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...Bogle's is one of a small, sturdy shelf of books about race films. Here are a few from my own shelves: Thomas Cripps' "Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942" (mostly about 30s Hollywood's view of race relations); John Kisch and Edward Mapp's "A Separate Cinema," replete with hundreds of color reproductions of movie posters and a good Bogle introduction; and Henry T. Sampson's invaluable "Blacks in Black & White: A Source Book on Black Films," which offers the most detailed history of the companies that produced black-cast films and the personalities...
...these pictures can't compete in polish or, often, simple competence with Hollywood fare. Modern viewers are likely to giggle at the films' technical flaws, groan at outmoded racial attitudes on display. But their very na?vet? makes them more persuasive as reflections of the black-white zeitgeist of the 30s and 40s. Art did not intervene; intended or not, these are documents of a vanished...
...descent," and notes that one of his five wives was the stripper Tempest Storm. Jeffries was a mellow baritone; he had sung with Cab Calloway. On screen, as Herbert Jeffrey, he became the smoothest cowboy west of Sugar Hill in four sagebrush sing-a-longs made in the late 30s at a black-owned California ranch. As Bogle observes, Jeffries and his light-skinned leading ladies were the "whites" in these films; the supporting roles were taken by dark-skinned comics like Mantan Moreland...
...Variety, reviewing her film debut, called her "the Clara Bow of her race." When she toured Europe in the 30s she was billed as "the black Garbo." But based on her one starring role in a Hollywood film, McKinney was more the black Jean Harlow - pure impurity on screen. Even that's not quite fair to Nina (rhymes with Dinah), for Harlow's was essentially a comic persona, lacing fake baby talk into the braying of the gold digger who's already a little tired of the priapic effect she has on men. McKinney, though her signature character is frequently...
...30s and '40s, movie women had little need for revenge; they weren't imperiled; they were liberated. They and their men talked, fought and loved as equals, and audiences flocked to see these battles of wits and wills. Often women dominated the most popular movies. Until 1965, Hollywood's top-grossing film was Gone With the Wind, which was succeeded by The Sound of Music--two films of women in peril (Yankees! Nazis!). Among today's heroines in jeopardy, there's no room for Vivien Leigh's classy spoiledness or Julie Andrews' sassy sweetness...