When a dramatic story centered on light-skinned mixed-race characters, usually female, attempting to “pass,” these roles were generally given to white performers, which is how Jeanne Crain became Ethel Waters’ granddaughter in Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949). Often they went uncredited in the opening titles far too often, their numbers were placed so as to be easily snipped out for the convenience of Southern theater chains that didn’t wish to provoke the local population by showing too many examples of what they termed “uppity” African-Americans, a species that Hollywood seemed to them to breed. And if the plot called for them to engage in dialogue, they too were most often presented as exaggerated stereotypes. The flamboyant, who most often appeared in musicals, were allowed one number, or at most, two, to liven up the proceedings with their beauty, like Lena Horne, or their brilliant dancing, like Bill Robinson or the Nicholas Brothers. The subservient were sometimes presented as serious people simply doing their jobs, usually with affectionate loyalty to their employers, but far more often as wise fools with eccentric voices and clownish names like Stepin Fetchit or Molasses and January. Black people who appeared in American movies fell into two categories: the subservient and the flamboyant.
#Intruder in the dust movie movie#
Remarkable as this was for MGM, it was still more remarkable for 1948, when racism was not yet a concept commonly discussed on America’s movie screens. And MGM bought it for him, and let him do it his way. He wanted to film Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. He knew and loved the South, and he knew it well enough to love it without any false sentiment or illusion. A proud graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (where a theater today still bears his name), he had studied engineering and run a car dealership in Alabama before his fascination with machinery shifted from automobiles to movie cameras, prompting his migration northward and then westward. Clarence Brown had been raised and educated in Tennessee.
In 1948, William Faulkner had just taken the step, unusual for a Southern writer, of publishing a novel in which the central figure was a sympathetic but hard-mouthed Black man falsely accused of murder. Was there anything special he wanted to do?
And 1949 would be the studio’s silver anniversary. Yes, if MGM owed anybody, it owed Clarence Brown. And after a quarter-century of reliable product, he was edging toward retirement age. His sensibility might have been less than inspired, but his workmanship was always dependable he had turned out movies in a great variety of genres. In addition, he had shown a sensitivity in dealing with kids, having directed two notable pictures with Mickey Rooney ( Ah, Wilderness!, 1935 The Human Comedy, 1943) and the highly popular The Yearling (1946). He had ranked among the select few directors favored by Garbo, with whom he worked on seven pictures, and had shown the range of female temperaments he could handle skillfully by directing Joan Crawford-a personality very unlike Garbo-in no fewer than six. He had been working for the company nearly from its inception, and had been one of those who helped shape its style. And the higher-ups may have felt, understandably, that the director Clarence Brown was someone to whom MGM owed more than a few favors. MGM was a big operation, and sometimes a surprising little film could slip through the cracks, particularly if the higher-ups owed somebody a favor. Mayer’s own mother’s recipe, on the menu every day.Īnd yet, and yet. And the studio commissary proved it by having chicken soup, prepared from Mr. If you thought America had social problems, you could haul your disloyal ass over to Warner Brothers. Social problems? At MGM, this country had no social problems. It was the studio where Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy had warbled at each other, where Mickey Rooney had suffered through years of adolescent traumas as Andy Hardy, where stars such as Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer had endured a succession of elegantly gowned marital crises. MGM was the studio of Gable, of Garbo (until she walked away), and of Judy Garland (until she collapsed as a result of their overworking her). MGM? That meant high glamour, high thrills, high-cost lavish productions, and, most especially, in the post–World War II period, high-spirited, star-laden musicals. In the late studio era, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was not the corporation from which you expected small-scale, serious movies that dealt realistically with explosive social themes.