Disabling African American men: Liberalism and race message films

Cinema Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 25-48

  Nickel, John ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247275496     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2004.0051     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. Quoted in Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 53
2. Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: New Press, 1997), 267
3. Stephen Burman, The Black Progress Question: Explaining the African American Predicament (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), 28
4. "$20,000,000 Box Office Payoff for H'Wood Negro-Tolerance Pix," Variety, November 30, 1949, 1, 18
5. Liberalism, of course, is a very general term. The race-disability movies represent a particular version, or versions, of liberalism, as each film distinctly shaped its political message and was shaped by historical and social forces. As we shall see, some of the myriad and changing facets of liberalism are depicted in the race-disability films
6. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995), 10-11
7. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 1:xi
8. On liberal optimism, see Burman, The Black Progress Question
9. and Arlene Lazarowitz, Years in Exile: The Liberal Democrats, 1950-1959 (New York: Garland, 1988)
10. Quoted in Carol L. Thompson, "No!" Forum 109 (1948): 353
11. For discussions of racial politics during the Truman administration, see William C. Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970)
12. and John Frederick Martin, Civil Rights and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Democratic Party, 1945-1976 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1979)
13. The word "courage" was used in "Another Champion," Newsweek, May 16, 1949, 86
14. review of Home of the Brave, Variety, May 4, 1949, 11
15. and review of Home of the Brave (no citation given), clippings file, Motion Picture Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C
16. Al Tamarin, press release, Home of the Brave clippings file, Film Studies Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York
17. Scenes were rehearsed in the homes of the white actors, and, during the extremely short, seventeen-day shoot, Kramer and the cast entered a closed-door studio from the rear gate with James Edwards, in the guise of a sleep-in janitor. Cripps, Making Movies Black, 223
18. Baynard Kendrick, Lights Out (New York: William Morrow, 1945), 51
19. Margaret Halsey, Color Blind: Or, How to End Race Discrimination (1946; reprint, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 35
20. My discussion of colorblind liberalism and its limits draws on Burman, The Black Progress Question
21. David Carroll Cochran, The Color of Freedom: Race and Contemporary American Liberalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999)
22. and Walter A. Jackson, "White Liberal Intellectuals, Civil Rights, and Gradualism, 1954-1960," in Brian Ward and Tony Badger, eds., The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 96-114
23. Several reviews noted the connection between Chaplin's film and A Patch of Blue. See Brendan Gill, review of A Patch of Blue, New Yorker, December 25, 1965, 58-59
24. "None So Blind," Newsweek, December 27, 1965, 71
25. and an uncited review, clippings file for A Patch of Blue, Motion Picture Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C
26. Guy Green, Patch of Blue (draft), November 23, 1964, MGM collection, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California
27. For excellent sources on the display of the body, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), who discusses slave narratives
28. and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), who analyzes domestic fiction
29. Tom Cowan and Jack Maguire, Timelines of African-American History: 500 Years of Black Achievement (New York: Roundtable, 1994), 207, 219
30. An anonymous reviewer of this essay observed that the depiction of Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) in Intruder in the Dust might be the exception that proves the rule. Throughout the film, Lucas remains a strong, stubborn, and resilient man, who is shown to be superior to his white enemies and always stands his ground, even against the advice (later proven to be misguided) of the white characters who try to help him
31. Michael Rogin, in his informative discussion of motion picture blackface, also notes Ben's martyrdom and the symbolic function of the swinging exercise bag in Body and Soul. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 218
32. Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 142
33. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1994), 220
34. Joan Barthel, in the New York Times, uses the phrase "lovable neuter." Quoted in William Hoffman, Sidney (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1971), 138
35. On "house Negro" and "Uncle Tom," see Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (San Francisco: Harper, 2000), 118
36. "Showcase nigger" and "million-dollar shoe-shine boy" come from Clifford Mason, "Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?" New York Times, September 10, 1967, sec. 2, 1
37. and Larry Neal, "Beware of the Tar Baby," New York Times, August 3, 1969, D18, respectively
38. Quoted in Hoffman, Sidney, 10
39. Vincent Canby, "'A Patch of Blue' Draws in the South," New York Times, May 4, 1966, 42
40. Martin F. Norden. "Resexualization of the Disabled War Hero in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo," Journal of Popular Film and Television 23 (1995): 51
41. The To Kill a Mockingbird quote is from Philip T. Hartung, "The Screen: The Child Is the Father of the Man," The Commonweal, February 22, 1963, 572
42. For the Home of the Brave review, see Bosley Crowther, review of Home of the Brave, New York Times, May 13, 1949
43. The Bright Victory review (no citation given) was found in the Film Studies Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Body and Soul reviews are, in order, "The New Pictures," Time, October 20, 1947, 107
44. Bosley Crowther, review of Body and Soul, New York Times, November 10, 1947
45. and review of Body and Soul, Theatre Arts, October 1947, 52-54
46. Kramer, A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, 40
47. "How Whites Feel about Negroes: A Painful American Dilemma," Newsweek, October 21, 1963, 44
48. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 928
49. See Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 226
50. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Moynihan Report," in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 76
51. Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 45
52. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Commencement Address at Howard University: 'To Fulfill These Rights,'" in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the Presidents, book 2 (Washington: GPO, 1966), 635
53. Telephone conversation, Roemer and Maura Spiegal, fall 2000. My thanks to Maura Spiegal for sharing her interview
54. Moynihan, "The Moynihan Report," 80
55. For another analysis of Home of the Brave and pathology, one with a Fanonian psychoanalytic perspective, see Gwen Bergner, "Politics and Pathologies: On the Subject of Race in Psychoanalysis," in Anthony C. Alessandrini, ed., Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999), 219-34
56. Quoted in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal, 300
57. My comments on Atticus Finch echo a Foucauldian discussion of disciplinary power by D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 17
58. Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird; Tender Mercies; and The Trip to the Bountiful: Three Screenplays (New York: Grove, 1989), 64
59. My argument here is influenced by Laura Mulvey's often-cited analysis of the male gaze in classical Hollywood cinema. In a feminist psychoanalytic context, Mulvey argues that the gaze, through voyeurism and scopophilia, reconstitutes the patriarchal unconscious. Somewhat similarly, power relations are reinscribed through the gaze in the race-disability movies, although along racial lines. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Leo Brandy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833-44
60. For a helpful analysis of the slippery nature of empathy, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, esp. chap. 1. Hartman takes up the subject of empathy in examining the letters of white abolitionist John Rankin, who imagined himself enslaved
61. Roy Newquist, A Special Kind of Magic (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), 26
62. Martin F. Norden notes the movie's conflation of -isms. See Norden, "'Coward, Take My Coward's Hand': Racism, Ableism, and the Veteran Problem in Home of the Brave and Bright Victory," in Daniel Barnardi, ed., Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 339-56
63. Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy also observe that "the black's equality is thus defined in terms of the crippled white." Roffman and Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 246
64. Lorraine Hansberry, "The Case of the Invisible Force: Images of the Negro in Hollywood Films," in David Platt, ed., Celluloid Power: Social Film Criticism From "The Birth of a Nation" to "Judgment at Nuremberg" (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 457-66
65. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: An Essay (New York: Laurel, 1976), 82
66. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 140
67. Gary Orfield, "Race and the Liberal Agenda: The Loss of the Integrationist Dream, 1965-1974," in Margaret Weir et al., eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 313
68. Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York: New American Library, 1964)
69. and William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage, 1971), 9
70. Cochran, Color of Freedom, 10
71. and Orfield, "Race." All of these writings detail the fragmentation of the consensus among liberals on race
72. Men of Honor is based on the true story of Master Chief Boatswain's mate Carl Brashear, but the character of Billy Sunday is fictionalized. See The Reminiscences of Master Chief Boatswain's Mate Carl M. Brashear, U.S. Navy (Retired), interviewed by Paul Stillwell (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute, 1998)