#basil ruysdael

[letterboxd-loggd]

The Cocoanuts (1929) Robert Florey & Joseph Santley

December 17th 2021

[dweemeister]

Pinky (1949)

Hollywood’s plodding shift to featuring films starring and/or made by non-white people has produced stories and perspectives that have never graced cinemas before. Some of the American films that have stirred me are rooted in racial identity. The 1934 and 1959 adaptations of Imitation of Life are two such examples, and both tackle a subject that has not been addressed in Hollywood for decades – a black person passing as white and the conflicts of identity that inspires. Both versions of Imitation of Life are blessed with heartbreaking acting and ideas rarely uttered or depicted in film history. But I can imagine some viewers dismissing both films without attempting to engage them – the two adaptations have a black female lead that assumes certain “mammy” stereotypes and the 1959 version’s passing daughter character is mixed-race but is not black.

Released by 20th Century Fox, Elia Kazan’s Pinky (based on the novel Quality by Cid Ricketts Sumner) casts Jeanne Crain, a white actress, as the titular character: a fair-skinned black granddaughter who passes as white. It is without question that Crain’s casting undermines Pinky’s wonderful and nuanced message. Fox’s chief executive, Darryl F. Zanuck, and the Breen Office (which enforced the Hays Code) noted that because the title character loves a white man, the film – if it chose a black actress to play Pinky – could face an intense public backlash from "a number of sections of [the United States].” All but twelve states had anti-miscegenation laws in their books in 1949. Compromises were struck between Zanuck and the Production Office. Fox could make the film and keep the interracial romance (the screenplay was written in consultation with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White) only if a white actress played Pinky. With Crain’s casting, the production moved forward, despite director Elia Kazan’s opposition to Crain’s selection.

On a sweltering day in the Deep South, Pinky Johnson (Crain) has returned to her impoverished rural hometown, hoping to see her grandmother Dicey (Ethel Waters) one final time before returning to the North. Dicey raised Pinky through her childhood and teenage years, with no mentions of allusions to biological or foster parents. Dicey is heartbroken to hear her granddaughter has downplayed her blackness during her time at nursing school, but is happy to learn that Pinky has graduated. To complicate matters, Pinky also tells of her love of a white doctor, Thomas Adams (William Lundigan), to whom she has revealed nothing of her black ancestry to. In addition, while attempting to collect her grandmother’s debts while in town, Pinky is involved in an incident with a Dr. Canady (Kenny Washington) and his significant other, Roselia (Nina Mae McKinney). The police arrive at the scene and apprehend all three. After being fortunately released from custody with just a warning – black people have been killed for far less by American police – Dicey learns that her elderly white neighbor, Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore), is dying and needs a nurse. Pinky, remembering how Miss Em was cruel and disparaging to her during her childhood, decides to extend her stay.

Also appearing in this film are the town’s doctor Joe McGill (Griff Barnett) and the gossiping Melba Wooley (Evelyn Varden, whose character is lacking a moral compass). Juanita Moore has a cameo as a nurse.

From the opening shots of Pinky, it almost feels as if it was shot on location somewhere in the Southern United States. Early in the film, there is an uncut tracking shot clocking in at almost ninety seconds as Pinky walks from the front of Dicey’s shack to the low cast iron gates of Miss Em’s slave-built estate. The sets, almost entirely constructed on a soundstage, are deep enough so that the audience cannot pinpoint the soundstage’s back wall. The foliage looms over dirt roads and buildings – the canopies, blowing in the wind, are never seen. Kazan, in retrospect, criticized his own film for not including the dirt and grime that need not be manufactured with location shooting. But these fabrications – thanks to cinematographer Joseph MacDonald (1958’s The Young Lions, 1966’s The Sand Pebbles) and art directors J. Russell Spencer (1936’s Modern Times, 1946’s Dragonwyck) and Lyle R. Wheeler (1939’s Gone with the Wind, 1956’s The King and I) – still evoke the small-town South. One can feel the humid heat permeating through the night, amid Spanish moss and the racial inequality built into public spaces and homes*. For those who do not live in such places, small dots on a regional map, the scenery envelops the viewer, allowing them to further understand the cultural disorientation of any visitor to Pinky’s hometown.

Though the film is a drama, Kazan borrows horror elements to frame the setting and highlight the racial tension that pervades this Southern town. Expressionist lighting overhangs shots of foggy forests, a graveyard, tight roads, and derelict/near-derelict buildings. During the night, these surrounding appear as if taken from a disturbing lucid dream. The lurking dangers are embodied through the racist and sexist characters that Pinky encounters. With this marriage of setting and supporting cast of flawed characters, Pinky could be classified as a Southern Gothic tale – a subgenre that uses the grotesque to comment on the American South’s culture. Kazan’s filmmaking here awakens the audience to Pinky’s inner turmoil over her racial identity and belonging. Freed from worrying about racial prejudice in the North due to her passing, she is terrified about what it means to be a black woman in the place of her childhood. Miss Em’s cousin, Melba, perhaps exemplifies the white residents’ racial animosity when she meets Pinky for the first time. What she says is a statement of curiosity, an expression of Southern gentility, and a veiled threat all at once: “I heard you were light, but I had no idea. Why, you’re practically white.”

Does Pinky still feel like she belongs to this poor village? That question, among others, has an answer. She must first navigate this racism, for the first time, as an adult. By film’s end and despite all outward appearances of success, it is unclear if Pinky is satisfied with the answer she has uncovered.

The interrogation of Pinky’s blackness truly begins when Miss Em quickly realizes the identity of the young woman tending to her bedside as a hospice nurse. Miss Em, though bedridden, attempts to reinforce her authority over Pinky – a relationship assuming Pinky’s immaturity and based on tacit racial subservience (for the latter, refer to both Imitation of Life films even as the white mother characters fully realize Louise Beavers/Juanita Moore’s humanity). No longer a child, Pinky will not tolerate Miss Em’s racial condescension. It matters not that the patient is drifting in and out of consciousness during her final hours. Miss Em will be more respectful towards Pinky in the face of this bedside manner. Perhaps she is chastened by Dicey’s friendship and the favor that Pinky need not return; perhaps she is admiring of the newfound strength in the young girl she used to berate; perhaps it is due to the drugs coursing through her body. That all or some of these factors can be interpreted as true empowers the film’s final act, as screenwriters Philip Dunne (1941’s How Green Was My Valley), Dudley Nichols (1938’s Bringing Up Baby), Jane White (no other film credits), and Kazan obfuscate any simple resolutions to the film’s sense of racial justice. Pinky validates anyone who might see the film as confirming that the harshest of souls can cool their racist predispositions, or that it is impossible to reform such persons.

Though Jeanne Crain’s casting captured the headlines, the best performances in the film are from the two Ethels. As Miss Em, Ethel Barrymore has little physical acting, so she must rely almost entirely in her verbal deliveries. Alternating between exhausted observation, acidic riposte, and resignation, Barrymore navigates these final hours of her character’s life with the requisite modulations in tone. Despite being on screen for less time than Crain and Waters, Barrymore – as Miss Em – inhabits a character with the most dynamic development, routinely stealing scenes even while confined to bed. Six years after starring and “taking a chance on love” in Cabin in the Sky (1943), the deeply religious Ethel Waters commands yet another accomplished performance in Pinky. As Dicey, she plays probably the least dynamic of the three principal characters, but Waters’ anguish and understated sense of egalitarianism is a fascinating contrast to Pinky’s drifting stoicism upon her arrival at Dicey’s shack. For the Ethels, they are playing roles analogous to those they had previously assumed. But Barrymore’s elderly curmudgeons rarely commented so directly on race; Waters’ hardened maternal figures seldom interacted with white people. Together, they form an imperfect, uneasy coexistence – a postbellum relationship grounded in necessity and deferred acceptance of the other.

Prior to Kazan’s arrival on set, John Ford (1939’s Stagecoach, 1946’s My Darling Clementine) had already directed a significant bulk of Pinky. Viewing the rushes, Darryl F. Zanuck was embarrassed by the footage Ford had shot, stating that, “Ford’s Negroes were like Aunt Jemima caricatures. I thought we [were] going to get into trouble.” Indeed, Ford was a dreadful fit, given the source material and the director’s reputation (Ford’s reputation on making introspective films about racial relations was dire, and he would not possess the basic skillset to make such a film until 1960’s Sergeant Rutledge). The cast, upon learning they were going to work with the best director in Hollywood at the time, were ecstatic the decision until it became clear his abrasive demeanor intimidated Crain and especially Waters. Zanuck quietly dismissed Ford in favor of Kazan (coming off 1947’s Gentlemen’s Agreement, which decried anti-Semitism), stating in public that Ford came down with a case of the shingles. Ford, as you have correctly guessed, never had the shingles. None of Ford’s work survives in the final print of Pinky.

Pinky was justifiably attacked by black critics for Crain’s casting over Lena Horne (who had lobbied for the role). The film, a compromise between 20th Century Fox and the Breen Office, contains mixed messages about racial integration and the nature of interracial friendship and love. The thematic confusion interferes with the film’s obvious, well-meaning intentions and the stellar performances from Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters. In its final form, one can only imagine how damaging Pinky may have been if John Ford remained with the production rather than Kazan. Within the artistic constraints of Hollywood studio filmmaking and the regressive perspectives of too many Americans, Pinky inspires a torrent of conflicting emotions as it struggles to form a coherent thesis. In a peculiar way, the muddled messaging is also a reflection of Pinky and mixed-race persons themselves, as they strive to understand what to make of themselves.

My rating: 6.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

* In the scene where Pinky goes to a general store late in the film, notice the racial composition of the customers and how they react to Pinky. Also, Dicey’s shack is aesthetically reminiscent to sharecropper hovels or slave living quarters.

[michigandrifter]

Broken Arrow 1950

[gatutor]

Basil Ruysdael-Dorothy Malone-Joel McCrea “Juntos hasta la muerte” (Colorado territory) 1949, de Raoul Walsh.

[michigandrifter]

The Horse Soldiers 1959

[dukeofriven]

The Cocoanuts (dir. Robert Florey and. Joseph Santley, 1929)

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[citizenscreen]

Banned and Blacklisted: Elia Kazan's PINKY (1949)

Banned and Blacklisted: Elia Kazan’s PINKY (1949)

There were at least five movies in production in 1949 that dealt with racial issues. Of those producer Darryl F. Zanuck‘s Pinky generated the most buzz. Throughout his storied career, Zanuck proved that he was as adept at crowd pleasing entertainment as he was at message pictures. He had by that point produced such classics as Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), John Ford’s T…

View On WordPress