Time Magazine's History of Race in the Movies

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Richard Corliss at Time honors Black History Month by naming "the Twenty-Five Most Important Films on Race". Many of the films aren't by conscious design on race so much as they are touchstones in the hundred-year fight by black artists for their right to be seen onscreen and to use film as an expressive medium, and two movies by Spike Lee might be one too many even if one of them wasn't Bamboozled. (It also seems a bit odd that he says that he included Cooley High because he thought the selection would benefit from the inclusion of "a flat-out comedy." I guess he must think that Richard Pryor Live in Concert is a film noir.) The first half of the feature serves a useful tribute to some of the African-American talents who made a smaller mark on movies than they might have, given the size of their talents: not just Paul Robeson (Body and Soul, 1925), but such performers as Nina Mae McKinney (the "black Garbo" who starred in King Vidor's 1929 musical Hallelujah!), Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, and Lena Horne, whose 1938 debut, The Duke Is Tops, was later rereleased with Horne's name at the top of the credits and with the title changed to The Bronze Venus; and such directors as Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, Jr., whose The Blood of Jesus (1941) is now included in the National Film Registry, though Williams himself is probably best remembered as one of the stars of the TV version of Amos and Andy. Williams not only directed but also produced, wrote, and starred in The Blood of Jesus, and the fact that a man who was a pioneering, quadruple-threat force in black film made his biggest mark in a sitcom whose title has, rightly or wrongly, become synonymous with a racist outrage says a lot about the complicated, tangle history of race and the movies. So does the career of Stepin Fetchet, to whom Corliss, writing about the Will Rogers vehicle Judge Priest, pays compelling tribute: ". . . anyone looking at Fetchit's performances today has to notice their subversive, anarchic, movie-altering force. His drawn-out drawl and living-dead pace instantly stopped any scene in its tracks, brought the pace to a halt and monopolized the screen. When Fetchit was on, you watched him, because his acting style was unique. The rest of the players were striving for movie naturalism, and he, with a turtle's intensity, was doing Kabuki."

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

The Screengrab : judge priest

Time Magazine's History of Race in the Movies

The Rep Report (January 11-15)