Joan Crawford in “Torch Song” -
VCNJ~
I’ve seen the movie several times, and that number is just mortally offensive by today’s standards. Holy cow.
C. Thomas Howell played a white student pretending to be black so he could take advantage of affirmative action to get into Harvard in Soul Man (1986). IMDb’s trivia for the movie includes this tidbit:
Uh, yeah. Taglines for the movie included “Mark needs a scholarship to get into Harvard. There’s one more available for a black student. The problem is Mark’s not black… Yet.” and “He didn’t give up. He got down.”
Blackface was at least marginally acceptable until the Civil Rights movement, and from then on, it had to be done ironically or with a realization of the baggage involved. The Archie Bunker portrayal of a minstrel show was pretty much an anachronism when it appeared in All in the Family – people had stopped doing them years before that.
There was a very funny Dick Van Dyck episode that didn’t have blackface, but rather, Dick and Mary’s black-dyed hands before they were to appear before to get an award from an NAACP-type organization for the Alan Brady show. When Mary suggests they say they could pass off their hands as some sort of joke, Dick is appalled at the thought, so by then the idea it meant nothing was long gone.
There is a bit in the film 1941 (so you probably haven’t seen it) but in the tank, John Candy gets his face covered in soot while a black actor gets his face covered in white powder.
Not sure if that counts but there are plenty of instances of a cartoon character having a bomb go off in their face and they are ‘black face’ for a bit of comedy.
I remember (God help me) a Very Special Episode of Gimme a Break that had a very young Joey Lawrence put on a blackface show, before Nell Carter broke in with her lesson on the history of blackface and how offensive it is.
There are plenty of silent films that use blackface, my favorite (film, not use of blackface) being Buster Keaton’s riotous Seven Chances.
When I was 18 me and a couple of other guys blacked up and wore dresses to sing Baby Love as the Supremes in a school show. This was in 1985, only seven years after the Black and White Minstrel Show was cancelled on British TV.
The only black person in the audience was my little sister, who thought it was hilarious.
Not quite in the era mentioned, but The Birth of a Nation has what might be the most appaling blackface setups ever. In a weird about-face (no pun intended), White Chicks has some very improbable scenes where black guys pretend to be white teenage girls…guess we had that one coming.
I saw the movie 'cause my nieces wanted to and I was their host for the day. You think I’d go to such a thing on my own?!
The Golden Girls had a scene where Blanche and Rose were wearing mud masks and walked into the living room to find that Dorothy was meeting her son’s fiancee and family for the first time. And the fiancee & family were African American.
Richard Sanders, WKRP season 3, “A Mile in My Shoes”, 1980.
A bunch of old Warner Bros., Disney, and MGM cartoons had blackface gags- usually a quick reaction shot after an explosion, leaving the character looking like a black person (sometimes combined with an impersonation of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson or another black celebrity). Two books have been written on the subject of black stereotypes in animation: That’s Enough, Folks and The Colored Cartoon.
If I were only going to read one, which would you recommend?
The sequence involves (IIRC) Harpo sneaking to the back of the track where a large black community kept the place going. (True in fact, it takes a lot of work to keep a horse in a life of luxury.) There he joins in a number entitled “All God’s Children Got Rhythm.”
Were there not similar sequences of a Negro Song in other Marx Brother’s movies? In the same vein, the movie version of Showboat featured “Ol’ Man River” sung by a Black man who did not interact with the White cast.
Or not.
I haven’t read either, actually.
That’s only sorta funny. Better would have been to make him sing the Stephen Foster song Old Black Joe.
My mother’s brother appeared in a minstrel show when he was in college around 1959 (the year in which I was born). His father (a liberal minister who later headed the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Christian Social Action) was not pleased. Uncle Paul still doesn’t see what the big deal was.
When I was in third or fourth grade (thus circa 1968), we had an assembly in which the students a few grades ahead of us performed. One boy came on stage in an old flannel shirt and blackface – I remember he said the words “I’m a poor Negro slave”, but I can’t recall what the context was (history? music?), just that the program was supposed to be educationally serious.
When I was in college a decade or so later, I appeared in a student-directed production of Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha. I played the porter, and – despite reservations – I donned blackface for the role.
I think this means you can write off any plans to run for political office.
I used to like that show as a kid, but the make-up, wigs, white lips etc. seemed weird to me even then, although I didn’t appreciate the significance of them. Still amazing to think that that was on British TV as late as the 1970s.
The movie Flashback (1990) had Keifer Sutherland getting Dennis Hopper to smear mud on his face, and singing while on one knee, in a parody of The Jazz Singer.
There was a huge brewhaha over Ted Danson appearing in blackface at the Friar’s Club. The fact that it was a private performance and the idea was written by his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg was ignored.
Are You Being Served? had a couple blackface incidents. Grainger appeared in blackface in The Father Christmas affair. The whole cast (except Miss Brahms) did a minstrel number in the Roots? episode.