The Blackface Bomb
Last night I was watching the 1949 show-business musical You’re My Everything for The Fractured Mirror, the absolutely massive and exhaustive history of American movies about the film industry that I have been working obsessively on for the past two years.
It was, for the most part, a reasonably entertaining if not particularly distinguished little movie with likable leads in Anne Baxter (whose grandfather, incidentally, is Frank Lloyd Wright, which has nothing to do with this piece but is a borderline interesting bit of trivia) and Dan Dailey, some nice musical numbers and colorful milieus in the overlapping, intertwined worlds of vaudeville, silent film and early sound film.
It’s from a story by George Jessel, who played the lead role in The Jazz Singer on Broadway and was offered the part in the film as well but turned it down for monetary reasons.
The experience obviously made a deep impression on him. You can’t turn down the lead role in possibly the most influential movie of all time without regrets.
Lanky song and dance man Dailey’s career goes back to vaudeville and, disconcertingly but not surprisingly, minstrel shows.
So I probably should not have been surprised, let alone shocked, that in the film’s woeful third act the emphasis shifts the focus from Dailey’s song and dance man and his reluctant actress wife Hannah Adams (Baxter) to their precocious daughter Jane (Shari Robinson).
The little girl with the mega-watt smile inherits the show business bug from her dad and, against the wishes of her blueblood mother, becomes a movie star exactly like Shirley Temple.
The tiny little show-stopper even performs “On the Good Ship Lollipop”, Temple’s signature song. In a staggeringly misguided tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Temple’s onscreen sidekick and dance partner, Timothy O’Connor performs the number, and several others, in blackface.
I probably should have seen that coming but I found it jarring all the same. I’ve been doing the deepest of deep dives for my book, which will be in the 650 to 700 page range so I am learning things about old movies I never did while getting a degree in Comm Arts at the University of Wisconsin at Madison or from my 26 years as a professional pop culture writer.
So I know damn well just how pervasive and resilient racism is in this country.
The sound film revolution began with a movie about blackface involving a vaudeville superstar who seemingly never tired of slathering on burnt cork and singing about his mammy and love of Dixieland.
Yet throughout this wonderful, strange and sometimes disturbing journey I regularly find myself enjoying a slight movie from our distant past and then BOOM, seemingly out of nowhere blackface minstrelsy breaks out.
A lot of the weird, obscure movies about the film industry that I cover in the book are not available streaming legally, anywhere, so I end up on a lot of dodgy foreign streaming sites.
Needles to say, they do not begin with content warnings about racist context or Ben Mankiewicz explaining their historical context.
So while I should be prepared for egregious displays of racism in old movies I’m regularly shocked and horrified by the extent and intensity of this old-timey bigotry.
I was not, for example, surprised to find blackface in The Jolson Story and its exquisitely unnecessary sequel Jolson Sings Again (much of which is about the making and success of The Jolson Story) but I was somehow surprised by the sheer amount of blackface.
These unwelcome explosions are a reminder of how deeply racist our nation is and has always been. Heck, Heck, Lorne Michaels’ Saturday Night Live was doing blackface well into the new millennium.
Our country’s racial history is a vast field littered with land mines. It’s not just old movies. If you’re not careful or prepared you end up stumbling unto a lot of them.
There are many different insidious forms of racism. Putting on black facepaint and performing a crude, racist caricature of African-Americans just happens to be a very blatant, public form.
The disconcerting thing is that I imagine that Jessel and Dailey, both of whom had extensive experience performing in blackface decades before You’re My Everything was made, probably thought the film was a loving tribute to black entertainers like Bojangles and not a form of hate.
I really shouldn’t be shocked or even surprised by American racism but the fact that I still am suggests that I still somehow have a little naive idealism about this country after all despite knowing damn well that our racial history is a racist history and a tragedy whose slimy tentacles ensnare seemingly every institution, not just the movie industry.
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