EARLY FILMS

In our period of racial aphasia, The Movies, as always, are first among Equals in fear of The Mob—my marvelous art form, but lickspittle racket.

Now, when Putting Up Signs is considered a brave act of conscience, we find an entire half of the populace adopting the movies’ charade, of valor by proxy—this the endgame of their relationship with an industry that once sold popcorn.

Lena Horne was not permitted to play an octoroon in Pinky because she was Black. Natalie Wood was shoveled into every role for a woman of color because her skin “took” the Hershey’s Syrup well. Klaus Kinski^I played the head of an Israeli Mossad unit in The Little Drummer Girl, Charlie Chan was played by a Swede, Mr. Moto by a Hungarian Jew; and the most memorable Nazi portrayals were those of Conrad Veidt, a Jew.

The Indians were played by Woody Strode, an African American, and Anthony Quinn and Ricardo Montalban, both Mexicans; while the Mexicans were played by Wallace Beery (Viva Villa!), Brando (Viva Zapata!), and Jack Palance (The Professionals).

Duncan Renaldo, the Cisco Kid, was born Vasile Dumitru Cugheanos, in Romania. Robert Donat played a half-Chinese, half-white man in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and Mickey Rooney (!) a Japanese photographer in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Dame Judith Anderson was the Native American matriarch in A Man Called Horse.

It was crazy, disrespectful, and agonizing to members of the slighted groups, but at least it was recognizable as a human reaction: it was prejudice. The tough-guy Jews who were the business, the hard-drinking, hard-whoring gamblers and thugs, bit their nails over “offending” majority Americans. Now the feared objects are not the mass but the minorities. This, though affording a demonic balance, makes, otherwise, as much sense as casting Paul Muni as Benito Juárez. It is now, as it was then, a sop to a perceived audience, which would not tolerate a white girl being kissed by Sidney Poitier but flocked to see Fay Wray being raped by a gorilla.

How odd, our human obsession with The Other. This is the engine of pornography, rendering thrilling the commonplace (everyone’s either got an innie or an outie) by showing it on-screen. The assertion of novelty renders it noteworthy, while the actually novel, casting a Jew as a Jew, was shunned as “too.”

And many of the Space Alien roles were assigned to The Other in order to keep the films Pure. See Ricardo Montalban as Khan in the Star Trek films, my landsman Leonard Nimoy as Spock, James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader, and Charles Middleton (born Chaim Mirsky, Lodz, 1892)^II as Flash Gordon’s nemesis, Ming the Merciless.^III

See also Broadway’s 1979 The Elephant Man, Bernard Pomerance’s play starring Philip Anglim as John Merrick, a horribly deformed Victorian man working as a sideshow freak, who is befriended and discovered to have a deep soul and a fine mind. The Broadway audience enjoyed the play and applauded themselves for accepting his deformity—easy to do, as Anglim was a beautiful young man (dressed, intermittently, in a loincloth) whose deformity consisted in his arranging himself into a pretzel.

“Illness” dramas have been replaced by “Diversity” porn. Both violate Aristotle’s dictum that the Hero’s progression must devolve from his choice, and never from his condition.

Well, what doesn’t go bad? The food with the longest shelf life is the least edible; and, vice versa, the most succulent food is that fresh from the garden—the garden here, perhaps, the interaction of inspired humans (enthused by love, or greed) and novelty.

For who would have stooped to pick up the unnoticed novelty (the cinematograph, or the Hula-Hoop) but those with vision. The vision might be of wealth, or of adventure, but it could only occur—the possibility of the overlooked—to the hungry and enthused. The rich man won’t stoop in the street to pick up a dime. The billionaire’s children wouldn’t pick up a dollar. (Why would they be on the street?)

Victorian fantasy had the young man schlepping to Paris to discover himself, as today’s blighted youth crowds into film school. Both are the equivalent of the Charles Atlas comic book courses in Physical Culture: “I was a 97-pound weakling, and the bully at the beach kicked sand in my face, but now…”

The Paris-bound, like the film school grads, were paid (then, by Mom and Dad; now, it seems, by Mom and Dad in our capacity as the Tax Base) to keep themselves out of the workforce.

It was long said that California needed illegal immigrants, as Americans would not do stoop labor. Now, the only folks working in the Golden State are the progeny of those stoop laborers; and, at the outside, fifty years at most, we Anglos will be mowing their lawns. How could it be otherwise? They’re the only group paying attention.

Meanwhile, as the Movie Industry ennobles this or that individual on the basis of an Acknowledged Group complaint, the ability of the individual to produce, improve, or indeed comprehend the basic activity is considered moot.

It is the same idiocy that cast Natalie Wood as the Puerto Rican girl named Maria. And it is only an inbred delicacy that prohibits me from suggesting that the film biz is expiring like Miss Wood, drowned by our own mink coat.

I. Who served in the German Wehrmacht during World War II.
II. A complete fabrication.—Ed.
III. In Atlanta, in 1913, a young factory girl was raped and murdered. Her supervisor, Leo Frank, was accused, and convicted in spite of his obvious innocence and an alibi. He was dragged from prison and lynched by a mob yelling, “Death to the Jew.” The case was dramatized in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget. Here, however, the film’s citizens framed and killed him because he was a “damned Yankee.”
The 1947 film Crossfire is a film noir based on the novel The Brick Foxhole. In the book, drunken GIs on leave are invited to a party and murder the host because he is gay. In the film, they kill him because he is a Jew. Call me crazy.