I wanted to throttle that DESPICABLE woman Manny was fixed up with. Granted she played the 50s widowed housewife extremely well ("It's just that...since my Douglas passed, I've never....KNOWN another man!"), but she's an awful reminder of the stereotype that existed then (referring to Corrina as his "girl").
shareIt was a sign of the times, racism wasn't only the norm, it was expected and people tended to automatically see a servant when they saw a black person, just like the man in the Chinese restaurant assumed Corrina was a waitress and asked her to help clean up a spill his wife made. I think reminders of things like that are important in a movie like this, because it shows how truly controversial and "off limits" Manny and Corrina's budding relationship really was.
shareNo argument here...it just seemed so surreal!
shareStupid 50s. I'm glad I wasn't alive back then. Although I realize everything isn't exactly "all better" now. But I'm pretty sure I would've made a lousy 50s white guy.
shareSpeedo, I'm guessing you would have been just a regular ol' 50's white guy, because you wouldn't have known anything else.
I grew up around St. Louis in the 50's. Manny could have been my next door neighbor and Corrina his Negro house maid. Race relations were amiable (at least within my narrow range of experience), but the whole culture was saturated with racism, which I didn't even notice because it was all I knew. I'll give you an example. When I was a kid I spent most of my spare time getting underfoot at construction sites. The foremen were always white and spent most of the time sitting in the cab of the truck, while the Negro laborers did the work. I didn't realize how peculiar this arrangement was until I returned for a high school reunion 25 years later. My mother's neighbor had a landscaping crew out, which consisted of one white man and one black man. I'll be damned if the white guy didn't sit in the truck all afternoon while the one black guy did all the work. It was shocking to me on two levels, first in and of itself, and second because I realized that I took stuff like that for granted growing up. That culture is an invisible weight that Manny and everyone else in the movie is carrying around. I recognize it only too well. (For another dead-on protrayal of 1950's racism, check out "Something the Lord Made", with Mos Def and Alan Rickman.)
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Not to mention all of the white males of the times who weren't as dense and oblivious as you claim to have been. There were quite a few non-racist whites who understood wrong as wrong right there & right then in the 50s. I'm sure I would have been one of them myself.
I met Cinderella once... she's actually kind of a bitch.
Of course you would!
shareYou are just showing that you are equally a prisoner of your own preconceptions and ignorance.
There was nothing inherently racist in Jenny's comment. She probably would have said the same thing no matter the race because in the 1950s, that's how you referred to domestic help. Office workers and common laborers, too. Ever hear the term "girl Friday"? Watch any film credits for "best boy". Look up the etymology of that term sometime. These were and are common aracial terms. Jenny wasn't being malicious at all.
The scene existed for the purpose of showing how Corrina had transcended being an employee and become a part of the family. Just as you were incensed by Jenny's innocent remark, so too was Manny, who had ceased to regard Corrina as just a domestic laborer. There was nothing wrong about what Jenny said, just that to her, Corrina was a faceless maid, the "girl" who helped around the house.
I don't get the hate for Jenny. She isn't a bad person by any stretch. She tried very hard to be pleasant to Molly and managed the grandfather's wake for the family. Maybe she tried too hard, but give the lady a break. Widowed young with two small boys to raise isn't easy in any era, but a single parenthood in that period would have to be particularly difficult given her probable limited job opportunities and equally dim marital prospects. Few eligible men would want to be second husband to a 30-ish widow with two young kids in tow. Manny was a golden opportunity for her and she wasn't going to pass up that chance easily. If she came across as desperate, it's because she was.
"You didn't come into this life just to sit around on a dugout bench, did ya?"