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Just about the only benefit today's Negroes can trace to the standard Hollywood product is the current Black Power slogan, "Ungawa!"—a fake African chant from a Tarzan picture. Even in 1950 reruns, Negroes are chuckleheaded or criminal. In mystery pictures, it is a Negro who discovers the corpse and scampers away shouting "Feets do yo' stuff!" Says the comic: "I don't want any dark innuendoes." Chirps the chauffeur: "Anybody call me?" Even such all-black musicals as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky patronized as they provided employment. "It's been a long journey to this moment," said Sidney Poitier when he received his Oscar for Lilies of the Field in 1963. But his was only the last lap. The first million miles were traveled by Eddie Anderson, Stepin' Fetchit, Willie Best, Butterfly McQueen and other gifted actors whose long ride in the back of the bus can be seen again every week on television.
With the new liberalities of the current cinema, such antique prejudices seem laughable—almost as laughable as the '60s movies will be to late-show fans of the '70s and '80s. Then as now, viewers equipped with 20/20 hindsight will perceive the depressed, desolated land that bled through the '30s films, the hunger for absolutes and the shrill patriotism that surrounded the war and cold war of the '40s. They will recognize the erosion of supposedly permanent mores and attitudes that characterized the late '50s and early '60s. They will survey the cliches of this period—the alienation bit, the under-30 thing, the unromantic sex kick—and will realize that no matter how laughable, these stereotypes, too, reflect a troubled reality. The hippie scene and the identity crisis will no doubt someday assume an air of innocence and cherished worth along with the Front Porch, the Soda Fountain and the Family, which now warm the nostalgia of late-night retrospection. Hollywood, which liked to see itself as Everyman's Scheherazade, has also been his Cassandra—the two roles are inseparable.
FILM FOSSILS
Perhaps the foremost collector of film trivia is Harry Purvis, a Canadian writer whose catalogue which appears irregularly in TV Guide, includes the following:
"Must you always think like a marshal? Can't you think like a human being just this once?" Dorothy Malone to Ronald Reagan in Law and Order.
"Why me? You have the pick of my brother's harem." Lucille Ball to Raymond Burr in The Magic Carpet.
"How long do you think I could hold on to my job if it got out that I had a transparent offspring?" Philip Abbott to Diane Brewster in The Invisible Boy.
"So, a low-born blacksmith is the famous Desert Hawk." Yvonne De Carlo to Richard Greene in The Desert Hawk.
"You're wasting your time on the major. He's a fighting machine, a soldier's soldier, with no time for weakness." Bing Russell to Jewell Lain in Suicide Battalion.
"This girl's of a different race, of a different world. You've got your friends, your position." C. Aubrey Smith to Leslie Howard in Never the Twain Shall Meet.