The Red and the Black
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Biacks in American Films.
by Donald Bogle.
Illustrated. Viking. 260 pp. $12.50.
The Only Good Indian . . . The Hollywood Gospel.
by Ralph and Natasha Friar.
Illustrated. Drama Book Specialists. 332 pp. $12.50.
The distinctions between these two books are infinitely more important than their similarities. Both are studies of the ways in which the two most significant American racial minorities have been treated—or rather mistreated—in commercial American films. But Mr. Bogle's “interpretive history” is a model of how a literate, reasonable, and readable critical survey should be conducted. He is moderate but keen in his judgments, sensible in his choice of works for close analysis, his well-organized and gracefully written book is persuasively grounded in historical and biographical facts—and in an intelligent interpretation of the small society (Hollywood) that produced these movies and the larger one that more or less unthinkingly consumed them.
The kindest thing to say about the Friars' study is that it is everything Mr. Bogle's is not. Having forced my way through it, however, I find my supply of kindness entirely expended on the journey. Wearily, I must place it among the most vulgar, ignorant and shrill volumes I have ever read on any subject, a travesty of accepted standards of critical and historical discourse. Essentially an undifferentiated list of all the movies (including silent one- and two-reelers from prehistoric days) that have in some way dealt with “Native Americans” (as the authors drearily insist on calling them), it is annotated with extensive, un illuminating quotations from bad critics (almost as numerous as bad movies), practically none from the good ones. Everything is whipped into single file aimed at establishing a single point: that our movies about Indians have universally been racist in spirit, genocidal in intent. If that is all a writer has to say on a complex and curious matter, it is a waste of energy to go to this length to say it.
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It is perhaps fair to note that there are historical circumstances rendering the Friars' task more difficult than that of Mr. Bogle. For one thing, Indians happened to be participants in a drama—the settlement of the frontier—peculiarly suited to the movie medium, with its built-in bias toward large-scale and violent action, and one which has also taken a firmer grip on the popular imagination than any other phenomenon in our history. The sheer volume of material they are forced to confront is, to say the least, daunting. Where
Mr. Bogle can cover his subject by studying a hundred movies, they must deal with thousands.
Moreover—and this is the point the Friars, and for that matter most contemporary writers on this subject, fail to consider—the Indian was part of a strange, indeed enigmatic, culture that, since the 18th century, had been in inevitable, active, and often savage opposition to the spread of the white man's culture. One does not argue, of course, that the latter was necessarily a superior culture (except in the purely technological sense) or that, in its arrogance, it made any worthwhile attempt to understand its enemy or to work out a peaceful, rational accommodation with the Indians. Its record of massacre, theft, and general duplicitousness is painfully obvious and has been so—even to those who made Western movies—for decades. On the other hand, the American pioneer of the last century was not a 20th-century cultural anthropologist—or even a liberal. He was simply a man in need of vast amounts of land for his agricultural economy and, having seen the great plains of the West, unlikely to be very sensitive to the needs of nomadic cultures for the large stretches of the same land to support their own way of life. Indeed, with the best will in the world, it is difficult to see how this conflict over what might be termed land use could have been avoided, especially given the barriers of language and custom existing between whites and reds. Doubtless a deal of racism arose out of this circumstance, but to understand the Indian wars as solely an expression of racism, or of a genocidal impulse, is disastrously to oversimplify the matter. This was, profoundly, a cultural conflict—and very possibly an unavoidable one.
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The Friars would also have it that the failure of film to particularize Indian characters, as well as the failure to be accurate about their dress, language, and customs, stems from the same racism that produced the historical conflicts Hollywood symbolically recreates. Again, in some indeterminate measure they are partly correct. But historical accuracy and full characterization have never been the medium's strong suits. All of us have serious grievances in this regard, no matter what our race or class or birthplace. In fact, however, as even the Friars admit, many of the Indian stereotypes are quite benign ones—on the whole far less patronizing than the black stereotypes Mr. Bogle describes. Indeed, in movies Indians seem generally to be rather distant and abstract characters, less stereotypes than symbols—conventionalized human projections of the frightening power of the wilderness the whites felt compelled to conquer. The argument that it is time to abandon such symbolization, time for popular culture to deal realistically with the Indian culture as it really is and was, is unimpeachable. But, really, people like the Friars must begin by understanding such simple distinctions as the one between stereo-type and symbol before they can fairly criticize the work of the moviemakers.
And to be truly persuasive, of course, they must give some evidence of having actually seen and freshly interpreted their material. They dismiss, for example, the 1944 Buffalo Bill as “a pedestrian attempt to sanctify” the title character, when, in fact, the movie is also, and more significantly, a long and quite moving plea for peace and understanding between the races, including, early on, a powerful scene in which an Indian woman specifically and vehemently rejects a liberal-minded attempt to impose white “civilization” on her and her people. It could have been written yesterday, and fair-minded critics more interested in truth than polemics would have devoted more than a few shoddy lines to this interesting film. Another example: Northwest Passage is correctly described as a film about a punitive expedition that historically wiped out the Abenaki tribe, but the Friars fail to note that in this 1940 film the humane and gifted Ring Vidor, in shooting the final massacre, turned it into a tragic and terrible indictment of the very crime that so exercises the authors—genocide. His imagery carefully undercuts the script's implication that a heroic triumph was being enacted here.
One could extend the list of carelessnesses and stupidities in The Only Good Indian indefinitely. They are what result when heavy thumbs are applied to the historical scale. Setting out to prove the thesis that white attitudes toward the Indian are irredeemably racist, the authors refuse to consider—or else contemptuously dismiss—all significant attempts by the guilty liberal conscience (which came to Hollywood when the sound track did) to reverse previous attitudes, refuse to concede the difference between cheap B pictures and serials and the more thoughtfully wrought major films of the sound era. The result is a book that is one-dimensional, hysterical, and useless as scholarship or criticism—and therefore useless also to a good cause.
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Mr. Bogle, who is black and therefore entitled to a larger sense of outrage than the Friars (who are not “Native Americans”), has the discipline and thoughtfulness to resist the easy impulse. It must, of course, be emphasized that the blacks live a little closer to the center of American life than the Indians, which means that a somewhat wider range of roles—and larger roles, at that—have been available to them. Moreover, since slavery effectively destroyed their culture and since they rarely passed over into armed warfare against the whites, their representation in the movies has been quite different from that of the Indians; they have rarely been shown as either mysterious exotics or as savages, noble or otherwise. Partial familiarity bred, in their case, contemptuous stereotypes; and though Mr. Bogle is properly withering about those, he is also aware that, however bad they were, they at least provided black men and women with sizable roles to play in a wide range of films—a range that was unavailable to Indian performers. Where such roles exist, the possibility for talented performers to transcend, to humanize, stereotypes also exists, and Mr. Bogle is both sympathetic about the problem and correctly and enthusiastically appreciative of actors and actresses who achieved this transcendence—Nina Mae Mc-Kinney, Hattie McDaniel, Rex Ingram, Butterfly McQueen, to name just a few. He even has kind and intelligent words—properly so—about performers whose reputations have perhaps been unfairly discounted by a new, more militant, generation of commentators—Step-in Fetchit, Rochester, Bojangles. And, throughout, he demonstrates a compassionate understanding of how difficult it was, until recently, for black dramatic actors (Canada Lee, Juano Hernandez, James Edwards) to develop and sustain careers their gifts entitled them to, given the erratic nature of Hollywood's concern with subject matter in which they might find work that was worthy of them.
He is aware that many of the movies of the 30's and early 40's, when black roles were the most heavily stereotypical, were also movies that, on the whole, have stood the test of time better than the later films in which a self-conscious “awareness” of blacks as “problem people” (Mr. Bogle's term) deadened everyone's creative force. After all, given a choice, who wouldn't rather see Cabin in the Sky than Home of the Brave? Isn't Hernandez a more interesting actor than Sidney Poi-tier, Rochester a more challenging theatrical presence than Sammy Davis, Jr.? Mr. Bogle certainly implies as much—and with that particular energy that comes to a critic engaged in the process of rediscovery and revaluation.
He understands, of course, that the “problem people” fulfilled a necessary social and educational function—and helped the Hollywood liberals to ease their guilty consciences—whatever their artistic value. Indeed, though he is slightly more ambiguous on this point than on others, he seems to feel that they were probably preferable—it's really a Hobson's choice—to the reversion to stereotype taking place in the cheap action films now being produced in job lots for a mostly black market—all those super-cool private eyes, pimps, and pushers being, in his view, nothing more than the Buck seen from a new, more appreciative, angle of vision. There is an irony in this, in that the great pioneer of the Buck stereotype was D. W. Griffith, a Southerner projecting a racist's nightmare on the nation's screens a half century ago. That the new moviemakers are using this figure as hero rather than menace does not really change anything, and in fact this creation is turning out to be, as it should be, as distasteful to a new generation of thoughtful blacks as Griffith's version of it was to the then fledgling NAACP in 1914. Undoubtedly Shaft and Superfly and the rest provide a certain immediate fantasy-gratification for the black audience, a gratification that has long been available to white fans of such figures as John Wayne. But as Mr. Bogle sternly asserts, in the long run the New Buck (if one may so identify him) is no more socially edifying than his more obviously deplorable ancestor.
It is a measure of Mr. Bogle's judiciousness that he is very clear on this last point. It is one more bit of evidence showing that he has responded to a complex subject with a complex, non-ideological, aesthetically aware work, infused throughout with a patient humanity and written in a carefully tempered tone. Indeed, given the wretched quality of nearly all the historical scholarship about movies, most of it witlessly journalistic in style and aspiring to no more than the evocation of nostalgia as a substitute for a firm point of view, his work could stand as an example for those dealing with less immediately “relevant” (but no less worthwhile) film topics. Now, if only someone would do as well for the Indians. . . .
