I'm watching Jezebel, a Bette Davis movie from 1938. A couple of weeks ago, I got into an old movie discussion with my GSA co-advisor, who now needs a name, so we'll call him Hal, which isn't his name, and he could not believe that I love old movies and Bette Davis and had never seen this one or all of All About Eve, so he brought me both DVDs the next day. I'm finally getting around to it.
I don't so much care for Jezebel.
It could not be a more blatant rip-off of Gone With the Wind, even though it came out a year earlier; it even says on the case Jack Warner made this movie for Davis because she didn't get the lead in GWTW, which was in the works for a long time. Everybody is over-acting like mad, except Fay Bainter who is really very good, and did get the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year, also according to the blurb on the case. But what is driving me totally crazy is the black-actor-as-slave thing.
I've seen worse, yes, even just the black-actor-as-awful-stereotype in Marx Brothers movies. In this one, though, they're all just happy slaves, loyal to their families, little Stymie Beard is the big-eyed carriage boy -- he's dressed like a lawn ornament -- and Eddie Anderson (Rochester of the Jack Benny Show) is his adult partner, the slave at the front door. It's interesting, though, that Bette and the other southern belle types and their men do seem to treat their slaves like people; they call them by name and offer them drinks and such. That must have been progressive for its time. But it's still so hard to watch. When I see it, I think of how demeaning for all of these actors, that the only decent parts they could get -- if that's what they were -- were as slaves in ante-bellum epics.
I do love Gone With the Wind, though. I always have, although I haven't watched it in a few years. I never saw those characters as stereotypes, for some reason. Yes, Prissy is an idiot. So is Ashley Wilkes. I don't think it's a racial stereotype; those characters are just jerks for some reason. One of my favorite characters in GWTW, book and movie, is Mammy. I think she's one of the best developed characters and with the most depth. I always found Scarlet's actual mother to be cold and creepy, but Mammy was the mother that everyone should have had. I loved her, I think Hattie McDaniel deserved her Oscar. I think there are groups now that are attacking her, saying she played a slave so she was giving in to a stereotype. Maybe they haven't seen the movie. Maybe they don't know how superb an actress she was, and that she was playing the best part she could get.
Okay, the Bette Davis character just went into the kitchen where the slaves were eating dinner and sat down at the table to talk to them, told them to go on eating. Maybe I'm getting used to it, a little. But still. When I look back at these movies from the thirties and even the forties -- and later -- and I see the way black people were represented, it makes me cringe. Even more so than now, it was a world of stereotypes; they didn't have to give characters depth because moviegoers were just supposed to know certain things about the characters based on the generalizations they displayed.
Now she's nursing Henry Fonda back to health. He's got yellow fever. It's becoming a little less frivolous and all ante-bellum south. Better, a bit. Still, I think I'll enjoy All About Eve just a little more.
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I'm watching Jezebel
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