In honor of Black History Month, TIME critic Richard Corliss surveys nearly a century of cinema, and reflects on 25 defining works that broke down the walls of intolerance on the big screen
For a half century, Ralph Cooper was the host of Amateur Night at the Apollo, the vibrant showcase that launched the careers of stars from Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn to Luther Vandross, Michael Jackson and Lauryn Hill. But in the 30s he was also the star of black-cast movies — quickie musical melodramas produced by whites but filled with the teeming acting and singing talent of African American denied the chance of mainstream movie stardom. In the custom of the day, the hero and heroine tended to be light-skinned, the comedians and villains dark. These “race movies” had minuscule budgets and a three- or four-day shooting schedule; they are as unpolished as a hobo’s footwear, but some of them have a raw energy that eluded Hollywood.
Cooper got top billing in The Duke Is Tops, a genial backstage story about a producer who lets his protege find her own way to stardom. The ingenue was played by 20-year-old Lena Horne in her movie debut. When Horne was signed by MGM, the film was rereleased, this time as The Bronze Venus; Horne’s name was now at the top, Cooper’s in agate print below. A slim, beyond-beautiful singer-actress, Horne had graduated to “real” movies. She could have been Hollywood’s first black-glamour musical star, but when she played in films with a mixed-race cast she was given discrete musical numbers that could be excised when shown at white theaters in the South. She lost the role of the mulatto Julie LaVerne in 1951′s Show Boat to Ava Gardner. That was about it for Horne, who got out of town just before it cracked opened the door to black actors.
To list the three most important early films is to recognize how deeply entrenched was the racism of Hollywood and its audiences. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the first blockbuster feature, depicted post-Civil War blacks as such corrupt and ignorant creatures that it literally revived the Ku Klux Klan, leading to a renewed wave of lynchings. The Jazz Singer, the first famous talking picture, had Al Jolson in blackface, singing “Mammy” to his Yiddishe mama. And Gone With the Wind, the all-time box office champ, was a sympathetic portrait of Southern slave owners and the black servants who remained loyal to them after the War Between the States. To argue that the ordinary moviegoer, dazzled by the entertainment value of these films, may have been unaware of their easy contempt for blacks, only proves how organic and institutionalized racism had become.
In GWTW, the tragedy is meant to be of a fiery gentlewoman, Scarlett O’Hara, fallen on hard times — and by extension, of the disenfranchised Southern aristocracy — not of the enslaved blacks whose cheap labor had fueled the South’s economy for more than a century. That said, the movie did, still does, provide rousing sexual melodrama and a defining performance of the willful, wile-ful Southern belle-bitch played by Vivien Leigh. The film also gave two meaty roles to black actresses: Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, the wise, domineering, de-facto manager of the Tara manor; and Butterfly McQueen as Prissy, the dithery housemaid who shrieks, in a tone that would make dogs wince, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!” All right, one meaty role. Mammy — not Scarlett or her lust-object Rhett Butler or that ethereal wimp Ashley Wilkes — is the movie’s moral center and the stern arbiter of Scarlett’s strategies and whims.
The role won the rotund McDaniel an Oscar as the year’s best supporting actress. She might have earned another for her acceptance speech, a moving masterpiece of overflowing emotion capped by dignity. “I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry,” she told the audience, and she was, even if the industry was not a credit to her and every other black actor. McDaniel played in hundreds of movies, almost always as an assertive domestic, but she was grateful for the work. As she famously said, “Hell, I’d rather play a maid than be one.”
On Saturday night, hours after Houston’s death at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Davis — Houston’s mentor, producer, champion and longtime friend — memorialized her at this year’s gala.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
