Resolved: "Our number would go better in blackface" is the surprise buttsecks of old movies.

Cafe Society
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Seriously, Bing fucking Crosby? SERIOUSLY?!

So somehow I missed ever seeing Holiday Inn, so I picked it up from the library for some seasonal viewing yesterday. Come on. Bing Crosby. Fred Astaire. Stupid plot full of horrible people the movie thinks are charming that’s just an excuse to string together musical numbers. Great Sunday afternoon movie, right?

Oh no, there’s a black actress in this playing a maid… don’t be racist, movie… don’t be racist, movie, please don’t be… oh. Okay. That was fine. I mean, she was a maid and her name was Mammy but there wasn’t actually anything too bad about her character, whew, dodged THAT bullet, huh? Wow, I sure am glad this movie didn’t turn out to be super rac<RECORD SCRATCH>

IS THAT BING CROSBY IN BLACKFACE?

Holy shit, is that the female lead in BLACKFACE AND PICKANINNY BRAIDS?!

ZOMG ARE ALL THE WAITERS AND EVERY EMPLOYEE IN THE HOTEL ALSO ALL IN BLACKFACE?!

Oh, wait. Except the actual black lady and actual black children, who get to sing along about “Who freed the darkies?”

Man, that’ll ruin a movie for you. I think somewhere in the rest of it was a really charming dance number with firecrackers, but I couldn’t really tell you because “holy shit did they honestly just do a blackface number?!” In a very popular movie that didn’t even really come out that long ago as things go? We were dreading the possibility of a Thanksgiving number but that one got “cancelled” in the film world, thank goodness. I can only imagine.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen enough classic films to not really be surprised by casual racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, whatever. I mean, there’s a continuum - on the one end you’ve got Alec Guinness in a fake nose playing Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia, which is, you know, non-preferred but not super offensive. And on the other hand you’ve got Mickey Rooney’s yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The thing is, that’s famous. You mention that movie and anybody with any familiarity with it is all “oh, yeah, too bad about that Mickey Rooney thing.” And of course the older a movie is the more likely it is to have something in it - Safety Last had a pretty gross Jewish jeweler in it, but that’s a silent. It’s antique. I’d never even heard there was anything objectionable in Holiday Inn! As far as I know there’s no general stain attached to it - it’s just sort of a second tier Christmas movie, right? The one with White Christmas in it that they had to kind of remake into White Christmas?

It’s a damned good thing my son is five months old - two years from now we’d have had some ‘splainin’ to do, and that’s a really complicated thing to explain! (Not racism as such, obviously we’re going to have to address that in life and in movies, but particularly the insane heritage of blackface numbers and why it’s specifically so so bad.) Do they usually just cut that part out or something? Because it’s actually important to the “plot”. You see, he wants to do a blackface act because he’s a horrible person and wants to continue exploiting this ingenue he’s found - uh, sorry, has fallen in love with her, and doesn’t have the guts to tell his old partner who showed up so drunk he doesn’t remember the face of the girl he was dancing with. And his manager saw her but only from the back. So he wants to disguise her so his old partner won’t make off with her. Instead of either paying her or passing her a note “do you like me check yes or no”. Ugh. Whatever. The only characters with any development in this movie are awful people - why is that so frequently the case in these things? Anyway.

Anybody else have an unhappy surprise with a classic film this year? (Anybody care to condescendingly explain to me that that’s how movies used to be and that’s okay because____?) Any movies you want to talk about that do rise above a pretty awful piece of bigotry, or that don’t?

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I’ve known about this for a long time.

And – surprise! – it’s not unique. There was a lot of minstrel shows and blackface recorded in the movies out there. The bulk of it is pretty negligible stuff by actors you never heard of, but it was prevalent enough that occasionally you get someone pretty famous doing it. Al Jolson, of course, was famous for “Mammy” and “The Jazz Singer”, but there is more of him in blackface on film.

It’s complicated, too – Jolson wasn’t an oppressor of African Americans – he had a reputation for sticking up for them and treating them as any other performers. But he didn’t see anything wrong with blackface and minstrelsy.
For your reading pleasure:

It’s a pretty amazing list. Doris freakin’ Day.

https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0LEVzyuK5hUcqoA7mdXNyoA;_ylc=X1MDMjc2NjY3OQRfcgMyBGZyA3lmcC10LTkwMQRncHJpZANSYjJCU2x3WVQ3eWJDSlc0d19ydG1BBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwM0BG9yaWdpbgNzZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tBHBvcwMwBHBxc3RyAwRwcXN0cmwDBHFzdHJsAzIyBHF1ZXJ5A0RvcmlzIERheSBpbiBCbGFja2ZhY2UEdF9zdG1wAzE0MTkyNTkzNjY-?p=Doris+Day+in+Blackface&fr2=sb-top-search&fr=yfp-t-901&fp=1
and I’m amazed at Neil Diamond (in the remake of The Jazz Singer) and Gene Wilder (in Silver Streak). That’s pretty late in the game, and they shoulda known better.

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Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) had a montage scene where The Four Cohans performed one of their songs for about 10 seconds in blackface. But then, we are talking the 1890’s here (when the scene was placed.)

For a defense for the Holiday Inn scene, there probably isn’t one. For a defense of the YDD scene, well, The Four Cohans did perform that song in blackface back in the 1890s, so it’s historically accurate. If I made a movie biography of Al Jolson, would it be better or worse if I rewrote the “Mammy” scene w/o him in blackface (which is how he performed it?)

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It would be worse if you rewrote, obviously. I think it’s awful that you can’t see Song of the South anywhere because I think that promotes the idea that racists all wear sheets on their heads; better by far to show your kids that racism is way more insidious in our culture and Disney could put out a very beloved movie that was also super racist.

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Is Gene Wilder (or Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places) really considered “performing in blackface”?

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I’d like to think not. That’s just a disguise.

We bad, mon. (inhales deeply from the ganja):cool:

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No. Not anymore than Dan Ackroyd was blackface when he dressed up like a Jamaican on “Trading Places”.

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I note, by the way, that Holiday Inn has 100% on the Tomatometer - I thought, huh, maybe some of those reviews are vintage? Nope.

(Seriously, I know the plot is not supposed to be very rich in this kind of movie, but this one particularly kinda stinks. I wouldn’t have given it a glowing review if it hadn’t had the Lincoln’s Birthday number anyway.)

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Well, CalMeacham above and the Wiki site seem to think so. I never thought it was, I took it as a disguise in the movie.

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Aside from anything else, cheers to you for perhaps the first time I’ve ever thought the use of the old debate format of “Resolved: X” made any sense. Unlike the topic of a debate, which by its very definition is not yet resolved, this one pretty clearly is resolved beyond any doubt.

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I think the Wiki list is a little overinclusive for some of those - it goes to the definition of “blackface”. To me it means something very specific, and not just darkening one’s skin to portray somebody with a darker skin tone than yours (like Fred Armisen playing Obama). Does “blackface” require the whole vaudevillian red lip grin thing? For example, here’s Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn. And here’s Armisen playing Obama. Clearly the dark makeup is part of an overall attempt to look like a specific person.

Of course, on the other hand I read a very troubling article recently about the practice of “painting down” white stuntpeople rather than hiring stuntpeople of color. That’s not what I’d call “blackface”, but it’s a related issue.

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What seems to be “resolved” here is that the culture, including movies, of 60 years and more ago included very different assumptions than 2014+29/30ths. I’ll concede that the 1940s is surprisingly late to be finding remnants of vaudeville, but I think it’s several kinds of mistake to judge a movie older than most of our grandparents by present-day (== post civil-rights) standards.

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Most of our grandparents? Dude, I’m 34 and that movie is only as old as my mom. My dad saw it in the theater when it came out.

ETA - also, my thread title is about unexpected surprises in old movies for modern viewers.

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It’s 72 years old. It basically predates WWII (at least, US involvement in it). I think it’s somewhere between mistaken and disingenuous to judge it as if it was made in some stretch of the present day.

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I didn’t judge it as if it were made in the present day, I judged it as if it were made in 1942 and I said “holy shit blackface?!” I asked my parents this morning if they remembered that in it - they didn’t, and were kind of shocked when I showed them that picture there of Marjorie Reynolds. Even my dad. Who saw it in 1942. In South Georgia. When he was eleven. So yes, movies are time capsules and people aren’t, but it was unexpected.

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Enter racist Bugs Bunny or racist cartoons on YouTube. I was shocked by how many I actually remember airing that had Elmer Fudd in blackface and all kinds of big-lipped African tribe stereotypes.
Look at 1930s comics like Gasoline Alley or Snuffy Smith for occasional minstrel show burlesque characters as well.

Or Rufus Jones for President- available on YouTube and several other places- in which a 7 year old Sammy Davis, Jr., becomes the first black president. (He was already amazing, btw.) All the actors are black, but the stereotypes they had to play (e.g. Rufus’s inauguration oath mentions pork chops and dice) are :eek:

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I missed your edit, but I still find your viewpoint a bit anachronistic. If you’re going to watch movies from 75 years ago, there are going to be endless “surprises,” both good and bad. I think that to be shocked or disturbed that a movie of that era contains examples of the sort of “genial racism” that was common then is… to have limited perspective?

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It’s not that it was surprising that it was there, again. It’s surprising that it isn’t famous for being there.

ETA - in other words, that two people who watch a lot of old movies didn’t know this is “the one with the blackface song and dance number”.

ETAA - especially since it’s a reasonably popular movie at Christmas and is shown a lot more frequently than the vast majority of the movies on that Wiki list. A lot more people have seen it in this century than Fresh Faces of 1937.

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For me “blackface” is a term specifically used and referring to minstrel/vaudeville style performances. I feel this way because words have meanings and that’s what that word means–it annoys me greatly when people decide to misuse terms to serve their arguments.

Regarding the stuntman thing–the stuntman pool is pretty small and there just aren’t a lot of black stuntmen. I remember watching “making-of” footage from the original “Shaft” and they used white stuntmen and used make up and wigs to make them passable.

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I get your point. I’ve never seen the movie, but I would have never expected a blackface minstrel show in it! I think I’d expect a shootout between Astaire and Crosby before I expected that.