You were supposed to hate the kicker and Ethan in The Searchers. It’s a film about how the hateful old Ethan is a monster from the past, but still a human who can be reached. The ending of this movie is one of the most powerful in all film, without laying on thick at all.
As for Holiday Inn, the first time I saw it, they were playing it at Bing Crosby’s Restaurant and Lounge in Walnut Creek, CA. I was stunned. Not that they had such things in movies in the 30s and 40s, but that they would show it in the 21st Century. They didn’t have a clue in the 30s and 40s when it was made that it was a bad thing. Crosby regularly worked with black entertainers and was not racist by any means. It just didn’t occur to them that it was horribly offensive.
It’s almost hypnotic while making me feel all firebomby.
OTOH, Holiday Inn is the worst movie the old ladies at church ever made me show. There’s a reason I stopped hosting those. Well, that and comments like, “Do you think that movie (Billy Elliot)was based on a true story?” and not being able to scream, “No, you senile, old twats, it was based on The Jazz Singer and every fourth movie Hollywood made since 1927! And probably lots before then.”
My wife and I certainly enjoy White Christmas better. Not only because of the lack of a blackface number (although there is a song about how great minstrel shows were :rolleyes:), but because the characters overall are nicer.
Crosby and Astaire in Holiday Inn, despite supposedly being friends, are generally pretty awful to each other throughout the movie. The story begins with Astaire’s character having an affair with Crosby’s fiancee, proceeds with Crosby trying to foil Astaire’s attempts to get a new dancing partner, Astaire resolving to steal Marjorie Reynolds’ character from Crosby, and so forth. Not to mention Crosby actively preventing Marjorie Reynolds from being seen by New York talent scouts so that she won’t leave him, and to hell with what she might want. It’s all pretty unpleasant.
By contrast, Crosby and Danny Kaye in White Christmas actually seem to like each other. There’s no romantic rivalry between them, and they’re clearly good friends who each want what’s best for the other. Add in Vera-Ellen’s terrific dancing, and you’ve got a far superior Christmas entertainment.
It’s worthwhile mentioning that Irving Berlin was mostly not racist. I say mostly because, true to his era, he did write “coon songs” which were originally intended to be performed in blackface. “Mandy” is one of these and “Puttin’ in the Ritz” is a burlesque of black social pretensions.
But, by and large, Berlin was sympathetic to the black experience. One of his revues from 1933 featured “Suppertime,” a ballad sung by the black entertainer Ethel Waters. In the song, Waters reveals that her husband has just been lynched. The song is a scathing attack on racism and is as heartbreaking as - and similar in theme to - Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit.”
During World War II, Berlin wrote and mounted the musical This is the Army. At his behest black performers, notably Joe Louis, the boxing champ, were included in the cast. Berlin took the show on the road to raise money for an armed services charity. Wherever the show went, Berlin insisted that the “colored” cast members were treated to the same accommodations and respectful treatment as the white actors. That was a pretty ballsy thing to insist on in the Forties.
Berlin himself know something about racism: his family’s Russian shtetl was burned by Cossacks and the family was forced to flee to New York City.
But, despite all that, yeah, I have to say that the blackface number in Holiday Inn is pretty dismal.
I understand what you’re saying, but it also seems odd to me that we would find it offensive or feel a need to explain why it is wrong to us bad words to describe the people you are killing.
For the same reason it would be wrong to call a black person a nigger or a gay person a faggot while you are killing them. They don’t suddenly become acceptable when you are mad.
I also doubt that people of color did not find minstrel shows offensive at the time. Just because black people did them too doesn’t mean they were ignoring that it was basically them playing stupid black people. A lot of people bow down to the system.
How can a show making fun of how stupid black people are not be racist? The only thing I can think is that it paled in comparison to other racism, so it just wasn’t a priority.
As an example of how different the world was in the early days, take Arthur Wilson.
You know him as Sam, the black piano player in Sam’s Club in Casablanca. Wilson, who didn’t play piano, was known as Dooley Wilson by that time. He got the name because his signature song in vaudeville was the Irish ditty “Mr. Dooley.” Which he performed as an Irishman, in whiteface.
He didn’t originate it, though. Apparently that was Lew Dockstader in 1895, who also performed in blackface.
Does that excuse the use of blackface a half century later? Of course not. It’s just a reminder of how hard it is to get our minds back into the heads of people in the past.
I agree. The minstrel show number in White Christmas is performed without blackface, making it much less offensive, Vera-Ellen dances up a storm, and while Fred Astaire is a decent actor, I never see him dance without thinking that I like Gene Kelly’s style of dancing more.
Tread’s comment was in reference to a World War 2 movie. It is always wrong to just kill a black or gay person off the street because they are black or gay. But during World War 2, it was legal and ethical for a member of the American military to kill a member of the Japanese military or in certain circumstances a Japanese civilian. So in that case, why was it OK to kill them, but not OK to call them “bug-eyed monkeys”?
I’d love to see a remake of The Jazz Singer where the protagonist is the son, grandson, and great grandson of famous bluesmen and women who quit the family business, converted to Judaism, and is training to become a cantor.
It wasn’t blackface, but I remember being shocked when I finally watched Saturday Night Fever. I had heard about it all of my life, obviously, but all I ever heard about it was Travolta’s suit and lots of dancing and 70’s Italian-in-Brooklyn stereotypes. When they were showing it for free to anyone who wanted to come see it one summer as an outdoor movie on the pier my husband (then boyfriend) and I were excited to go see it. And then there was raping. And suicide. What the hell, movie?!? I thought this was supposed to be a fun dance movie with an excellent musical score, not the story of how a chick gets raped and then some guy jumped (or tried to jump) off a bridge.
I was not at all prepared for that. I’ve mostly blocked it out of my head but it stands out in my mind as one of the most horrible movie experiences of my life, right up there with when my daycare decided to show the movie Watership Down to a bunch of 4 year olds.
