By Robert K. Lightning.
Whether through indifference, innuendo, or caustic commentary, she makes her opinions apparent to her employers and, essentially, subverts any pretense of absolute authority over her. She is effectively unmanageable.”
In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1973, I recently pulled Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks off the shelf. (A fifth edition was published in 2016.) An example of the enhancement of film studies by identity politics at the time (Molly Haskell’s feminist study, From Reverence to Rape, was published the following year), Bogle’s landmark study provides (to quote the book’s subtitle) “an interpretive history of Blacks in American films.” Bogle, who has published regularly on the topic of Black entertainment, should be recognized for his career-long devotion to the subject. (He is frequently interviewed on Turner Classic Movies and elsewhere on this topic.) This extends to comprehensive biographies of entertainers Ethel Waters, Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne, the last published in 2023.
In his study, Bogle distills the Black characters that dominated the screen during Hollywood’s classical era (and haunted Black onscreen characterizations thereafter) down to the five prototypes of the book’s title (and a few subcategories, such as the pickaninny.) Bogle does such a good job classifying Black characters of the classical era that it becomes nearly impossible to identify exceptions. A character such as Paul Robeson’s Jericho Jackson in the British production, Jericho/Dark Sands (Thornton Freeland, 1937) is almost unimaginable in an American production prior to WW II. Through Jackson (a conscripted Black soldier in the segregated American Expeditionary Forces during WW I) the film (a musical-adventure film) weighs the relative value of self-sacrifice, self-effacement, and Christian forbearance (qualities associated with Blacks since at least Stowe’s Uncle Tom) against that of heroic self-determination.

Initially, Jackson is aligned with the former values: seeking to quiet fellow soldiers unhappy with their lot (they are on a ship bound for Europe and war), he sings the song “My Way”, a hymn to the virtues of forbearance in the face of unfair circumstances (“Lonely road, with a heavy load/Brother, are you walking my way?”), with the promise of “green pastures” in the future. But when he is arrested after accidentally killing a superior (who tried to impede his efforts to rescue men after the ship is torpedoed), he becomes Stowe’s George Harris, the Black man of action: he escapes the ship, steals a boat (at which point he acquires a White sidekick he refers to playfully as “Boy”) and eventually joins a tribe of desert nomads for whom his past medical training, as well as military and leadership skills, prove valuable. In the meantime (and unbeknownst to Jackson), a White officer (and longtime friend) is blamed for Jackson’s escape and court-martialed, vowing to one day clear his name by bringing Jackson back. When he catches up with Jackson (now a family man and leader of the tribe), Jackson (after initial resistance) agrees to return with him. However, in the face of Jackson’s achievements, the officer has a change of heart and departs alone, leaving Jackson to his new life.
If a White man sacrificing his own interests for a Black’s would be hard to replicate in thirties Hollywood (as it would be in British cinema of the period: Robeson follows the more typical path three years later in the British Proud Valley [Pen Tennyson, 1940], where he sacrifices his life to preserve that of a White youth), a Black man exhibiting Jackson’s agency and self-determination would be equally so. In thirties Hollywood, Black independence was almost always curbed by Black servility. In fact, in my viewing experience, I can identify only two Black characters in thirties-Hollywood films who not only challenge (without quite circumventing) the usual categories but also exhibit agency and self-interest. (Morehouse-graduate Dr. Marchand/Clarence Brooks of John Ford’s Arrowsmith [1931] meets the first requirement but is basically in the film to facilitate the White hero’s goals.) The role of the criminal gang’s driver Slim (Slim Thompson) in The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936) is one instance. Despite ample evidence of servility (he addresses the gang’s leader/Humphrey Bogart habitually as “boss”), he nonetheless openly objects to decisions made that do not benefit him or are opposed to his vested interests, suggesting that he is more of an independent contractor than a servant. In his speech, behavior and ideas, he suggests a contemporary working-class political awareness: in his encounters with the very formal Black chauffeur of a wealthy couple (who wears traditional livery), the very informal Slim addresses him as “fellow brother”, suggesting not only racial solidarity but familiarity with contemporary political lingo (fellow traveler). I have described Slim elsewhere as the embodiment of Malcolm X’s field negro, in opposition to the haughty and compliant house negro represented by the chauffeur. Neither a totally faithful tom, ruthless buck nor comic coon, Slim defies Bogle’s classifications.
Even more unclassifiable is Leigh Whipper’s Crooks in Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men (1939). Crooks (a ranch hand) radically inverts concurrent Jim Crow policies and practices by denying his White co-workers access to his quarters without his permission, preferring books to their companionship. Crooks’ defiance is even more impressive for his ignoble position on the ranch: he is subjected to occasional violence as the boss’s literal whipping boy. As usual, the Black man’s demonstration of agency is mitigated by the narrative, here not by excess displays of servility but by a very human need: Crooks’ separatist agenda masks an underlying desire for companionship and inclusion within the all-White community of ranch hands which, prohibited by custom, he inverts with his own exclusionary rule. (He desires and is almost included in the idyllic homosocial community the White protagonists seek to form…almost.) Despite the conditional nature of his agency, the very idea of a Black character asserting privacy rights in thirties Hollywood (let alone one of such psychological complexity) is astonishing.
It is probably no coincidence that the Slim and Crooks characters have Broadway origins (Thompson and Whipper originated their screen roles there), New York theatre being less beholden to satisfying regional tastes and, thus, generally more progressive. But what of the prototypes that dominated Black characterizations in prewar Hollywood? Bogle’s revolutionary intent, after all, was not only to heighten awareness of the types themselves but (in many cases) to celebrate the Black actors who brought them to life. Whatever their historical uses, prototypes (like genres) are politically neutral phenomena, ripe for inflection by individual artists: the mammy prototype is no more defined by Hattie McDaniel than by Louise Beavers or Ethel Waters, each of them only representing a variation on the type, a variation determined not only by personal idiosyncrasies but also the artistic collaboration typical of classical Hollywood filmmaking as well as the historical moment. Was there enough wiggle room for the expression of agency and independence within the familiar servile roles in thirties Hollywood?

Bogle’s conclusion that there was indeed room is one with which I concur, and I will argue that both positive and negative agency (as forms of resistance) find expression respectively in the work of two artists, McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen. Beginning with McDaniel (I hope to examine McQueen in the very near future in a companion to this essay), it is difficult to at first determine the essence of her screen persona, so many variations on the African-American domestic did she encompass. There is the maid-for-hire half-heartedly performing her duties in Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935). There is the equally indifferent maid of China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935), so slyly covetous that, through persistent hints, she finally succeeds in getting her employer (Jean Harlow) to relinquish one of her negligees (and, eventually, her entire wardrobe) to her. There is the reliable domestic of so many other films, who takes on responsibilities willingly, even enthusiastically, but who is, conversely, undiplomatic in her exchanges with her employers. But whether through indifference, innuendo, or caustic commentary, she makes her opinions apparent to her employers and, essentially, subverts any pretense of absolute authority over her. She is effectively unmanageable. (1)
The opening breakfast scene in Warner Brothers’ 1934 adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (William Keighley) provides an excellent example of McDaniel’s “unmanageable maid” persona. As the Babbitt family members gather for breakfast, their maid Rosalie (McDaniel) serves but, while doing so, she can’t refrain from including herself in their table conversation (when the daughter expresses a fondness for gardenias, Rosalie impulsively rhapsodizes at length on the flowers herself), going so far as to offer her opinions as the Babbitts discuss family matters (she weighs in on the mysterious telegrams Mr. Babbitt has been receiving), matters which propriety dictates are private. While most of the family regard her indiscreet behavior as humorous (Rosalie should, of course, pretend that she can’t hear their conversations), Mr. Babbitt takes particular exception to her behavior (“Isn’t there any way to keep her quiet?”). So unmanageable is she that he, the head of the household, has personally purchased an egg timer to keep her from singing (she times a two-and-a-half-minute egg by the length of “one verse and the chorus” of a loudly sung blues song). She continues the habit despite his efforts.
The humor of this scene (as in much of McDaniel’s work) derives from her demolition of the wall dividing employee and employer through a refusal to even recognize that one exists. McDaniel is one of classical Hollywood’s great social levelers and, while the Babbitts are solidly middle class, her behavior similarly vanquishes both the pretensions of lower-class employers and the polite authoritarianism of upper-class employers. Thus, as the inept and indifferent maid in Alice Adams, she is instrumental in dismantling the façade of gentility the lower-class Adamses have attempted to construct to impress an upper-class visitor. On the other hand, when scolded by her upper-class employer in The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938) for showing insufficient deference to “our guest”, McDaniel brazenly retorts, “I didn’t ask her up!” Of course, McDaniel’s subversive temerity is regularly contradicted by the inclusion of scenes where she is called upon to display appropriate deference, uncharacteristic fear, timidity, etc., scenes clearly meant to appease viewers (or state film censors) offended by her boldness. These moments are akin to those in Katharine Hepburn films (Alice Adams is a prime example) where the star expresses contrition for transgressions committed in the course of the narrative (always accompanied by copious tears). The strategy of appeasement (or recuperation) is fairly transparent in both cases and is, after all, not the reason we remember these stars.
Although her anti-authoritarianism is exclusively individualistic in practice, McDaniel’s role as a social leveler can be occasionally levied in support of group efforts. Set in the world of horse racing, breeding and betting, Saratoga (Jack Conway, 1937) features McDaniel as Rosetta, maid to a breeder’s snobbish daughter (Jean Harlow), the latter aspiring to marry an aristocratic Englishman. Horse racing functions as a metaphor for American democracy in the film and, to demonstrate this point, in one scene set on a train, horse lovers gather in the club car and engage in a sing along, individuals taking turns improvising verses to the song “The Horse with the Dreamy Eyes”, the song’s theme (the risks of betting on a whim) clearly resonant with contemporary audiences suffering through an economic crisis brought on by the caprices of capitalism. While performing her duties, Rosetta makes her way through the car and (the participants calling out, “Rosie!”) is immediately invited to participate, whereupon she provides her own improvised verse. Her integration into the all-White group, though countered to a degree by racial stereotyping (her verse links horse racing to misfortunes in or a helpless capitulation to romance, at that time a theme regularly associated with Black women) (2), nonetheless links all the participants as sometimes luckless aficionados of the sport. In this expression of 1930s democratic feeling, where hierarchical race relations are partially abolished, it seems appropriate that McDaniel-the- social-leveler should be included.
McDaniel is one of classical Hollywood’s great social levelers and, while the Babbitts are solidly middle class, her behavior similarly vanquishes both the pretensions of lower-class employers and the polite authoritarianism of upper-class employers.”
In the scene from Miss Manton referenced above, McDaniel’s behavior is described (by a guest) as a forecast of an impending proletariat revolution. Such comic asides are not atypical of Hollywood films of the Depression years and bespeak a prevailing unease regarding the possibility of just such a political development. As the Unmanageable Maid, Hattie McDaniel’s subversiveness registers primarily in her private relations with her (often White-female) employers. But one wonders what political purposes her unmanageability could have served in the public sphere of a narrative. A stunning moment at the end of The Shopworn Angel (H.C. Potter, 1938) hints at what that might have looked like within a Hollywood film. As the maid of entertainer Margaret Sullavan, McDaniel seeks to deliver vital information about Sullavan’s husband (who has possibly been killed in the war) at the posh nightclub where she works. Arriving while Sullavan is performing, McDaniel brushes right past the White maitre’d when he tries to question her, her race clearly an unspoken barrier to entry into the all-White environment. Without a word, an unstoppable McDaniel proceeds to the dining area and delivers the message, her action easily explained as evidence of her commitment to her duties. However, what cannot be said (but, I would argue, is clearly dramatized) is that the restaurant’s (presumed) exclusionary policy threatens to impede the immediate interests of characters with whom we are deeply concerned. Thus, the scene also functions as a silent rebuke of Jim Crow laws and customs, a rebuke all the more powerful for being inexplicit. (3)
I can think of no other actress of that historical moment who could convey the implications of this scene so forcefully without uttering a word and it is regrettable that the potential it heralds was never fully realized. Rather than a political agitator in the public sphere, we more typically get a McDaniel who channels her energies into the home in fierce devotion to her White mistress. Moreover, in films like Gone with the Wind (various directors, 1939), The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941), and Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944) if there are transgressions, other women commit them while she is left to maintain traditions, decorum and (in the last) the American home. (Even in the all-Black musical number “Ice Cold Katie” from the 1943 film Thank Your Lucky Stars [David Butler], she is the number’s conservative voice enjoining independent Katie to marry.) Nonetheless, McDaniel remains obstinately unmanageable and a film like The Great Lie reveals the potentially complex uses to which her persona can be put even when it maintains the status quo. Here, McDaniel plays Violet, maid to Bette Davis’ Maggie. So devoted is Violet to Maggie’s interests that at times she functions essentially as an extension of Maggie: at one point after Maggie learns that her former fiancé, Pete (George Brent), has married another, Violet begins crying uncontrollably, releasing the tears that Maggie strenuously suppresses. In fact, so violent is Violet’s outburst that it is finally left to Maggie to comfort her. (Throughout the film, Blacks function as vehicles for the expression of emotions suppressed by or alien to the White-American bourgeoisie.) But (as is typical of McDaniel characters) Violet’s devotion is in constant tension with her chosen methods for expressing that devotion and this is where her unmanageability surfaces. Thus, when Pete arrives unannounced to proffer an explanation to Maggie, Violet (fearing the effect his presence will have on her mistress) bodily prevents his access to the home. (This is not the first time McDaniel has engaged physically with a man: in Murder by Television [Clifford Sanforth, 1935] she wrestles an intruder to the ground; in Miss Manton she matter-of-factly tosses a pitcher of water in Henry Fonda’s face.) Moreover, Violet is the one character to voice what comes closest to a frank critique of Pete’s intrusiveness and presumption: when he asks Violet why he can’t see Maggie, she responds (with disarming gravity), “Don’t ask me the reason why not, just tell me the reason why.” (Maggie herself equivocates on the matter.) Of course, this is all done in the name of propriety. (“Your lady wife must be waiting for you right now!”, she tells Pete). So, it seems fitting that once Maggie’s rival, Sandra, (the film’s most transgressive character, played by Mary Astor) arrives later in the narrative and fails to dismantle the family Maggie has (in the interim) constructed with Pete, it is left to Violet to imply Sandra’s presence has become superfluous (taking the family’s enfant heir by the hand, she says firmly, “Wave bye-bye to the lady”).

However one responds to McDaniel’s performance (that is, despite its subversiveness), it is important to remember Violet’s symbolic function in a work that cannot unambiguously support the bourgeois institutions (marriage and family) it describes (the scenes depicting Maggie and Pete’s post-marital bliss are particularly strained): as a willing participant in the cult of domesticity, she is as available for the film’s critique as are those institutions. Opportunities for such full-throttle performances as she gives in The Great Lie would diminish for McDaniel during the 1940s. (She appeared in over sixty films in the 1930s; fewer than twenty in the 1940s.) Although she remains a formidable presence, her roles in George Washington Slept Here (William Keighley, 1942), Janie (Michael Curtiz, 1944) and her final film, The Big Wheel (Edward Ludwig, 1949) are modest replicas of the radical, dialect-seeping servants that she had played in the previous decade. Although (as Bogle notes) servants had been the dominant category of roles available to Blacks in the 30s, new categories such as the New Negro began also to emerge, eventually supplanting the comic Black servant.
Bogle never satisfactorily defines the New Negro as a type (describing them at one point as “Sympathetic Blacks”) (4) but he traces the type back at least to Dr. Marchand in Ford’s 1931 Arrowsmith. He also includes Leigh Whipper’s Crooks in Of Mice and Men, Ernest Anderson’s Parry (falsely accused of vehicular homicide) in In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942) and Canada Lee’s Joe in Lifeboat (Hitchcock, 1944) in this category. What is most obvious about these characters is that (unlike the Black servants of the 30s) they are not comical. What is perhaps less obvious is that the films in which they appear (with the exception of Arrowsmith) foreground the issue of racism, a subject largely absent from films featuring comic Black servants. (Whale’s 1936 Showboat is an obvious exception.) In the films listed above, the New Negro functions as either a victim of racism or a witness to its effects. Huston’s In This Our Life, featuring Hattie McDaniel as the maid Minerva, is the perfect film to illustrate this transitional phase in Hollywood, with the character of Minerva incorporating elements of both the old and the emerging new.
As Minerva, the maid of the once-wealthy Timberlakes of Virginia, McDaniel is introduced in true comic fashion. While discussing the family’s ancestors with Roy (Olivia de Havilland), one of the Timberlake daughters, Minerva notes the similarities between Roy and her grandmother. Roy agrees but returns that she is not so pretty as her grandmother, to which Minerva bluntly responds “No”, the scene’s humor deriving not only from McDaniel’s perfectly timed and tuned delivery but her characteristic indiscretion. By contrast, her final scene (also with de Havilland) is uncharacteristically somber. Based on a false statement provided the police by Roy’s sister Stanley (Bette Davis), Minerva’s son Parry has been arrested for vehicular homicide and Roy visits Minerva to reconcile the conflicting accounts. In one of McDaniel’s rare displays of sorrow (Gone with the Wind having provided the most prominent prior opportunity), Minerva confirms Parry’s account, declaring that she would never lie to the Timberlakes, not even for her own son. Establishing the primacy of her devotion to the White family, Minerva convinces Roy of Parry’s account.
Both Minerva’s bluntness and her devotion are typical McDaniel traits but, as a sober witness to racial discrimination, McDaniel is briefly transformed into a New Negro. It is tempting to interpret this development as an attempt to reconceive the McDaniel persona by incorporating elements of the old and the new in the Minerva character. It can equally be argued that she is being politely shunted aside. McDaniel’s value as a commodity in Hollywood films at the time can perhaps be deigned from her limited screen time in the film: she appears in precisely three short scenes, in one of which her on-camera presence is insignificant and she does not utter a word. By contrast, Parry (the New Negro tout court) appears extensively throughout the film, his storyline functioning essentially as a subtext to the main storyline, a subtext where America’s discriminatory practices are dramatized. In his most important scene (a showcase for the talented Ernest Anderson), Parry becomes the spokesperson for the film’s progressive politics, describing discriminatory customs that we would identify today as systemic:
“Well, you see it’s like this Miss Roy, a White boy can take most any job and improve himself […] but a colored boy can’t do that: he can keep a job or lose a job, but he can’t get no higher up. So, he’s got to figure something he can do that no one can take away. That’s why I want to be a lawyer.”
So wide is the political schism between the thirties Comic Servant and the wartime New Negro (Parry notes that Minerva does not support his ambitions) that they scarcely seem to belong in the same film: although technically mother and son, McDaniel and Anderson do not appear in even one scene together.
If McDaniel was being phased out, the political and cultural climate of the time makes this process understandable. (5) Along with Pullman porters (frequently seen in American films of the classical era), the African-American female servant was doubtless the most prominent onscreen representative of America’s Black work force during the 1930s. It goes without saying that service could not be easily dismissed as an employment option during the economic crisis of this period and it is entirely possible that, in her unruliness, Hattie McDaniel served as a sometime inspiration to workers, domestic and otherwise. That the rebelliousness of her onscreen characters was largely removed from the public realm of her films and singular (its effectiveness, that is, was restricted to highly personalized labor-management relations within the home, very often in isolation from other workers) defines its limitations as a model for workplace negotiations outside of a very circumscribed sphere.
On the national front, a vision for the future of both Black-American labor and citizenship was emerging. In terms of labor, in 1941 civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph (the first president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Pullman porters’ union, an almost entirely Black-male organization), successfully pressured President Roosevelt into prohibiting racial discrimination “in the employment of workers in defense industries or government” (Executive Order 8802). (Roosevelt complied under threat of Randolph organizing a protest march on Washington, DC). Following the war, continuing pressure from Randolph and others subsequently led Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, to take the first steps toward desegregating the military in 1948 with Executive Order 9981. Neither labor imperative that Randolph represented (unionism, equitable hiring practices) can be thought to be adequately represented in classical Hollywood’s representations of Black domestic work. (It can even be argued that the reality of a Black organized-labor force is deliberately repressed in Hollywood’s depictions of Pullman porters.) Collectivism, either in the form of unionism or in the form of organized protest, cannot be said to correlate significantly with any of the constituents of McDaniel’s screen persona.

Clearly, the iconography of the McDaniel persona was not in sync with the aims or strategies of contemporary black leadership. (6) This becomes more obvious as the integrationist politics of the two landmark presidential directives begin to spill over into Hollywood productions. Wartime films such as Lifeboat and Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943) integrate a non-servant Black character (although in the former he remains quite servile) into an otherwise non-Black group. This was due in part to pressure from the federal government during the war to make a “more extensive use of motion pictures to indicate the participation of the Negro in the war effort and American life.” (7) As a consequence (and amazingly, in light of the postwar resurgence of conservatism in the country, epitomized by the HUAC hearings), by 1950, racial prejudice and integration had become acceptable themes in American film productions, with two films released that year featuring Black integrationist heroes, The Jackie Robinson Story (directed by Alfred E. Green and starring real-life integrationist Jackie Robinson) and No Way Out (Joseph Mankiewicz) starring Sidney Poitier (in his first major role) as a hospital’s first Black intern. The integration of American public and professional life by Black Americans, a theme largely ignored in McDaniel’s films, is repeatedly addressed in Poitier’s films (most of them released during the Civil Rights Movement.) Given the political (that is, policy-making) and cultural direction in which the country was heading in terms of race relations, it seems almost prescient that 1949, the year preceding Poitier’s Hollywood debut, would see the release of Hattie McDaniel’s final Hollywood film.
By the late 1960s, the Poitier persona (which was never significantly aligned with domestic work) would be almost exclusively aligned with professional labor, completing a process of bourgeoisification that the Black image in Hollywood films had been undergoing since the war, a process in which the dialect-infused, working-class, comic characters in which McDaniel had specialized could play little part. Sidney Poitier’s speech and diction bespoke the possession of a formal education, aligning him with middle-class values no matter the actual class affiliation of his characters; the beauty of Lena Horne (whose first Hollywood film was released in 1942) and, later, Dorothy Dandridge, also agreed with bourgeois standards. (This is in stark contrast to the “othering” of Black actress Theresa Harris shortly before the war in such films as Jezebel [William Wyler, 1938] and Blossoms in the Dust [Mervyn LeRoy, 1941], her skin darkened to such a degree that she is nearly unrecognizable.) By 1953, Hollywood was willing to cast Black actor Maidie Norman (whose lighter skin color and slim figure align with Horne’s and Dandridge’s) as Joan Crawford’s attractive personal secretary in Torch Song (Charles Walters), whose duties are (despite her more prestigious job classification) not entirely dissimilar to McDaniel’s as Crawford’s all-purpose maid in The Shining Hour (Frank Borzage, 1938). She is as a character, however, neither bossy nor servile in the manner of McDaniel, and infinitely more erudite and chic than McDaniel was ever allowed to be, more reminiscent of Eve Arden in her pairings with Crawford than McDaniel in hers.

As the Black-female domestic began to disappear from the screen, starting in 1947 McDaniel would find work as the eponymous maid of the hit sitcom “Beulah” (1944-54), first on radio then, briefly, on television. (The role had hitherto been played by white men. Upon her request, it was stipulated in her contract that she was to speak no dialect.) (8) The prototype, of course, doesn’t disappear from films entirely but she develops a more complex relationship to narrative events: one thinks of the Ethel Waters characters in both Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949) and The Member of the Wedding (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), Frances E. Williams in The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949) and, of course, Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959). As for the Unmanageable Maid, she makes at least one more appearance in a Hollywood film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (Stanley Kramer, 1967), ironically starring the era’s most prominent symbol of change, Sidney Poitier. The stunningly anachronistic reappearance of the type in the form of Isabel Sanford’s rambunctious Tillie, housekeeper to the wealthy Drayton family, is jarring to say the least but perhaps easily explained by the seeming radicalism of the film’s subject, interracial marriage. It seems likely that, in an effort to make the film more palatable for a middle-class audience (clearly the film’s target demographic), producers decided to cloak the subject in the garb of Old Hollywood, in terms of genre (romantic comedy), stars (Tracy and Hepburn, classical cinema’s favorite democratic couple) and such stereotypical figures as a benevolent priest, a hypocritical snob and, finally, an unmanageable maid. This seems to me the only possible reason for the reappearance of the Unmanageable Maid so long after her usefulness as a symbol of workplace subversiveness had expired.
References
Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films), Continuum International, New York, 1973, 2001.
Carlton Jackson, Hattie: The Life of Hattie McDaniel, Madison Books, London, 1990.
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Black Culture and the New Deal: the quest for civil rights during the Roosevelt era, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2009.
Footnotes
- If Hollywood’s Black actors were largely restricted to servant roles in the 1930s, the types of servants often associated with Black performers were hardly limited to only them. Thus, Marjorie Main’s Katie in Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) is an example of an unmanageable maid played by a White actress. As for the reliable or devoted (though still unmanageable) maid that McDaniel also specialized in, White actress Dorothy Adams’ Bessie is an extreme example of the type in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944).
- In just the year prior to Saratoga’s release, the song “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” betrays the singer (a Black woman passing for White) as indeed Black in Whale’s Showboat.
- If indeed a surreptitious anti-Jim Crow message was intended here, it might have been a product of the liberal politics of the film’s producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He would later direct the pro-integration drama, No Way Out (1950), starring Sidney Poitier in his first Hollywood film.
- Bogle, p. 137
- A perusal of the IMDb page (IMDb.com) of Black actress Louise Beavers (McDaniel’s rival for maid roles) testifies to a similar decline in employment opportunities for her during the same period.
- McDaniel spent much of the 1940s at loggerheads with NAACP president Walter White who, in his efforts to encourage more progressive Black representation in Hollywood films, managed to alienate some of Hollywood’s Black-acting establishment by bypassing them and negotiating directly with studio heads. The protracted McDaniel-White battle is detailed in chapter 6 (“The Crusade Against “Mammyism”) of Carlton Jackson’s biography Hattie.
- This statement was made by one Theodore Berry, liaison officer to the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), one of several agencies consolidated in 1942 into the wartime United States Office of War Information (OWI). During its brief existence (1942-45), the OWI was charged with supplying information about the war effort both in the US and abroad. Among the duties of its Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) was reviewing Hollywood film scripts (provided on a voluntary basis) and it was not above exerting pressure on studios to make changes more amenable to wartime aims. That creating progressive images of American life (including “positive” representations of African Americans) for foreign consumption was perhaps the BMP’s most important function is suggested by the fact that, following the abolishment of its domestic operations in 1943, Congress continued to fund its overseas branch. (Sklaroff, pp. 197-201)
- Jackson, p. 122.
Robert K. Lightning is a contributing editor for Film International.
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