HOLLYWOOD’s latest example of segregation, “Cabin in the Sky,” is the usual religious-comic handout that is given the Negro by a white studio whose last thought is to make a movie that is actually about Negroes. This is like trying to make a Christmas tree by bringing together all the tinsel, lights and candy canes you can lay your hands on but leaving out the tree itself. “Cabin in the Sky” misses the heart of the idea, although it is played solidly by Negroes, and has all the guaranteed (by white men) Negro-folk fixtures from Heaven and Hell walking around in pants to Hall Johnson Choir music. There is going to be no movie made about the Negro until one is made about him in relation to the rest of the country of which he composes ten percent. His blues, dress, his whole attitude, do not exist in a vacuum but have meaning only as they are seen inside the society that made them.
“Cabin in the Sky” first cuts itself off from everything white and then constructs a niggertown—out of jimcrack architecture, stage grass and magnolia trees—to look like Paradise. In this state of unreality the only course is to fill the movie with God’s messengers and make the struggle one between Heaven and Hell for the hero’s soul. In the midst of this, the story line is no different from the more superficial movies made about white people. The wife loses her husband to the charmer and wins him back again, the approach being from the snickering, genteel side of sex. The characters are merely tags marked “Gambler,” “Temptress,” “Wife,” which is what you have left after you have stripped the character of all emotions and qualities that would arouse comparison, perplexity, feelings of inferiority or admiration in a white audience. The preacher in this movie is just about what the Tuesday-afternoon bridge club would like for a Negro preacher—a broad-shouldered, clean-cut young man with perfect manners, clothes, and a suitably unprofound religion, a man who is not too much a Negro because he has all the manners of a white man. Compare him with the Negro in “The Oxbow Incident,” whose presence bespeaks a life that has endured much hatred and violence, and whose religion, by forgiving everything, has become a mysticism beyond the understanding of the townspeople. Moreover, the visual quality of this man has a roughness, irregularity and unprettiness that I have seen achieved so well and in the same spirit by two Negro painters, Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence.
Hollywood, in its position of greatest public influencer, solidifies racial prejudice to an enormous degree by its “Cabins in the Sky,” which are an insidious way of showing the Negro his place. The all-Negro film is no less Jim Crow than a bus where whites sit in front and Negroes in back, because the film is owned, operated and directed by whites, even to the song writers. (The story that is always going to be written by Duke Ellington is always tripped up somewhere and never gets written.) On the surface a whitewash, but really a stab in the back, these religio-comic treatments rob the Negro of a self and a place, relieve the whites of any necessity to realize that the Negro is really a person who lives next door, goes to work on the same bus to the same factory in Detroit. (Even the place society has given him inside the noose of a lynching party is given to whites in the anti-lynching movies.) Hollywood, in sound treatments of Negroes like those in “The Oxbow Incident” and “Bataan,” has shown maturity and intelligence, but it will have truly merited respect only when it brings out a movie where the central figures are Negroes living in a white majority.
The one value of all-Negro films lies in giving Negro artists an outlet for their talents. And the one value of “Cabin in the Sky” is the talent of Rochester, Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong, irrespective of anything in the movie script. Rochester gives just the right emphasis to his innocence and guilt and tops everything with his wonderful dance concocted out of a minimum of movement. Lena Horne, despite her voice, has some truly marvelous equipment and ability to use it, and Louis Armstrong, without his trumpet and song, is still at home. Their offerings are well turned decorations on something which is a stale insult, cheap, and growing daily less innocuous.
The tragic fact is that the Negro artists are in no position to bargain with Hollywood, because if they refuse to play in bad movies they only bring Hollywood closer to its goal, as shown in “Cabin in the Sky”—the complete negation of the Negro in American society. As long as Americans accept the all-Negro film, it is obvious that they can take it or leave it, and Hollywood is more than willing to leave it.
July 5, 1943