty posed, but it is an insult to the Negroes actually faced with that problem. Few indeed are the members of her race handed a ready-made haven as Pinky is.
Therefore, in its main theme, the film is a dismal failure.
Furthermore, the whole tenor and tone of the picture is on the unprogressive side. The Uncle Tom philosophy pervades it. The grandmother is content to wash clothes for the white lady who befriends her. The white lady creates the best possible world by befriending the Negroes.
Even in the court action entered by Pinky to retain the property left her in the white lady’s will, contested by the relatives of the deceased, the theme of Negro struggle is merely secondary. Even though the decision of the judge asserts the right of Negroes to inherit property, Pinky’s motivation in the affair is not to fight for her rights as a Negro but to carry out the wishes of the grand white lady.
As in Lost Boundaries, sympathy is aroused not for all Negroes but for Pinky, the white Negress, the educated Negress who looks and acts like the whites. Except for the grandmother and the Negro doctor who puts in only a momentary appearance, the other Negroes in the film are disreputable characters. There is a Negro of shady pursuits and cowardly instincts. There is his mistress, an uncouth woman; the indignities against her at the hands of the white police do not arose the audience as they do when administered against Pinky.
If Hollywood intended a positive contribution by this film, then there is a wide gap between the intention and the outcome.
The one film that merits wholehearted approval is the last to come out, Intruder in the Dust. Whether it follows the original story or not, the movie as a separate creation is authentic and serious in its execution of the central idea, namely, the atrociousness of lynch law.
Through the efforts of a boy, a middle-aged woman and a reluctant lawyer, all white, the real murderer is found while an innocent Negro is held in jail for the crime. The lynch mob gathers outside the jail, its impatience mounting, as this middle-aged woman, by sheer guts, hold’s off the leaders from entering the jail to get their prey.
It later develops that the ring leader is the murderer. This nuance is effective in impressing not only the injustice of lynch law but also its possible motivations.
Another cogent point in the story told is that the actual murderer is the brother of the murdered man. The white fratricide is, of course, to be given a fair trial, as indeed he should be given. However, but for the will of a boy and a middle-aged woman, the innocent Negro would have been accused, tried and executed by the Negro-hating mob. The contrast stands out in bold relief.
Indirectly some light is also thrown on the psychological basis of white supremacy. The Negro accused of the murder is one universally disliked by the whites because he is what Southerners call “an uppity nigger.” No cringing fellow is he. He walks with his head high. He asks for a receipt when he pays money. He carries a gold toothpick as a symbol that he is as good as any white who carries one. He is, in short, a living negation of the psychological reassurance nurtured by frustrated whites that Negroes are lower creatures than they are.
Another factor that makes Intruder in the Dust so interesting is the relationship between the Negro and the white boy. This relationship intrigues one for an adequate explanation. The two had met when the boy got himself dunked in the river, needed dry clothes, warmth and food, all of which he received in the cabin of the Negro. What somehow impressed the boy was the refusal of the Negro to take money for his trouble; implicitly insisting that he was extending hospitality in his own home – to a white boy. The boy’s attachment to the Negro is shy, uncertain and yet unshakeable, and somehow the Negro understands this without spoken words.
Appraising all four movies, we can thank Hollywood for only one thoroughly good one. Intruder in the Dust offers no remedy for lynch law beyond the efforts of people of good will, which are not to be pooh-poohed, since such efforts can stretch in many directions. Aside from that, one may hope that since the film places lynch law in such a relentlessly revealing light, audiences may themselves conclude that something more must be done than reliance on the accident of a boy, a middle-aged woman and a reluctant lawyer to save an innocent Negro’s life.
If Hollywood continues its venture into the Negro question, it is suggested that it come closer to the heart of the question than it has done in three out of the four movies thus far produced.
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Last updated: 23 February 2023