No apology for 'Cabin in the Sky'

First of all, let me warn the reader that this thread could end up becoming a very personal and negative experience because I intend to enter into matters of racial politics that are a sore on America's soul. Many years ago I took part in an exercise like that with regards to Disney's buried film "Song of the South" and it became truly personal -- I have no desire to see this thread become that negative, but it's a possibility at some points that it may end up that way because if we're going to be real we're talking about a lot of pain here.

Secondly, let me just saw a few of the many thousands of positive things I could say about this film, which I consider one of the masterpeices of American film. Before I saw this movie, I had never even HEARD of Ethel Waters -- who is, believe it or not, one of the most significant popular singers of the 20th Century. She had a voice that made the angels heave a sigh, to borrow a well chosen phrase. Not only was this film a great vehicle for Waters' singing, dancing, and acting, but it also served as a showcase for an all-star all-black cast of some of the most talented performers in American history. Lena Horne made her Hollywood film debut in this film as the devilish temptress "Sweet Georgia Brown". It was Vincente Minnelli's first film as a director, and surely one of the best debut films this side of Citizen Kane. His visual sensibility and his attention to psychological nuance were already in full swing. Eddie "Rochester" Anderson appeared in his most fully formed character, lending the film great comic value. Duke Ellington's band was at its full power and was never displayed on film to as great effect as here, with "Bubbles" Sublett doing an incredible dance routine. The Nicholas Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Rex Ingram, Butterfly McQueen -- the sheer volume of powerful musical and acting talent was rarely met in any Hollywood film from this time, much less a film that would appeal to the black audience. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, one of America's all-time great songwriting teams fresh off the success of "The Wizard of Oz" contributed songs that for once were up to the level of the original Broadway score by Vernon Duke and John La Touche. Pretty much everything about this movie is incredible.

Now let me get into what upset me and made me want to create this thread. First of all -- the apology. Warner Brothers felt it necessary to accompany this DVD with a written apology on behalf of the distributors stating that the movie itself was morally incorrect at the time of its release and now. I was stunned and my mouth literally dropped open when I read this apology. I do not think "Cabin in the Sky" needs an apology. I do not think it is any more stereotyped than the average Chris Rock movie. Most importantly, I think this film presents black characters with substance, regardless of their surface resemblance to stereotypes. I do not believe that the producers and director of this film had racist intentions when they made this film -- in fact I believe quite the opposite. For example, the decision to do the film with an all-black cast was commendable. We could compare the film to the somewhat similar Gershwin opera "Porgy and Bess", in which white characters are presented as cartoonish negative types. Or we could talk about the many hundreds of primarily-black films made from that time through today which include the reprehensible white character who represents the "good" white man and approves of the black's behavior and helps them. I believe it's to this film's credit that all of that was left behind, basically they took what Gershwin and Heywood did and one upped it.

Now, to the commentary. I was really offended by the commentary track on both personal and artistic grounds. I haven't finished it yet as it was getting quite late last night and I was working through "Cabin" the second time in that evening, but an hour into the commentary neither Arlen, Harburg, nor Duke had even been mentioned. That should point up a huge problem with the commentary right there. Actually I found the commentary fascinating because it combined 3 very distinct types of commentary -- Lena Horne and the children of Eddy Anderson provide the human angle, Drew Casper provides a great wealth of knowledge and understanding of Vincente Minnelli's artistry, and Dr. Todd Boyd, Professor of Critical Studies at USC, provides an ethno-historical perspective I guess you could say. It's the latter that I find troubling, or to use Dr. Boyd's terminology "problematic".

Dr. Boyd, whose commentary uses up most of the space, almost never actually addresses the film's artistic aspects. He is strictly interested in using the film as a springboard to demonstrate various aspects of the racial equation in mid-century America, some of them really related to the film but many having no relationship whatsoever. For example, during the sequence in which Waters sings "Cabin in the Sky" as a crowd gathers and she and Rochester relax beneath a shady tree, Dr. Boyd is going on about how Little Joe's character represents the conflict between immediate gratification and "defered" pleasure with the promise of heavenly grace. OK, that's fair enough. But then he extrapolates to claim that the film can be seen as a commentary on the civil rights movement, because there is what he considers a similar dichotomy between the deferring of human rights compared with the immediate need for human rights. This is a "problematic" analogy. Fair enough to compare the deferrment of civil rights to the deferrment of earthly pleasures, but I see no analogy whatsoever between Little Joe's scandalous behavior (the gambling, drinking, and whoring) and the immediate need for civil rights. I mean, yes the film is saying that Joe needs to control his vices and become a more virtuous and honest man, but it's in no way saying that black people in general should control their desire for freedom and put that off for a later date. The film is not even addressing those types of issues, it is about individual spirituality and one's relationship to god through our loved ones.

In countless instances, Dr. Boyd simply considers each character as nothing but a stereotype and does not see the true psychological implications of the narrative. For example, he is offended that Little Joe is a gambler and so forth, as it represents the racial stereotype of a "no good" black man. But there are many examples of films with white characters who have character flaws and who must take a journey of self-discovery in order to learn virtue. If Dr. Boyd's ethic was taken to the extreme, it would in fact be impossible due to political correctness to even show a black character who was not virtuous. Dr. Boyd considers the plot set-up -- the idea that Joe must not seek out what he desires but instead seek to become virtuous -- to be a metaphor for message that black people should not seek to improve their station in life. For example he states that the idea of having Little Joe win the lottery and therefore be put in temptations way to be a racist concept based on the assumption that black people cannot handle money and are like "children" he says. Yet I believe that the theme of greed and vice are universal themes. And in actual fact if Dr. Boyd had watched the film more closely as a peice of art instead of looking at it simply as a historical document, he would have seen that in the scenes where Joe discovers he's won the lottery, he has no intention of leaving Petunia or suddenly turning "bad".

One of the most disturbing aspects of Dr. Boyd's lecturing is the fact that he only regards the film's spiritual narrative to be a device for the subjugation of black people. He is not trying very hard to veil his feelings about Christianity and its role in African American culture. The commentary itself presents a fascinating contradiction in this regard: while Dr. Boyd only speaks of Little Joes' virtue insofar as he considers it an attempt by the white producers to impose a "safe" system of virtues on the black man, Mr. Anderson's own children speak at other points in the commentary about Eddie Anderson's gentle and virtuous nature. I have a strong feeling based also on what I know about Ethel Waters and her religiosity that she would have been offended by Dr. Boyd's opinion of religion and of the spirituality being expressed in "Cabin in the Sky". Quite simply, what Dr. Boyd sees as a hateful stereotype was in reality, to the people who made this film, an idealistic vision of the possibility for human self-improvement and Christian charity and faith.

I realize the post is getting long, but one more observation on how ridiculous Dr. Boyd's comments are. I mentioned that an hour into the film Mr. Arlen and Mr. Duke, the songwriters of this musical, had not even been mentioned. And only Mr. Casper provides any commentary or insight into Minneli or ANY of the other performers. While one of the Nicholas Brothers is doing a dance -- I don't know which brother because he wasn't on the cast list and Dr. Boyd did not identify him or say anything about his incredible tap dance performance other than to say that the fact that he was smiling represented a negative stereotype to people in the 1960s. ????? Tap dancing was really popular among black people in the 20s and 30s, and the Nicholas Brothers were the best outside of arguably Bojangles himself. This section of the film would probably have been just as entertaining to the average African American audience of the period this film was made, but Dr. Boyd is only interested in telling us that this image later became a symbol of hate and repression.

As to the subject of Mr. Arlen and Mr. Duke, there's a hilarious segment of the commentary where Dr. Boyd is complaining about the instrumental passages in the dramatic sequences and saying that they clash with the more "authetic" black performance peices thereby damaging the film's integrity. This totally ignores the fact that the songs were written by 2 Russian and American Jews. Which is hardly surprising since so many black intellectuals have never acknowledged the role that Jewish people played in the development of Jazz music. They forget the immortal words -- "Basin Street is the street/Where all the dark and light folk meet/You'll never know how nice it is/Or just how much it really means". By seeing Jazz music as exclusively the province and legacy of African Americans, they reveal their lack of understanding of its real origins and appeal.

In my opinion, Little Joe's visitation by the angels and devils and his subsequent moral test is very similar to Charles Dickens' "Christmas Carol". Certainly there's an anti-semetic element in the work and in some of Dickens' other works.... but the powers that be do not feel that it's necessary to put a disclaimer on video copies of that film, nor do they feel it necessary to have an academic lecture the audience on the commentary tracks constantly about how Dickens was using racial stereotypes of Jews. This is just one example of why Warner Brothers' PC presentation of "Cabin in the Sky" is an example of hypocrisy. Their "apology" is an insult to the artists who made this film and shows disregard and a presumptive attitude towards their intentions.

Please let me know how you feel. I think this is a really important issue because we're at the point in time, this generation is at the moment in time, where we can rise above all this politics and see something like "Cabin in the Sky" as a great work of art, or we can simply remain on its surface and see its characters as nothing more than "types". We can sit there and be offended by the fact that Ethel Waters is wearing a bandana and call her "Aunt Jemima" as Dr. Boyd does, or we can see the power and majesty of her performance, one of the greatest in musical film history.

Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'