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As early as the 1940s, Hollywood realised that films about race and prejudice could not only be popular amongst American audiences but also form an important artistic stance in the fast-changing cultural climate.
Coincidentally, it was Gregory Peck (who would later become an integral part of film history – and the representation of black lives in American cinema – playing Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird) who appeared in Fox’s highest grossing movie of 1947, Gentlemen’s Agreement.
Peck plays Philip Green, an undercover journalist posing as a Jew to investigate antisemitism in upper-class New York. The film won several awards including three Oscars, one for Best Film.
The success of Gentlemen’s Agreement opened the door for other films dealing with racial prejudice, class, and a multi-cultural society. For example, Sidney Poitier would make his screen debut in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 film noir No Way Out playing a doctor faced with the ignorant taunts of an uneducated working class. It was one of the first instances where a black actor played the lead in a Hollywood film.
Other examples throughout the 50s include James Dean’s Giant that featured racism against Mexican-Americans, and Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono which saw actor James Shigeta, an American-born performer of Japanese descent, attempting to solve a murder case in the Japanese quarter of Los Angeles. The film sees several characters in a film noir setting having to deal with various issues of race including a blossoming romance between Shigeta’s Japanese cop and American girl Victoria Shaw.
Yet Hollywood has favoured casting its gaze towards the African-American struggle; a reaction, it could be argued, to the contempt – and sense of guilt in liberal thinking – towards the slave trade.
Another reason could be the rising star that was Sidney Poitier. 1958 saw Poitier feature in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, about two escaped convicts (Poitier and Tony Curtis) shackled together, having to cooperate in order to survive. Like In The Heat Of The Night, there are two characters – one white, one black – who have to form a bond. Their prejudices towards each other begin to break down as they learn more about each other. The film won two Oscars.
In 1961, Poitier took on another role, this time in Daniel Petrie’s A Raisin In The Sun. The film is important because it is based on the original theatre play by Lorraine Hansberry, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie version. The play was the first to be written by a black woman to debut on Broadway, as well as the first to be directed by a black director (Lloyd Richards). It deals with one family’s experiences living in Chicago’s South Side, bringing together themes of poverty and class, as well as race and identity.
In the film Poitier plays Walter Lee Younger, an idealistic limousine driver, who dreams of wealth and prosperity. The film, arriving both on stage and in theatres prior to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is considered one of the most significant of its type. It is ground-breaking in its depiction of race relations and one of the first mainstream movies to feature an almost entirely African-American cast.
Before the Civil Rights Act
By 1962 pressure was growing on the government to end segregation, introduce fair voting practices, and to instigate laws protecting the civil rights of African-American people.
At the time it was common in the southern states to see African-American prisoners wrongly tried and convicted, unfairly judged in a court of law, and given none of the protections enjoyed by white Americans in similar situations.
This was the problem faced by white attorney Atticus Finch in Robert Mulligan’s film To Kill A Mockingbird. Finch, played brilliantly by Gregory Peck, is a strong-minded individual who sees right from wrong in a single colour. He makes it his mission to protect the rights of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white girl. However, he is constantly confronted by the prejudices of the small town and the failings of a judicial system still overrun by racism.
After the Civil Rights Act
In the period after the Civil Rights Act Hollywood continued to make social commentary movies that looked at the African-American position within society. The Act itself didn’t immediately change the way films were made, or alter their view on race and prejudice. Much like policing of the new equality provisions made law by the Civil Rights Act, change was slow.
Like To Kill A Mockingbird, The Defiant Ones, and The Crimson Kimono in the late 50s and early 60s, race was still an issue treated as disparate social groups struggling to live together.
This continued in 1964 with Carl Lerner’s little seen Black Like Me, about a white American journalist who adopts blackface and travels around racially segregated southern states in order to investigate the difficulties facing African-American people. The film was based on John Howard Griffin’s book which highlight the fact social change was a slow process and still very much in its infancy.
In 1967, Sidney Poitier released two films, one of which was of course In The Heat Of The Night. The other was Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, a film that concerned itself with the then much-taboo subject of interracial relationships.
I’m reminded of Atticus Finch’s comment to the jury in To Kill A Mockingbird when he says, “It was guilt that motivated her”, alluding to a white woman’s sexual attraction to a black man. “She has committed no crime. She has merely broken a rigid and time-honoured code of our society. A code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst, as unfit to live with,” he says.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner deals with the proposed marriage between a black doctor (Poitier) and his white fiancée (Katherine Houghton). Poitier’s doctor is conceived as idealistically perfect so the only problem with the relationship would have to be based on race. The film was controversial because its theme was still very taboo (highlighted in the film by the prejudice seen by both black and white families), and interracial marriage was still illegal in seventeen American states until the summer of 1967.
In Poitier’s other film of 1967, In The Heat Of The Night, he has to deal with the prejudice of a small town while investigating the murder of an upper-class businessman.
The film was ground-breaking and massively influential, but in addition, sought to remove itself from the melodrama of racial-tension and social-commentary movies.
In The Heat Of The Night was instead a slow-burning mystery-thriller which worked perfectly in representing race and prejudice under the prescribed conventions of its genre.
The sequel, They Call Me Mister Tibbs (released in 1970), was even more in debt to generic convention. It was the popularity of these movies, the iconic depiction of African-American machismo and self-assurance, and the star-quality of Poitier, that saw a vast number of films appear in the 1970s designed around similar ideals to appeal to an emerging black audience.
Independent cinema and blaxploitation
While it was a fruitful period for black artists, many sought other outlets such as poetry, performance art and literature. If black life in film was still vastly underrepresented, it was also, in the guise of Poitier, perpetuating white fantasies.
There were however exceptions. A favourite of Malcolm X – Jewish filmmaker Michael Roemer’s Nothing But A Man arrived in 1964 – which focused on the racism faced by a black couple in early 1960s Alabama.
In need of a spark, black cinema was being increasingly influenced by the black power movement, and got a much-needed boost courtesy of Mario Van Peebles who, after starring in the drama The Story of a Three-day Pass about a black soldier in Paris, directed comic satire Watermelon Man in 1970 about a white middle class suburbanite who wakes up one morning to discover he’s turned black.
“It was Black Power cinema manifest and satisfied a craving among many in the post-civil rights-era black community for screen representation that departed from the saintly, white liberal-friendly likes of Sidney Poitier,” says film critic Ashley Clark.
These films featured a largely black cast, and were made by black writers and directors. They were made for young, urbanised African-American audiences who were experiencing unprecedented freedoms yet still dealing with an unsettled multicultural climate.
Many of the films were quickly produced on low-budgets, meaning dozens appeared each year. Examples include Shaft in 1971, Black Mama, White Mama in 1972 (which was a loose re-imagining of The Defiant Ones), Coffy in 1973 (one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite films), and Black Shampoo in 1975 (which basically copied Hal Ashby’s Shampoo).
Pam Grier, who would later star in Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, became the pin-up girl of black-orientated film in the 1970s, appearing in some of the better features to appear during the decade including Coffy, Black Mama, White Mama, Foxy Brown, Sheba, Baby, and Mandingo.
However, many of the films were trashy at best, throwaway stories that were exploitative in nature. Thus came the term “blaxploitation”. The films didn’t concern themselves with race issues as had been seen in the 1960s, favouring a pastiche of stereotypes. They were criticised by the NAACP, and by some quarters for appealing only to drug-dealers and pimps. This saw the genre diminish as the decade drew to a close.
Says art collector John Duke Kisch, who published the book, Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art, blaxploitation was a way to “stand up to The Man”. He says, “But by the mid-1970s audiences were tired of the drug dealers and the pimps. After that there was a big lull until the arrival of Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee, who proved that it still took an independent filmmaker to go places Hollywood would not.”
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