Why was Glenda the good witch the only White Woman in the movie
Why was she the only one?
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She wasn't? How?
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uh that's partially right .. she was partially black, indian and white .. she was mixed .. and she looks a lot 'whiter' than she does black in a lot of pictures I see of her
shareLena Horne was "Black Enough" to be unable to get accomodations at many of the segregated hotels in whose lounges and showrooms she performed.
She was "Black Enough" to offend southern film board censors who routinely excised her musical numbers from the early MGM films. (Too glamorous...not playing a subserviant...not a comic buffoon.)
She was "Black Enough" to be deemed uncastable as mulatto characters in such films as "Show Boat" and "Pinky" because she would have had to share kisses with White actors, and depicting miscegenation on screen was a Production Code violation.
The result was that Ava Gardner and Jeanne Crain (respectively), both White, ended up playing light-skinned/mixed raced Black women.
This represented the ultimate absurdity of those times: A light-skinned Black woman was not allowed to play a light-skinned Black woman. Why? Because she WAS a light-skinned Black woman.
I'd say that all that (and much more) made Lena Horne "Black Enough" for a cameo in "The Wiz."
Emoticons are for people who haven't learned to express themselves with actual words.
Well said Denbeez, well said.
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Denbeez: I't sad to hear how things were back then. How ridiculous it sounds today, that a biracial actress couldn't even play a biracial character, because black women weren't allowed to kiss white men on the big screen! And when Lena Horne was young, she hardly even looked black! Not to mention how discriminated she seems to have been otherwise as well.
Intelligence and purity.
WELL SAID DENBEEZ!! I thought I get in on that.
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Umm....The plots of both "Show Boat" and "Pinky" involve light-skinned Black women "passing" for White. Making the male love interests Black would have negated the stories entirely.
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No, I understand entirely what you're trying to say, but you seem to lack historical perspective on this subject.
If race relations in the '40s and '50s had been so advanced that light-skinned Black actors had been allowed to play White characters in major motion pictures like "Show Boat" and "Pinky," not only wouldn't it have mattered who played the female roles (Lena Horne or otherwise), but the films themselves, which are largely about the folly of racism, probably would not have been made at all.
Besides, casting a Black actor to play a White character at that time would have caused even more of an uproar than showing Lena Horne kissing a White man.
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