Black film history: Five early movies

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released a slate of acting nominees for the 2016 Oscars that was all white, it added fuel to the flame of a fierce debate about diversity in American pop culture and sparked an attempt to make the Academy's membership look more like the audiences for the movies it wants to recognize.

But if mainstream entertainment has looked largely the same for decades, black artists have always found ways to do their own vibrant work, with or without the help of major studios and directors. That passion and excellence show up in projects such as Spike Lee's Chi-Raq and Ryan Coogler's Creed.

This is no recent phenomenon. I've recommended Donald Bogle's Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood before. And as Black History Month kicks off, Bogle's look at the early years and the major figures of Hollywood's pre-Production Code black film colony is a great guide to the work artists managed to do in the years when racism was a far more open element of the entertainment industry.

Here are five movies to kickstart your February watchlist. These movies don't exactly conform to contemporary standards of what progressive depictions of blacks might look like. But they're fascinating documents of how black actors and writers managed to work within or push back against the constraints that so limited their careers.

1.Hallelujah! 1929: Director King Vidor grew up in Texas and had long wanted to make a movie about black communities, starring black actors. He had to forgo his salary to persuade MGM to allow him to make Hallelujah, then shot it on location and, as Bogle recounts, hired black consultants "for technical advice on everything from river baptismal services to revival meetings. Black choral director Eva Jessye -- director of the original Dixie Jubilee Singers and the Eva Jessye Choir -- supervised key choral sequences." The film was partially shot in Arkansas and was the one that launched Nina Mae McKinney's career.

2.Imitation of Life, 1934: Fannie Hurst's novel of the same name was adapted twice for the screen, first in 1934. Director John Stahl insisted that a black actress had to play Peola Johnson, who breaks her mother Delilah's (Louise Beavers) heart after choosing to pass for white, compounding the injury that comes when a close white family friend (Claudete Colbert) becomes rich off a pancake recipe of Delilah's invention. Bogle casts Stahl as telling reporters, "This girl is the daughter of a colored mammy and this point obviously makes it impossible to use an established screen player or, in fact, any girl of Caucasian birth. Such a thing, so to speak, would simply not 'go down' with theater audiences."

He was unusual in his attitude, and cross-racial casting still persists today, most recently in the casting of Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson in a forthcoming movie. And Fredi Washington's performance as Peola may not have changed the movie industry forever. But Imitation of Life is still a landmark movie, and it's well worth watching, especially in the context of Bogle's reporting on Washington's behind-the-scenes experiences on the film.

3.Maid of Salem, 1937: Bogle's portrait of Madame Sul-Te-Wan is fascinating and heartbreaking. She was a longtime D.W. Griffith collaborator, only to be fired after The Birth of a Nation prompted huge (and of course, hugely justified) protests from black moviegoers. "A production manager at the studio explained that a white actress had accused Madame of stealing a book," Bogle writes. "Finally, he told her -- or so Madame was to say -- that she was considered responsible for all the criticism within the colored community against The Birth of a Nation." Many of Sul-Te-Wan's parts were small to the point that she wasn't credited. But in Maid of Salem, a riff on the Salem witch trials, you can watch her as Tituba.

4.The Duke Is Tops, 1938: Ralph Cooper, an actor so handsome and magnetic that he was nicknamed "Dark Gable," helped found Million Dollar Productions, a company dedicated to producing movies specifically for the theaters that marketed themselves to black moviegoers. Cooper co-wrote and co-directed, and he gave Lena Horne her first feature film role in the movie.

5.Stormy Weather, 1943: One of the laziest canards people use to explain a lack of diversity in their casts or writers rooms is that they just can't find women or people of color. Stormy Weather, in which Bill Robinson plays a World War I veteran trying to restart his career as a dancer, is one of those movies that both serve as entertainment and offer up a powerful testament to just how much black talent Hollywood has always had available to it. Robinson's the headliner, but he co-stars with Horne (who was loaned to 20th Century Fox), Cab Calloway and Fats Waller, among others.

MovieStyle on 02/05/2016

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