Once again, I didn’t leave myself enough time to produce the OP this subject deserves. Then of course I completely spaced on it while I was away from my computer for a few days. Apologies for the tardiness and meagerness of this OP.
If I had a great deal of time and energy on my hands, I’d write a long, complex OP–an essay even–on this movie, because it’s almost impossible to approach it simply. It exists in so many different aspects and levels.
[ol]
[li]** Literary:** Faust, the Bible, and I get a feeling there are echoes of American Slave mythology, unless that’s just the skill of all the artists involved in making it seem so endemic to the setting.[/li][li]Racial: The fictional setting of the movie, in an idealized all-black universe; the setting of the movie’s production–including the history of Black Hollywood and industry devoted to making all-black productions for black-owned theaters (look into Oscar Micheaux’s career for a general overview) and the minstrel-tainted though hugely successful careers of some of the film’s stars, like “Rochester” Anderson, Stepin Fetchit, Rex Ingram, Ethel Waters (the only actor ever to get the best of John Ford)–the racial ripples (both cultural and political) spread far and wide, and would fuel a much larger work of scholarship than I’m ever likely to attempt.[/li][li]Aesthetic:* Cabin the Sky *was the first film by one of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of Hollywood, Vincente Minnelli. Just comparing it to his later work Meet Me in St. Louis, which most of us watched earlier, is an interesting angle that would provide more than enough to talk about.[/li][/ol]
. . . when I started enumerating these notes, I feel like I had four distinct angles to approach this movie from; I’m at a loss as to what the fourth might have been. Unless I had initially separated the movie’s place in Hollywood history and in Racial history as two distinct approaches.
Anyway, hopefully this will suffice to get the discussion started.
Well, we can probably assume that SDMB=Straight Dope Message Board, so…
Signs of the Straight Dope Message Board Memory Glitch?
Sins of the Straight Dope Message Board Messy Gamers?
Sloppy Order To Straight Dope Message Board Member Genomes?
Uh . . . since no one expected it of you, your nonparticipation in a thread with “Cabin in the Sky” in the title, instead of your making the thread all about you, would be more readily appreciated than a solipsistic, sarcastic “apology.”
It was jarringly minstrelish by modern standards, but that was the only kind of role black actors could get in films intended to reach white audiences too. Some very nice songs too, and damn, Lena Horne was hawt! No wonder Ethel Waters was jealous of her.
The social significance of a white studio making an all-black movie far outweighs any artistic merit the lightweight story had, though.
Yes, although it wasn’t the first time, or even the last. King Vidor’s *Hallelujah! *is a much stronger film, IMO, with more naturalistic portrayal’s; Vidor seemed to have a little more respect for his actors as people, more than just as characters.
Not sure what you mean by this – that the movie should have been made by a black studio? There weren’t any.
I did watch it, but it was about two weeks ago and I’ve been sick, so I don’t have much edifying to add. The thing I noted was that most of the songs were written by white songwriters: Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, and Vernon Duke and whoever.
Is “Taking a Chance on Love” original to this movie? What a great song it is, and what a great performance. (Also, does anyone know if the song “Shine” is the source of the racial slur of “shine” for a person of African-American descent? 'Cause it’s a great song – Django Rheinhart and Stephane Grappelli do a wonderful version.)
As with Stormy Weather, it seems like much of the significance is in having the record of these black performers who are otherwise quite lost to history.
lissener – what’s the story with Minnelli getting his start with this? That seems like an unusual career path in Hollywood. (Of course, it’s only fair to mention that I’m not Minnelli’s hugest fan – part of the problem is his era, but there really isn’t a single “damn I love that movie” on his list. And yes, I know you disagree with me vehemently on Meet Me in St. Louis.(
No, MGM’s doing it played a role in advancing race relations that distribution only in the black system would not have achieved. But it seems *Minnelli *did get told exactly that.
As much as any other MGM feature, apparently, except that
Dunno, haven’t read any bios or anything. All I do know is that he had been a stage director in New York before this, and this was his first assignment in Hollywood. It was probably seen as a lesser project–limited audience, etc.–for an untried director.
Anyone who wants to see the excised Lena Horne bubblebath number should rent That’s Entertainment III. Actually, you should rent it even if you’re not particularly interested in this scene; it’s perhaps the best behind-the-scene\es documentary ever made about the Golden Age of Hollywood Musicals.
There’s a 2002 Cinema Journal article by Sean Griffin called “The Gang’s All Here: Generic versus Racial Integration in the 1940s Musical” that discusses this issue. The MGM musicals of the era were often “integrated musicals” in the sense that the songs were integrated into the plot, but were unintegrated in terms of race. They typically had all-white casts. Cabin in the Sky is an exception in that it has an all-black cast, but of course that isn’t racial integration either.
Fox musicals were more commonly Vaudeville style “unintegrated musicals” in the sense that the songs had little to do with the storyline. They were usually part of a show-within-a-show. For instance, the main characters might go to a nightclub and see a musical number performed there. This style of musical made it “safer” to case black singers, dancers, and musicians. The structure limited the need for potentially controversial interaction between black and white performers, and movie theater managers would easily be able to cut the black performance scenes altogether depending on local attitudes. I don’t know how often these scenes actually were cut, though. Griffin points out that the Nicholas Brothers number in Down Argentine Way was hugely popular and that many (white) people would go to the movie just to see that scene and leave once it was over.
So while it was clear that most white moviegoers in the '40s were happy to watch black performers sing and dance, it was considered much riskier to have the whole story center on an all-black cast of characters like in Cabin in the Sky.
Although I should note that even this was less controversial than having black and white characters interacting as equals in the same movie would have been.
“Flying Down to Rio” is a good example. The white nightclub-goers, including Fred and Ginger (scandalously dancing with their foreheads touching) take their turn doing the “Carioca” number, then leave the stage to make room for the blacks, who appear seemingly from nowhere.
You could find that even in real life - it seems to have been perfectly acceptable for whites to dance to all-black bands (and even tell them privately that they were “just as good as us”), but not to dance on the same floor at the same time as blacks. No, of course there was no rationality to it.
Interesting stuff, Lamia – I’d never really thought about how the “unintegrated” (in terms of the framing of the numbers) musicals could function to maintain various racial and other “real-life” assumptions.