No Way Out is perhaps the most ambitious of the growing list of films designed to combat anti-Negro prejudice. All, like those about anti-Semitism, have aroused debate as to their effectiveness by critics, social psychologists, movie-makers, and experts in intergroup relations. Here Nathan Leites and Martha Wolfenstein, the authors of Movies: A Psychological Study, published this year by the Free Press (Glencoe, Illinois), give their views of No Way Out, and in the process demonstrate some of the pitfalls and complexities that face the producers of films intended to reshape racist attitudes. Mr. Leites, who holds his Ph.D. degree from the University of Fribourg, has done important research in the field of propaganda.
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No Way Out, the latest film on race prejudice, revolves around the difficulties of a young Negro interne in a county hospital of a large Northern city. On his first assignment to the prison ward, he is called upon to treat a hoodlum who has been wounded in the leg during a robbery. Led by various signs to suspect a brain tumor, the doctor performs a spinal puncture. The patient dies immediately, while his brother, also wounded and handcuffed to the adjoining bed, screams: That nigger killed my brother! The doctor wishes to have an autopsy to prove that his diagnosis and treatment were correct. But permission must be obtained from the surviving brother, the Negro-hater, who has gruesome fantasies about what they would do to his brother’s body, and refuses. He gets word to his friends that his brother has been “murdered” by a Negro, and they plan to avenge the “murder” by a race riot. The Negro community is forewarned and by a well-organized strategy surprises and beats its white enemies, but without the participation of the Negro doctor, who disapproves of resorting to violence. The doctor forces the issue of the autopsy by “confessing” to the “murder” of his patient. The autopsy exonerates him. The hoodlum, to whom the physician who has performed the autopsy gives an explanation of his brother’s death, remains unconvinced: That’s medical double-talk—I tell you I saw him kill my brother. The hoodlum escapes, lays a trap for the Negro doctor, and is about to murder him when he is stopped at the last moment.
The makers of the film have tried in various ways to present Negroes favorably (though without exaggerated nobility) and their detractors unfavorably. The Negro hero belongs to one of the most respected professions and is shown to be competent in its practice; throughout the film he demonstrates a high standard of character: he is intelligent, unassuming, industrious, a good doctor, a good son, a good husband. The Negro-baiter, on the other hand, is presented as a psychopathic criminal of the lowest status (the part is played by Richard Widmark, one of Hollywood’s most “detestable” villains). And, to reinforce the figure of the hero, there is a white doctor, an embodiment of respectability, calm courage, reason, and responsibility, who helps the Negro in his fight for vindication. On the conscious level—the level of argument—it is likely that any but violent Negro-haters will be moved by this film in the direction that the film-makers desire them to go—though to what extent is always a question. No Way Out has been endorsed by many Negro and white leaders in the fight against prejudice, and some film reviewers have praised it as the most courageous and honest of the cycle of films about Negroes.
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However, if we analyze the film in more detail, certain negative elements begin to appear that might well counteract, on a deeper level, the good intentions of the movie-makers. An examination of the negative side of this film should be useful for our understanding not only of prejudice itself but also of the combination of factors that goes into the formation of films and other products of our popular culture.
In the death of the patient under treatment by the Negro doctor, we are shown one thing and told another. While the verbal explanation (which the surviving hoodlum calls “medical double-talk”) indicates that the Negro doctor is innocent, what we see tends to create an opposite impression. We are shown that the doctor is unsure of himself. He has come to the prison ward for the first time; the guards do not know him, are uncertain whether he should be there, and increasingly puzzled at the seemingly irrelevant instruments he requires for what everyone supposes to be a simple leg wound. Moreover, the doctor is already visibly shaken by the insults of the patient’s brother. What we see is that an inexperienced, insecure Negro doctor, whose procedure looks dubious to everyone present, treats a man with a seemingly minor injury in such a way that he immediately dies.
This device of showing one thing and telling another is a recurrent one in American films. Thus, to cite a frequent instance, a beautiful girl appears to be sexually promiscuous, but eventually an explanation is given which proves her behavior to have been virtuous. What we were shown, though proved to be a false appearance, has nevertheless made its emotional impact: the final explanation satisfies our conscience and enables us to enjoy forbidden fantasies without feeling guilty. Similarly, in No Way Out, what we see confirms the fantasy of the Negro as a killer, and the emotional impact of this may remain though it is explained away as a false appearance. The doctor’s eventual “confession” to the “murder” further aggravates this ambiguous effect: for a moment we are apt to suppose that he believes himself guilty, that under the unnerving Negro-baiting of the patient’s brother he actually committed a fatal blunder. We are soon given to understand that his confession is only a ruse to force the autopsy, but the other impression has already been made and will probably not be entirely obliterated.
Likewise, the sequence of the race riot contains images which tend to confirm the fantasy of the Negro as a dangerous attacker. We know that the Negroes in stealing a march on the white gang who are preparing to attack them are acting in justified self-defense. But at the moment when the Negroes rush in, we see standing beside the brutal bully who has been organizing the white gang a clean-cut young girl who does not appear before or after in the film. And as the fight begins, there is a close-up of another white girl, who also has no other part in the film, screaming in anguish. These two images would seem very likely to evoke the fantasy of “white womanhood” assaulted by the “bestial Negroes.”
Again, though the Negroes’ victory over their attackers is one of the most positive actions of the film, it is also a case of “preventive war.” Foreseeing an assault against themselves, the Negroes take the initiative in opening hostilities. Presumably many Americans doubt the moral legitimacy of such behavior. If the whites had been shown striking the first blow, the position of the Negroes would probably have seemed stronger.
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The central issue about the autopsy presents us with the following alternative: in order to save a Negro, a white corpse must be “violated.” (The brother of the dead man richly evokes the horrors of cutting up the body.) The posing of this alternative is the more impressive if we recall that much the same issue was presented in Intruder in the Dust and in Home of the Brave. In Intruder in the Dust, the body of a white man, supposedly murdered by a Negro, must be dug up out of consecrated ground in order to establish the Negro’s innocence; we are made vividly aware of how terrible this sacrilege seems to the father and brothers of the dead man, but to save the Negro it is necessary to set aside the white men’s feelings. In Home of the Brave, at the moment when the reconnoitering party is leaving the island before the oncoming Japanese, one of the white soldiers dies of wounds; all believe that if his body falls into the hands of the enemy it will be mutilated, and the men are about to carry their dead comrade away with them when the Negro soldier succumbs to a hysterical paralysis and they must carry him instead.
What is the meaning of this reiterated fantasy in which to save a Negro a gruesome sacrifice must be made? We would suggest that it may be connected with the idea of lynching, when the Negro’s body both before and after death is made the target for otherwise impermissible sadistic acts. The films seem to express a kind of inversion of the lynching theme: if the Negro is saved (not lynched, not mutilated, etc.), then the pent-up sadistic impulses will recoil against the white man; if the Negro is not the victim, then the white man will have to be the victim in his place. Towards the end of No Way Out, after the autopsy, when the hoodlum remains unreconciled, the white doctor reassures the Negro: You’ve convinced everyone in this town except one madman. He then turns to the hoodlum: Maybe an autopsy on you would show what’s the matter with your brain. This confirms the significance of the autopsy as a punitive threat. (Earlier the hoodlum had threatened the Negro doctor that his gang would perform an “autopsy” on him.)
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The Negro doctor in No Way Out is in a position corresponding to that of the hero in many American film melodramas: he is falsely accused. But where the typical white hero meets his difficulties self-reliantly and fights alone for safety, the Negro is here dependent on others to fight his battles. He is shown as extremely dependent on the white doctor who is his superior in the hospital, and who makes strenuous efforts on his behalf to arrange for the autopsy which will clear him. In the end, when the Negro is about to be shot by the hoodlum, it is a girl, whose sympathies have been won over by the white doctor, who saves him. Even in his forcing of the autopsy, the Negro’s behavior is markedly different from that of the usual film hero: his false “confession” suggests that his only weapon is self-abasement, an outdoing of his detractors.
Contrasted with the Negro doctor is another Negro, who has not tried to improve his social and professional position, but works as an elevator operator in the hospital. This man has all the toughness, resolve, and self-reliance which the doctor seems to have lost in the course of his self-betterment. When the news comes that the white gang is going to raid “Nigger Town,” it is the elevator man who organizes the successful surprise attack, while the doctor is shown at the last minute futilely telephoning an alderman to ask him to do something about the threatened riot. Thus the two major Negro protagonists have contrary shortcomings from the point of view of American ideals: one is overaggressive and dangerous; the other is underaggressive, a personification of the victim; neither seems to fit into American concepts of normal self-reliance, though presumably one of the purposes of the film is to “normalize” the audience’s image of the Negro.
In effect, the Negro doctor has withdrawn from the struggle of the Negroes and in his efforts to better himself has become a burden on well-disposed whites such as his superior in the hospital; he embodies a moral demand, all the more pressing because of his own high moral character. In a similar way, the Negro protagonist in Intruder in the Dust, though a more heroic figure, also by refusing to keep to his “place” becomes a burden to his white well-wishers, who must exert themselves to get him out of the difficulties in which he has become involved. The Negro soldier in Home of the Brave is a burden in a more literal sense when he becomes paralyzed and must be carried on the backs of his white comrades as they escape from the enemy; and here too the Negro is “out of place,” having been reluctantly included in the group only because of a shortage of personnel.
Some may argue, of course, that this “burdensomeness” of the Negro is, rather, a clear moral obligation: since the disabilities of Negroes are laid upon them by white society, it is incumbent on the whites to remedy the situation, and a film directed at white audiences should therefore emphasize this. But the sense of obligation and guilt often produces an increased hostility to the victim. The problem of how to state the moral case without risking such a “boomerang” reaction is of course involved in most efforts to cure prejudice.
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The theme of betrayal occurs in No Way Out as it did in Crossfire, one of the films on anti-Semitism. A character is presented who is subject to conflicting loyalties and who, in order to side against prejudice, must betray an old attachment. In Crossfire it was the young soldier who was prevailed on to betray his buddy who had murdered the Jew. No Way Out presents a girl who has been intimately involved with the two hoodlums but is struggling to free herself from the degrading social conditions of her origin. She is the former wife of the man who dies, and has been the mistress of the surviving brother. The white doctor and the Negro doctor come to see her in an effort to engage her help in getting permission for the autopsy. Though temporarily diverted by her former lover (it is she who carries the message that precipitates the race riot), she eventually turns against him, and in the end saves the Negro’s life. Though she is presented as noble in her conversion, we also know that she has a record of betraying one man for another. The coarse accusations of her former lover for her desertion to the Negro are thus to some extent convincing.
This girl is also used as the focus of another theme: social advancement. No Way Out shows anti-Negro feelings as peculiar to semi-criminal elements in a slum area, and most intensely concentrated in one pathological individual. The girl in seeking to rise above her origins must cast off the anti-social attitudes of the slum and identify herself with the respectable and decent people; decent people are not prejudiced against Negroes; therefore she must get rid of her prejudice. For some audiences, this appeal may be an effective one. But, again, it is not without danger. Race prejudice in its most violent forms is apt to occur among just those whose desire for social advancement has been frustrated; for such people, the argument that lack of prejudice is “respectable” may be only irritating.
The picture of the Negro doctor’s home life contains further images that may have an unintended negative effect. He and his mother, wife, sister, and brother-in-law are shown at table eating heartily. In American films, serious positive characters are rarely shown eating: they drink a good deal, and sometimes are shown preparing food, but rarely consuming it; if they start to eat, they are apt to be interrupted by something more important. Negative (or comic) characters, on the other hand, may be shown eating at greater length and with more absorption. That the Negro family in No Way Out is shown preoccupied with eating confirms the conventional image of Negroes as absorbed in bodily gratifications. (Compare again Home of the Brave, where the Negro soldier produces a package of fried chicken which he has cooked himself.) Further, the members of the family joke about the number of apple turnovers each has consumed, and another taunt of the hoodlum is implicitly justified: in the scene immediately following this one, the hoodlum calls the doctor “Little Black Sambo,” and one remembers the childhood story: “And Black Mumbo ate twenty-seven pancakes . . . and Black Jumbo ate fifty-five. . . .”
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There is of course no doubt of the good intentions of the makers of this film. But in order to show how wrong race hatred is, the film-makers had to create a plot and characters, and elaborate them in detailed images; here their fantasies from a less conscious level come to the surface: the Negro becomes a terrible burden that we must carry on our backs; a sacrifice of white corpses is required for his preservation; the image of the violated white woman forces its way to the screen; and so on. There is an effort to deny these unacknowledged nightmares about the Negro by locating race hatred exclusively in an exceptional, pathological character, but this attempt at denial remains, at bottom, ineffectual. The very title of the film, extremely puzzling in terms of the plot, expresses the basic ambiguity; though the Negro-hater is supposed to be defeated and the falsely accused Negro saved and vindicated, the title seems to state a deeper belief and draw a contrary “moral”: there is no way out.
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