Writing Blacks into Film History: Donald Bogle as Author and Programmer (Preview)
by Craigh Barboza

On a brisk afternoon this past winter, I met the writer Donald Bogle at a cafe near Central Park, not far from his apartment in New York City. We were there to talk about his award-winning career as a film historian, which includes the landmark Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (Viking Press, 1973, and updated and expanded in four subsequent editions). The book, revered for its rich historical detail, fluid prose, bold critical judgments, and insights into the freighted issues surrounding race in Hollywood, is a must-read for anyone with any interest in the subject. It argues that while the cinema has long endeavored to keep Blacks “in their place” (by perpetuating the five basic stereotypes cited in the title), certain talented actors “elevated kitsch or trash and brought to it arty qualities if not pure art itself.”

It’s a wide-ranging book that moves effortlessly across eras, taking on different stars and genres. Bogle is as skilled at analyzing King Vidor’s 1929 rollicking spectacle Hallelujah as he is writing about acclaimed films of the 1960s, like Nothing but a Man (1964), a touching independent movie about a young Black man who refuses to kowtow, and Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee’s Oscar-nominated opus from 1989, which, Bogle suggested, heralded the arrival of a new brand of African American cinema in which the subjects of race, cultural bearing, and sociopolitical problems were foregrounded.

One of the first things Bogle said when we sat down was that he didn’t particularly care for the way certain scholars write about the movies. For a long time, he believed that the academic community should be looking at popular films, but when they finally did get around to doing that, they were often too “removed” from the work. “They didn’t quite understand the audience and the audience is important,” he said. “Film or performance can reach into what that audience has been waiting for and, when it all comes forth, it can be a great experience even when the movie isn’t that great.”

Bogle is convinced, for instance, that the funk-driven retaliatory Black fantasies of the 1970s known as Blaxploitation were, in many ways, an audience reaction to the Sidney Poitier hero. “Sidney was a great actor, a very exciting actor. But as his career progressed, they removed certain things from what would have been a vibrant character,” Bogle explained to me. “The Defiant Ones [1958] tries to show this brotherhood, people coming together, it’s the Civil Rights era. But when Sidney jumps off the train to save a fellow fugitive, played by Tony Curtis, and during the closing sequence when he cradles Curtis in his arms—it’s a potent, disturbing image and—you’re disheartened by it. He’s sacrificing himself for his white friend. So, the concept of interracial male-bonding is fine, but the way it’s executed is problematic.”

A big star in the age of integration, Poitier wound up being jeered at in ghetto theaters for upholding the system, and his characters, who were increasingly isolated from the Black community, were often denied romantic scenes, especially in the context of interracial relationships. So, by the time Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song arrived in 1971, you had a large audience primed for sex-and-power symbols who also wanted stories that, as Langston Hughes said, indicate the varied, complex and exciting milieu in which Black folk live in America.

While much has changed over the past few decades in the film industry—today, for instance, there are more prominent Black stars, directors, artisans and craftspeople than at any point in history—Bogle remains a model of balanced judgment, constantly goading the industry to do better. You might say what he wants is movies that reflect the African American ethos and culture, that try to speak to the moment in a daring, fresh way, with points of identification for the audience. One of Bogle’s major influences is critic Pauline Kael (“She was a woman with great critical observations and insights, and she went against the grain”), but he also mentioned poet-playwright Amiri Baraka (for “his thoughtfulness and the way he would examine something”) and cultural critic Albert Murray (especially “what he did with ‘Stomping the Blues,’ where he tried to approximate with his style the rhythm or beat of certain jazz”).

It’s easy to forget that Bogle is part of a generation that was starved for any form of representation. Growing up in an integrated community outside of Philadelphia, his first exposure to classic Hollywood was on television. In the days before Turner Classic Movies (TCM), he watched a local channel that ran movies during the day and, when visiting relatives in New York, he watched Million Dollar Movie. As a boy, Bogle suffered from debilitating asthma, which kept him in front of the tube, where he was always taken with Black performers. It could be Bill “Bojangles” Robinson with Shirley Temple, the Charlie Chan movies with Mantan Moreland, or The Ghost Breakers (1940) with Bob Hope and Willie Best. “I just had questions because the actors were strong enough for me and there was a suggestion that they had another life, one I was not privy to and that the films were not showing,” he said.

The movie that made the biggest impression was Carmen Jones, an all-Black musical from 1954 shot in Technicolor and directed by Otto Preminger. For her performance as the title character, a gypsy minx who seduces and destroys both herself and her lover, Dorothy Dandridge earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination, the first ever given to a Black performer. (Bogle has said her character anticipated the heroine of She’s Gotta Have It [1986], who also wants to make her own romantic choices, like men do.) “Carmen Jones is the film that brought it all together for me,” he said. “It had Black actors—Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll—playing off one another’s rhythms and using the language in the script in another way. Then all of the energy. That great sequence with Dandridge at the roadside nightclub where Pearl Bailey sings ‘Beat Out dat Rhythm on A Drum’—and who’s the drummer? It’s Max Roach. You had all these extraordinary dancers, Carmen de Lavallade, the young Alvin Ailey, and Archie Savage who had been with Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe.”…

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Craigh Barboza teaches film journalism at New York University and has written for The Criterion Collection, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Credits.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 3