Showboat directed by James Whale. Universal Pictures 1936

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     Based on the novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat was turned into a successful and innovative Broadway show by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in 1927.  In 1928 Paul Robeson was offered the role of Joe in which he performed “Ole Man River,” a song that would become his signature piece as the years went by.  In 1936 director James Whale wanted Paul Robeson, who was then living in England, to perform the role for the film version, and offered Effie and Paul Robeson, despite their reluctance, too much money to turn it down ($40,000).

    With a story that draws attention to the rapid evolution of stage performance in the United States, most of the activity revolves around the emerging obsolescence of a showboat company of actors and singers on a showboat on the Mississippi River from its heyday in the 1880s through the beginning of the 1920s.  There are three loosely interconnected plots.  The first deals with the fate of Julie, who at the beginning of the film is the star of the company until a disgruntled lover reports her to the authorities in Mississippi for having black blood and therefore committing the sin of “miscegenation” with a racially mixed cast.  Her leading man, her white husband dramatically cuts her finger and drinks her blood as the sheriff arrives to close the company down.  But now the husband is black too in the state of Mississippi by virtue of the “one drop” rule of racial identity. 

   The second, larger plot has to do with the romance of the company director’s daughter (played by Irene Dunne), who becomes the next leading lady, and her romance with a handsome young gambler who becomes her leading man.  

     Meanwhile, Robeson figures in the third entirely subsidiary plot around his role as Joe, the lazy husband of the company cook (Hattie McDaniels).  The well known stereotype of the comically trifling black husband and his overbearing and not pretty wife is filled out more tastefully than usual with Robeson’s excellent immaculate rendition of his songs, eliciting from Daniels (who will subsequently win a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in Gone With The Wind) both obvious delight at finally having such a wonderful leading man together with one of the best performances she ever gave on film. 

     Despite the fact that this film is rife with every stereotype in the book of Hollywood, Whale seems to weave it all together with a surprisingly light and deeply engrossing sense of the fun of it all, which figures into a lesser trend plainly visible in some of Hollywood’s output during the 30s that there were some constituencies in Hollywood and on Broadway who were beginning to regard African American culture and black face as fodder for camping it up.  Although there are tangible no breakthroughs from a contemporary Civil Rights (meaning as envisioned by a Walter White or a W.E.B. Du Bois) standpoint, there is already the sense that racial views are not so seriously regarded as they once were.   It is hard to imagine, for instance, how Southern distributors could have excised all signs of race from this film—given that the African American presence was evenly distributed in almost every frame of the film with a bevy of black men and women singing and dancing in the background.   Even Clarence Muse’s small but dignified performance as a janitor near the end of the movie hints of the coming of a new age in black Hollywood.

     The particular disappointments here from a racial standpoint is to remind us that this film is made in what is still  1930s  U.S.A. in which Jim Crow is in full effect: the role of Julie, the mulatto, was not given to the fair skinned, strikingly beautiful, green-eyed Fredi Washington who had already made an impression as the mulatto lead in Imitation of Life (1934), but instead to a white actress (Helen Morgan); and one of Irene Dunne’s largest production numbers is performed entirely in full black face get-up including wigs and large painted white lips.   She is nonetheless a delight to watch in every frame throughout, highlighting the increasingly campy aspects of blackface performances during the period, or in other words the manner in which blackface, if it is done right usually involves a send up of gender stereotypes, as well as race.

The Help: Black Women and Hollywood

Viola Davis, the real star of The Help (2009)

    The novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett, a bestseller and a big favorite with black women’s book clubs this year, is appearing as a film this month with Viola Davis (Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Doubt 2009), featured in the role of Abilene, the child-loving and conscientious black maid and nanny in 1960s Mississippi who risks life and limb to tell her story.  
      

If there were, in fact, lots of other opportunities for black women (of every hue) to strut their wares in the marketplace of American films, I would affirm The Help in its addition to the spectrum, providing a deeper resonance of an experience (working class black women) ordinarily underrepresented.  But black female acting talent rarely gets attention these days.
      
 In contrast to the stunning accomplishments of black men as actors and directors in the last decade, there continue to be only three variations on black female participation in American film. The more common of these is a “colorblind” role in which a black woman is cast in a part that would ordinarily be played by someone who was white, and in a story in which there is no attention to racial issues.  The second kind is the black cast film in which pretty much everybody is black, the most recent prominent examples of this type are the films of Tyler Perry.  The third kind of film (the category to which The Help belongs), which has always been the rarest, is one in which race is an issue or a problem, and the black woman plays a specifically black role, usually not the leading role.  
       
In the history of feature films, black maids have had a long and distinguished history: beginning significantly with Louise Beavers in Imitation of LIfe (nominated for an Academy Award as a Supporting Actress in 1934) and Hattie McDaniels in Gone With The Wind (Oscar Award Winner of Best Supporting Actress in 1939), both of whom had to struggle valiantly on set for every shred of dignity mustered on screen.
        In an era in which black female employment was primarily confined to domestic or acgricultural labor, black actresses were most frequently excluded from the silver screen entirely or forced to play maids regardless of abilities.  Thanks to interventions by NAACP President Walter White with the Hollywood studios, singer and actress Lena Horne never played a maid. Still her major appearances were confined to leads in two black cast films in 1943--Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Billie Holiday even played a maid in New Orleans (1947).
        Viola Davis, who is stunningly gifted, has had an important and promising career thus far on stage and on screen but The Help isn’t likely to bring her any closer to breaking with the other less talked about Hollywood convention of not featuring dark skinned black women in dramatic (romantic) leads. The role this part is positioned to play in Davis’s career is to show her capacity for serious dramatic roles. Would that the role weren’t so entirely sexless as well, but rarely are black maids in the movies allowed to be sexual. There were some notable exceptions in the heydays of the 60s and the 70s (such as Diahann Carroll in Claudine and Abbey Lincoln For Love of Ivy) but The Help isn’t one of them.
     Davis's role in Help (Disney 2011) fails to break with the past in any respect. Featured in a supporting role as a maid in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, Davis is dressed down without makeup, to age her by a decade or so, and in order to disguise her striking good looks and fabulous figure.  Her work as Abilene, and that of the equally stellar Octavia Spenser in the role of her best friend as the rambunctious Minny, pivots around the central part which goes to the white actress Emma Stone as the young and spunky Squeeter (Emma Stone), the recent Ole Miss grad.  Squeeter, who is home for the summer, has the bright idea of secretly interviewing black maids in town about their work conditions under their white mistresses, who also happen to be her best friends.
   The film significantly mutes the dangers inherent to this plan for the black women in Mississippi in 1962, where James Meridith had just broken segregation by registering for law school at Ole Miss, touching off a riot which required the intervention of President John Kennedy and  U.S. Marshalls, and in which two people were killed.
    At the very point at which the story begins, the cooperation of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizen’s Council are making life in Jackson frequently harrowing for black people.  Hundreds of Freedom Riders, arrested in Jackson in 1961 for the temerity of integrating the waiting rooms in the bus terminal, were sentenced to hard time at the notorious Parchman Penitentiary.
     While events in The Help revolve around the sometimes humorous, sometimes ghastly interactions between the white women and their maids, the fatal shooting of NAACP Field Coordinator Medgar Evers on his front porch by the infamous Byron De La Beckwith (finally convicted in 1994) takes place off camera and in the distant background of the film.
    For white women in Mississippi in the 1960s it could be as dangerous to be perceived as sympathetic to blacks as it was for blacks to be perceived as hostile to whites.  Legal segregation was still in effect and crossing the boundaries could and did cost many people their lives.  Nonetheless by the early 60s, Mississippi was the scene of a major Civil Rights Movement initiative spearheaded by Bob Moses and SNCC that would culminate in the Freedom Summer of 1964.                
    Kathryn Stockett's fictional work casts this interaction between black maids and Skeeter as a minor yet significant chapter in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet no such chapter exists in the annals of the Movement, now extensively documented. Stockett, who is herself only 40 years old, may be reflecting unintentionally on more recent working conditions for domestic help in Jackson, Mississippi.  
    Stockett has a brother who has for many years employed a nanny for his children named Abilene, currently 60 years old, who complains that the character Stockett created is based on her (same name and they both have a gold tooth), causing her great personal discomfort and embarrassment.  Fully supported by her employers, she is suing the author for damages in the amount of $75,000, an seemingly intentionally symbolic amount given that  the book has already sold nearly half a million copies and is sure to sell even more upon the release of the film in August.   I can well imagine that it might be uncomfortable for Abilene Clark to consider the prospect of thousands of readers confusing her life as a 60 year old woman (I, myself, am 59) in 2010 as a cipher for that of the character Abilene, a total victim of the Jim Crow South half a century ago.  

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