Disney's Most Notorious Film (15 page)

CINEMATIC STEREOTYPES

At the core of these responses to
Song of the South
by Cooke, Bowles, and Griffin was the question of what constituted an acceptable, non-stereotypical presentation of African Americans. These letters reiterated how, by the 1940s, a wide range of supportive and resistant audiences were well aware of the damaging stereotypes
Song of the South
perpetuated. Audiences, film critics, and cultural scholars all referenced these dated images as part of their criticism. Another letter to the
Post
explicitly contextualized
Song of the South
in relation to pre–World War II cinematic (and radio) stereotypes: “Hollywood has always leaned over backwards in an attempt to portray American Negroes as sort of Amos ’n’ Andy buffoons, who stand, Phi Beta Kappa key on chain, in a hat-in-hand Uncle Tom attitude before the gates of justice, vainly waiting admittance. ‘Song of the South’ is no exception to the usual movie caricature of our colored citizens and Walt Disney has nothing to be proud of, with all due respects to the genteel original author, Joel Chandler Harris.”
⁴⁴
Over the decades, critics and audiences would become more protective of Harris’s property and more critical of Disney’s reframing. Fans of Harris in the 1940s could not have anticipated how much the film and subsequent Disney and Golden Books versions would come to replace Harris’s as the dominant conception of Brer Rabbit in American
culture. Through various cinematic, televisual, and literary means, most American children growing up after 1946 came to know an Uncle Remus who was mostly Disney’s creation.

Still, the literary version of Uncle Remus was not always seen as a positive image either. Writing for the progressive Jewish magazine
Commentary
, Bernard Wolfe authored a scathing piece on Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit in 1949. While acknowledging the Disney film and its lingering presence in songs and children’s books, Wolfe offered a detailed criticism of the original literary creation. “Uncle Remus—a kind of blackface Will Rogers, complete with standard minstrel dialect and plantation shuffle,” he wrote, “has had remarkable staying power in our popular culture, much more than Daddy Long Legs, say, or even Uncle Tom.”
⁴⁵
Unlike critics in the 1980s and 1990s like Patricia Turner and Peggy Russo, Wolfe’s effort was not to preserve Harris’s legacy as a genuine collection of rare African American slave folklore (if framed through a white perspective). Turner and Russo regarded
Song of the South
as a distortion of Harris, whose work they see as one of the few surviving links to original oral slave narratives. Wolfe believed that Harris’s work itself was a considerable distortion of those same oral slave stories. Wolfe’s article helped illuminate the ways that the Uncle Remus stereotype and the remediation of Brer Rabbit have always been controversial.

While mostly interested in questions of aesthetics, film critics saw the stereotypes as well. In an article titled “Spanking Disney,” Crowther criticized the studio’s use of generic Hollywood live action when he considered Disney’s one true artistic gift to be animation. Yet he also acutely criticized the film’s racial representations. The critic structured the piece as a series of spankings—“wham!”
⁴⁶
—followed by reasons why
Song of the South
was inadequate. In his critique of Disney’s treatment of race, he notes:

Old Uncle Remus (James Baskett) is just the sweetest and most wistful darky slave that ever stepped out of a sublimely unreconstructed fancy of the Old South.

As a matter of fact—wham!—you’ve committed a peculiarly gauche offense in putting out such a story in this troubled day and age. For no matter how much one argues that it’s childish fiction, anyhow, the master-and-slave relation is so lovely regarded in your yarn, with the Negroes bowing and scraping and singing spirituals in the night, that
one
might almost imagine that you figure Abe Lincoln had made a mistake. Put down the mint julep, Mr. Disney!
⁴⁷

Crowther’s echo of White’s phrase “master-and-slave relationship” (which had been published at the same time and in the same section of the
New York Times
) was not a coincidence. Much of Crowther’s criticism was motivated first and foremost by aesthetic frustrations, and his critique of the film’s politics was a means to further support his initial objections. Would Crowther have been so harsh had the film not been a Disney product, and had it not been so artistically weak? After all, Crowther closed his “spanking” with the assertion that “worst of all—wham!—from a strictly artistic point of view you have permitted a sad misapplication of your art and your name” by including the cartoon sequences “with all their fantastic joie de vivre, in a hackneyed and smug ‘live action’ story.”
⁴⁸
Other critics focused on the grotesque stereotypes as well. Manny Farber wrote in the
New Republic
that
Song of the South
presented “plantation life as paradise for lucky slaves.”
⁴⁹
In fairness, he also noted that it was “the first movie in years in which colored and white mingle throughout, and where both are handled with equal care and attention.” Still, Farber felt that the depiction of the South was deceptive. Baskett, he added, “is so skillful in registering contentment that even the people who believe in the virtues of slavery are going to . . . want to know his secret.”
⁵⁰

Not all critics agreed with this reading, even if they recognized the stereotype. In late January 1947, as
Song of the South
began a theatrical run at the Pantages and Hillstreet Theatres, Philip K. Scheuer largely praised the film in the
Los Angeles Times
, though his review was not unconditionally positive. In particular—like Crowther—he found the live action sequences underwhelming. Yet overall he believed that Disney “has managed the smoothest integration yet, both technical and dramatic, of cartoon and live action.”
⁵¹
Written two months after the film’s original debut in Atlanta, Scheuer’s review acknowledged the racial controversy that had emerged around the film. “Criticism has been raised in the East by the racially conscious,” he wrote, “that, in portraying Uncle Remus as the stereotype of the lazy, shiftless (but admittedly lovable) southern Negro, the film performs a disservice.”
⁵²
Scheuer dismissed the criticism, arguing that Uncle Remus was a likeable enough character who did not harm anyone. “Besides,” he added, “this is the postbellum South as Harris described it.”
⁵³

Likewise, there was some support within the African American community,
though it would be a mistake to argue that the response was evenly split. One
Defender
article stated that the film used “exceptional dialect of the period (1860)” and that “there is nothing in the story or the screening for anyone to become squeamish about.”
⁵⁴
Moreover, the
Defender
writer Lawrence LaMar remained a champion of the film well into the next year after its release. Writing in July 1947 to promote its Oscar chances, LaMar summarized what he saw as conflicting viewpoints on the film: “One opposing school of thought maintain[ed] that the story material was a reflection on the Negro, and that it was antebellum and ‘Uncle Tommish,’ while the other asserted that it was a mere whimsical fairy tale and no harm would be suffered through its filming.”
⁵⁵
LaMar privileged the latter, citing the fact that Baskett was one of the first starring roles for African Americans ever offered in Hollywood. Yet, as another
Defender
reporter noted, Baskett was denied appropriate billing as the star of the film,
⁵⁶
highlighting how segregation limited the actor’s achievement. To prove the film’s appeal, LaMar cited a Gallup research poll, which placed
Song of the South
ahead of other 1946 films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s
Notorious
and Frank Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
. But he didn’t state where the Disney film ranked overall, or what the specifics of the poll were. Meanwhile, another
Defender
article covering the film’s Atlanta premiere confirmed Bernstein’s findings. It reported that the film was being “hailed here . . . as bringing a new spirit of tolerance and understanding between the races in America’s tense melting pot.”
⁵⁷
But the article is not flattering overall, complimenting the performance of Baskett more than the movie itself. While covering the premiere, the
Defender
documented the audience’s response: “Although the story was laid in a southern plantation, antiquated locale somewhat obnoxious to the aspirations of a people getting away from slavery time settings—the film brought tears and laughter alike from Negroes and whites who thrilled to the superb performance of Baskett and other stars, together with Disney’s animation.”
⁵⁸
The ambivalence in the passage is indicative of the generally mixed feelings in the
Defender
regarding
Song of the South
. While degrading on many levels, the film did at least aspire to some measure of racial harmony, however conditional and illusory.

Appropriate to this atmosphere of ambivalence, not every
Defender
article was sympathetic to the Disney film. Covering Powell’s attempt to ban
Song of the South
, another writer argued that it was “inconceivable that Hollywood can do what most of the film critics have stated—go back to the nineteen twenties of racial and religious prejudice.”
⁵⁹
Shortly after the film’s premiere, the
Defender
further drew out the conflict emerging
among African Americans. While reactions in the black community were “perhaps a little divided . . . as a whole, at the conclusion of the preview showing, they considered the real-life cartoon a backward step in representation of the Negro.”
⁶⁰
Specifically cited were the depiction of a plantation context and Uncle Remus, though this writer, too, generally supported Baskett’s effort: “The film confused many of its spectators at the special preview showing as it is a skillful blending of delightful music and cartooning with a stereotype of the ancient southern pre–Civil War Negro complete with handkerchief and ‘yassas.’
”
⁶¹
While Uncle Remus is sympathetic around the little children, the article added, when in the company of the film’s white adults, he reverts to a degrading Tom stereotype.

Decades later, scholars would criticize
Song of the South
for its frame narrative, which moved the Uncle Remus stories too far from the implicitly African American subtexts of Brer Rabbit and toward the white contexts of the Southern plantation and the white boy’s experiences. But this article did not object to the framing, insisting only that the film should have confined the story to Uncle Remus and the children:

Disney would have run much less risk of offending Negroes had he refrained from weaving in as much story continuity as he had, and left “Song of the South” a picture of the three children and Remus. His instinct in reviving the wise and humorous tales was good—no one can object violently to folk lore as such. But in the absence of the realistic portrayal by Hollywood of any Negroes, Disney’s hybrid folklore and semi-realistic social production was a real mistake. As long as Hollywood refuses to portray modern Negroes truthfully, flights into the servile past, no matter how sincere, will always be resented.
⁶²

Yet confining the story to Remus and the children would have offended those audiences who resisted the image of a strong African American male presence, uninhibited by the oversight of white adults. It would have also undermined the film’s attempt to mimic
Gone with the Wind
’s melodrama. Overall, the article summarized adeptly some of the critical ambivalence of African American communities toward the film, even in the North, an attitude that ultimately undermined black protests against
Song of the South
.

Of course, some took issue with the larger stereotype of a romanticized
Old South, and less with race in particular. The
Washington Post
published a response that noted that fans of Harris were not likely to be “particularly pleased at the incidental treatment of [the Uncle Remus tales] in the midst of the tedious hokem [
sic
] of the non-animated part” of the movie.
⁶³
Signed with the initials “H. C. T.,” this letter criticized
Song of the South
not because of the racial content, but because of the film’s sentimental, Northern depiction of a pastoral South. This proved a direct contrast to the
Defender
’s general assessment that “the South . . . seems pleased with the picture.”
⁶⁴
Even people from the region itself were not always happy with its representation. “None of your letter comment on ‘
Song of the South
,’
” began H. C. T.:

has pointed up the fact that [the film] is the sort of phoney that Southerners loathe. They have taken it in good part because poor Disney intended it as a compliment. But in the South of Uncle Remus, the gentry of the plantation, even in the isolated big country town of Atlanta, did not use an upstage accent, they did not look about them as if trying to get the eye of the head waiter at the Stork Club, their little boys were not kept dressed up, and the Negroes did not sing Tin-Pan-Alley songs in northern voices under an experienced choir leader.
⁶⁵

H. C. T. believed that
Song of the South
was part of a larger literary and stage tradition stretching back to the late nineteenth century. This legacy developed “when the North was smoothing over the hate of the Civil War by sentimentalizing the South, with emphasis on moons and magnolias and Negroes singing on Cabin steps.”
⁶⁶
The writer rejected the film’s idyllic presentation of the Old South, but with less interest specifically in its representation of African Americans. The anonymous H. C. T. may have felt that such a point was already made, but it is entirely possible that he or she also intended to marginalize the racial tensions the film’s controversy invoked.