16-17

Cinema is littered with examples of racism, but we can hardly remove the offending films from the history books.

"Political correctness" has reared its mixed-up head recently with Clint Eastwood's diehard views that "in former times we constantly made jokes about different races. But you can only tell them today with one hand over your mouth, otherwise you will be insulted as a racist," and, in contrast, the decision not to let the actor playing Al Jolson to black up in a new production of the stage musical Jolson & Co, at the King's Theatre in Edinburgh. According to the producer Michael Harrison: "Blacking up is historically correct, but in this day and age we are not out to offend anyone."

Leaving aside the gutless notion that theatre should be inoffensive, the logical conclusion of this decision would be to air-brush cinema history Soviet style. One has to recognise the sad fact that the major part of the history of Hollywood, always lagging behind wider social advances, is mapped out by the racist insults Lenny Bruce spat out at his audience in a skit designed to deflate the meaning of the words.

One might argue that Jews were spared the worst of these indignities (possibly because they were at least well represented within the industry's higher echelons), though their visibility was still limited at best. Jews as Jews were more or less unseen in Hollywood movies where stars such as Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas and Jerry Lewis hid their origins behind Anglo-Saxon names. In the rare cases in which Jewish characters appeared in the movies, it was usually as victims of antisemitism, or as philosophical drugstore owners - just as patronising in its own way. (Ironically, Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer plays a Jewish cantor's son.)

So let's start a huge bonfire to burn all the copies of American films that feature racial stereotypes. We will begin with all the films in which white actors blacked up, including the historic first sound feature, 

The Jazz Singer, followed by other Jolson musicals, and every other musical that featured minstrel shows such as Busby Berkeley's Babes on Broadway, with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire's brilliant tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in Swing Time. Then into the flames go most of DW Griffiths's films, including the ground-breaking Birth of a Nation, in which the hero forms the Ku Klux Klan, and a white girl is raped by a black man. And in goes Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent, the villain being a blacked-up drummer with a twitch, as well as the Othellos of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier.

Goodbye to all those films where blacks play stock, wide-eyed cowards or "uncles" and "mammies". Gone, therefore, is Gone With the Wind and Tom and Jerry cartoons. What about all those ignoble savages in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and 1940s, never mind the "Red Indians" in westerns such as John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk and Cecil B DeMille's Unconquered, where they are portrayed as bloodthirsty, depraved rapists and murderers? Apart from the "savages" in Ford's Stagecoach, there is the archetypal dumb Mexican, finishing every sentence with "I theenk". When they're not cast as idiots in sombreros, Mexicans are mean, moustachioed bandits.

Then there are the expendable Arabs in colonial adventures like Beau Geste, and the multitude of wily Asians exemplified by the Fu Manchu films, with a slit-eyed Boris Karloff. Surely, we cannot spare those films where white actors yellow-up, even as sympathetic characters, like Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed, Warner Oland as Charlie Chan and Peter Lorre as Mr Moto, Rex Harrison in Anna and the King of Siam, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Alec Guinness as a Japanese businessman in A Majority of One. (Among Guinness's other crimes were his Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia and Professor Godbole in A Passage to India.)

I could go on and on, but the bonfire is now burning brightly. On the other hand, should we not be mature enough to acknowledge that Hollywood was (is?) part of an ideological superstructure determined by the capitalist economic system and, since its inception, it has projected a largely conservative white middle-class view of the world? Perhaps we should be grateful that we have now reached a time in film history where we have constructed a less passive acceptance of the mores of the dominant film culture, and have a wider critical perspective in relation to the "real" and its misrepresentation in the cinema.

Ronald BERGAN
www.guardian.co.uk