Sixty Years of Race Relations In Film
By DAVID MEISTER
With the evolution of race relations in America now including the 2008 election, it’s interesting to look at ten movies from the past sixty years and how they dealt with race. They fall into three categories: “Passing,†Fiction, and Fact-based.
Jeanne Crain “passed†for white in Elia Kazan’s 1947 drama, Pinky (1947), also starring Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters; Sapphire is a crackling 1958 murder mystery challenging Scotland Yard; and Carl Franklin’s 1995 Devil in a Blue Dress, is a very good whodunnit starring Denzel Washington, and introducing Don Cheadle
Pure fiction allows the greatest creativity, and Oscar-winning examples include The Defiant Ones, Stanley Kramer’s powerful 1958 drama starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis escaping a southern chain gang while handcuffed to each other; Alan Pakula’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1962 film of Harper Lee’s stirring novel with Gregory Peck, keeps getting better and better with each viewing; Norman Jewison’s 1967, In the Heat of the Night, with Southern sheriff Rod Steiger turning to Sidney Poitier to help solve a murder; and Stanley Kramer’s 1967 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy dealing with prospective son-in-law, Sidney Poitier, in a movie that seems terribly dated today.
Finally, there are movies that reflect history, and three recent ones stand out. Ghosts of Mississippi is Rob Reiner’s recreation of the 1994 trial of Byron de la Beckwith (James Woods), who was charged with assassinating Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963; Remember the Titans, the 2000 film of the integration of Virginia High Schools in 1971, and coach Denzel Washington leading the football team to a state championship; and 2006’s Glory Road, recounting the Texas Western basketball team winning the 1966 NCAA Championship, led by coach Don Haskins, underplayed beautifully by Josh Lucas.
Finally, one cannot ignore the silent film Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 cinematic breakthrough, the first “feature length†film, an epic 2 ½ hours. It should be seen by cineastes, but scorned for depicting the Ku Klux Klan as heroic.
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David Meister has been a passionate movie-goer, since his childhood, reared on Saturday afternoon double features and 25¢ pop corn. As a grown-up, he was a top executive at HBO, where he also launched Cinemax, was President of Time-Life Films, and later created The Sundance Channel for Robert Redford.
