"Babes In Arms"/"Babes On Broadway"--minstrel shows are "hep and modern"?! What? Cultural confusion

[Fenris]

Note–I put this in GQ because I’m asking about the history of the time, not about the plot or quality of the movies. That said, if it gets moved to CS, I’m not gonna be all that upset.

I just watched Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway for the first time. FTR, Broadway is about 23,000,000 times better than “in Arms”. But that’s not the point of this thread.

Ok–in both movies (circa 1939) Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland play young talented aspiring actors. In both cases, old fuddy-duddies don’t get their jive, hep, modern new ways. In both cases, Mickey and Judy (and friends) decide to put on a show in a barn/abandoned warehouse. In both cases, to demonstrate their hep new swingin’ act to their parents, the town and the stuffy producer they…put on a…minstrel show. Wid de blackface and de dia’lect and de shufflin’ and Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo and de big white lips and de polka-dot pants.

Note that these are set in the then-present day. 1940-ish. Minstrel shows
A) Died before vaudeville except in rural locations, right?
B) Featured music by Stephen (“doo-dah”) Foster–who’s heyday was…what? about 1880?

How in the world were minstrel shows supposed to convey the swingin’ hep modern Broadway talent that Mickey and Judy represented? Forget the fact that these numbers were cringeworthy* by our standards (and they are), they were creaky by their standards. And the plot in both hinges on Mickey and Judy being new and modern.

I don’t get it. These “broadway” shows the kids are putting on are set 12 years after Show Boat, 8 years after “Anything Goes” and 1 year (or so) before Oklahoma! What gives?

*“Babes in Arms” was so bad as to be embarassing to watch. “Babes on Broadway” had decent production values, so while watching it is creepy and wrong, at least it’s well directed and produced.

[samclem]

@Fenris

Ok–in both movies (circa 1939) …

Babes in Arms. 1937

Babes on Broadway. 1941.

@Fenris

I don’t get it. These “broadway” shows the kids are putting on are set 12 years after Show Boat, 8 years after “Anything Goes” and 1 year (or so) before Oklahoma!

Anything Goes 1934 on Broadway.

Oklahoma. Only a Broadway play by that name in 1943.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Blackface was common in films throughout the 30s, so its appearance in throwback films - Rooney and Garland were not supposed to be cutting edge hip in these movies; they were extremely safe models of what adults wanted cutting edge hip to be - doesn’t surprise me.

I don’t have access to any good histories of Hollywood right now, but a quick trip to Wiki’s page on blackface gives some quick answers.

Through the 1930s, many well-known entertainers of stage and screen also performed in blackface.[32] Whites who performed in blackface in film included Al Jolson,[33] Eddie Cantor,[34] Bing Crosby,[33] Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland.[34]

From the early 1930s to the late 1940s, New York City’s famous Apollo Theater in Harlem featured skits in which almost all black male performers wore the blackface makeup and huge white painted lips, despite protests that it was degrading from the NAACP. The comics said they felt “naked” without it.[66]

U.S. cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s often featured characters in blackface gags as well as other racial and ethnic caricatures.

The conventions of blackface also lived on unmodified at least into the 1950s in animated theatrical cartoons. Strausbaugh estimates that roughly one-third of late 1940s MGM cartoons “included a blackface, coon, or mammy figure.”[42] Bugs Bunny appeared in blackface at least as late as Southern Fried Rabbit in 1953.[43]

Here’s a useful scholarly piece. MICHAEL ROGIN
“Democracy and Burnt Cork”: The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights
Representations 46 (Spring 1994)

As a family melodrama, The Jazz Singer used music to evoke conflict and loss, and in the first years of talking pictures other musicals followed its example. By the mid 1930s the genre had transformed itself, according to Rick Altman, as music became associated more with pleasure than with pain; the blackface musical is an instance. Most musicals using blackface in the 1930s and 1940s fall into two subcategories, both derived from The Jazz Singer: either backstage musicals about putting on a show or biographies of the central figures in the history of American popular music. The first group includes such unsuccessful Jolson vehicles as Mammy (1930) and The Singing Kid (1936), Fred Astaire’s Swingtime (1936), Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s Babes in Arms (1939) and Babes on Broadway (1942), Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby’s Holiday Inn (1942; the film that introduced what was for half a century the best-selling song in history, Irving Ber1in’s ‘White Christmas”), and This is the Army (1943; starring Ronald Reagan). The second group comprises retrospective, nostalgic films that, from 1939 to 1949, took blackface from its antebellum origins to post–World War II America, recounting the lives of Stephen Foster (Swanee River, 1939; the movie also features the blackface minstrel, E. P. Christy, played by Jolson); Dan Emmett (with Christy, the most popular early minstrel; Dixie, 1943); George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, 1945; Jolson, whose blackface rendition of “Swanee” made Gershwin famous and helped launch the Jazz Age, repeats that performance); and Jolson himself (The Jolson Story, 1946; and Jolson Sings Again, 1949). The Eddie Cantor Story and the Danny Thomas Jazz Singer remake (both 1953), critical and box office failures, bring the subgenre to an end, though it comes back from the dead in Neil Diamond’s Jazz Singer (1981).

The blackface scene in Holiday Inn is often cut out today, but note that it came after the two Babes movies.

Really, nothing at all changed about racial attitudes in America or Hollywood prior to WWII.

[panache45]

@Exapno_Mapcase

Rooney and Garland were not supposed to be cutting edge hip in these movies . . .

This. They weren’t supposed to be professionals performing on Broadway; they were supposed to be kids, putting on a neighborhood show.