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Because of numerous factors, among which were the lessening of racial prejudice brought about by black participation in the war, and the exposure of Americans to the horrifying effects of racism in Europe during World War II, American film audiences of the late 1940's were ready for a treatment of racial problems that was more daring than what had been provided previously by the white-controlled film companies. Bogle also contends that the popular entertainer films of the earlier '40 's, epitomized by such classics as Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, had diminished in popularity due to the aforementioned factors and the critical failure of Walt Disney's stereotyped Song of the South (1946).2 The culmination of the trend toward black realism in the American cinema of the forties awaited the year 1949, with its unique cycle of pictures that tackled the race problem of America.

Because of numerous factors, among which were the lessening of racial prejudice brought about by black participation in the war, and the exposure of Americans to the horrifying effects of racism in Europe during World War II, American film audiences of the late 1940's were ready for a treatment of racial problems that was more daring than what had been provided previously by the white-controlled film companies. During the war years, the Roosevelt Administration had applied pressure on the studios to produce significant pictures in which Negroes played consequential roles. As Donald Bogle points out, the government's motive was to help along its program of increased employment for Negroes in previously restricted industries.! Blacks began assuming heroic roles in such war-time epics as Bataan, Crash Dive, and Sahara (all 1943). Bogle singles out Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), and Robert Rossen's Body & Soul (1947), as films which included dignified, intelligent roles for blacks. Bogle also contends that the popular entertainer films of the earlier '40 's, epitomized by such classics as Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, had diminished in popularity due to the aforementioned factors and the critical failure of Walt Disney's stereotyped Song of the South (1946).2

The culmination of the trend toward black realism in the American cinema of the forties awaited the year 1949, with its unique cycle of pictures that tackled the race problem of America. These films all showed blacks at home in the United States, enduring the problems of civilian life, rather than the all-for-one, one-for-all heroics of war-time. Stanley Kramer's independently produced Home of the Brave dealt with the civilian re-adjustments of a Negro private who had cracked up under the strain of racial discrimination during the war. Louis de Rochemont's Lost Boundaries followed the critical success of Home of the Brave with a film treatment of a factual Reader's Digest account of a Negro doctor's family that had passed for white in New England for twenty years.3 1949 also saw a very well-received adaptation of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, which starred the great black actor, Juano Hernandez.

The film in this cycle which seemed to receive the greatest critical success as popular entertainment was the Elia Kazan directed, Darryl Zanuck produced Pinky, starring Jeanne Grain in the title role and Ethel Waters in the supporting role of Aunt Dicey Johnson. The film was an adaptation from the 1946 bestseller, Quality^, a novel first serialized in the Ladies Home Journal. A reviewer for the New York Times characterized Quality as "conforming generally to the requisites of women's magazine fiction: including some fussiness in style, melodrama, typed characters (hard to avoid in fiction about the South), the emotional world of a schoolgirl's dream."5 Sumner also wrote two other novels, Tammy Out of Time and Tammy Tell Me True, which were adapted for the screen and which were popular successes irr both novel and film versions. These entertainments also featured dreamy adolescent heroines.

The film Pinky opens with a shot of a train carrying the nurse, Pinky, back to her hometown in the Deep South. The audience observes the white actress Jeanne Crain, as she portrays Pinky 's emotional upset after fleeing from her white boyfriend in the North. At first surprised by Pinky's kinship with the colored washerwoman Aunt Dicey, the audience suspends its disbelief and accepts the plot device. But, like Pinky, the audience remains troubled by the situation to which the heroine returns: the poverty of her grandmother's home, the humiliation by whites who discover her colored identity. While her grandmother steers her to accept her life in the black community, we shudder at the abuse she receives from a razor-carrying black woman with whom she has argued over some money, and at her mistreatment by white police who have come to her rescue and turn against her when they realize she is black.

After being almost raped by two white drunks who call her "the whitest dinge" they have ever seen, she decides to return North to her fiance and a life as a white woman in a healthier society. The audience sides with her and questions Dicey 's demand that Pinky care for Dicey 's friend and former mistress, the aristocratic Miss Em. At first angry about the burden of caring for the arrogant, demanding old woman played by Ethel Barrymore, Pinky later learns to respect Miss Em and her viewpoint that Pinky, fey passing for white, had been pretending to be something she was_not. Pinky realizes that, if she rejects her black heritage, she will lose something very important- lier self-respect.

Miss Em dies, leaving her large house, antique furniture, and land to Pinky, who bucks the tide of resentment in the small town and defeats the attempt to have Miss Em's will nullified. She also resists her fiance's well-meant but rather paternalistic encouragements to forget her developing destiny in her homeland. But Pinky refuses, opting instead to accept her identity as a Southern Negro. The movie's final shot shows Pinky supervising black nurses in a clinic. Aunt Em's mansion has been transformed to a school for nurses and old Aunt Dicey remains on as an ageless factotum.

Both Time and Newsweek, those reflectors and creators of mass American tastes, saw Pinky as the best of the post-World War II black problem films. Time based its opinion on Pinky 's strength as entertainment, while Newsweek cited the film's "daring" treatment of racial discrimination. Time compared the film to its rivals in the following manner: "Pinky is the most ambitious and costly of this season's crop of negro-problem films-ncluding Home of the Brave and Lost Boundaries. Pinky was finished after its B-budgeted rivals had proved at the box-office that the public is interested in movies that give serious treatment to a serious theme, e.g., the sorry plight of the U.S. Negro. Partly because it puts entertainment above soap-boxing, Darryl Zanuck's sleek movie is head and shoulders above its predecessors both as entertainment and propaganda."6

Newsweek saw Pinky as the most provocative of the films dealing with racial discrimination in the United States. The magazine claimed that the film "gave little indication of pulling its controversial punches to safeguard a reported $1,800,000 investment. The result is a drama fit to stand alongside Gentleman's Agreement-the producer's Academy Award-winning joust against anti-Semitism . . . Kazan does an admirable job of blending a courageous approach to racism and the strickly emotional factors of Pinky 's personal history. Jeanne Crain is completely persuasive as the Negro girl . . ."7

The more liberal, issue-oriented press tended to de-emphasize the entertainment value of the film and to stress some of Pinky 's flaws in social observation. Bosley Crowther, critic for the New York Times, commented: "With all its virtues, however, this scan of a social problem has certain faults and omissions which may be resented and condemned. Its observation of Negroes, as well as whites, is largely limited to types that are nowadays far from average. The 'old mammy' sentiment is extolled. And a passion for paternalism is very obvious at the picture's core."8 Crowther's observation about far from average types points to a serious weakness in the film's social observation. In some ways, Pinky exists in a never-never land, a "schoolgirl's dream," where a Negro girl, who looks like Snow White, willingly returns to an outrageously bigoted small town in the Deep South. Bogle sees the same flaw in the similar Lost Boundaries: "By dealing with such characters and such a remote problem as 'passing', the movie, like most Hollywood productions, had created a dream situation, an isolated fantasy world no more real than those of the all-black musicals. "9 It seems that Bogle, in criticizing the "dream" or "fantasy" element, attacks the precise element which often makes entertainment films so successful.

John McCarten, writing for The New Yorker, also pointed to the unreality of the basic premise of the film. Although he saw many positive aspects to the film, he wrote ironically, "The heroine is a young lady whose life is endlessly complicated by the circumstance that although she is almost as fair as Snow White, she is, nevertheless, a Negro. The Mendelian intricacies of this young lady's background are not explored in the film and only a blurred explanation is given to account for her return to her Southern birthplace, where we first meet her, after she has spent years as a trained nurse up North in Boston, passing as a white girl as untroubled about her background as any of the Lowells."10

The New Republic's reviewer, Robert Hatch, was unrelievedly negative in his comments. He too criticized the inconsistencies of the popular entertainment aspects of the film, but his onesided stand conveyed more outrage than any of the previous reviewers. He seemed to deplore the strategy of dealing with sensitive issues in popular entertainment terms. Hatch described the film as "an attempt to adapt the problem of race prejudice to the requirements of a Ladies Home Journal serial, from which source the story was borrowed. Pinky is a fooling around with the terrible sickness of bigotry, a mass market romance given a shot of social responsibility because in the recent past a number of better pictures have shown that it pays to have a conscience. The appeal is old and surefire: a girl, torn between love and duty, is placed in an intolerable position. Only a miracle can extricate her, so a miracle is arranged, and we reach for a caramel as we turn the page."11 Rather than viewing the film as an attempt to use entertainment in the service of social observation and social responsibility, Hatch saw Pinky as doing just the opposite: using an opportunistic injection of social conscience to stimulate the entertainment appeal of the film. This criticism seems directly opposite to the Time and Newsweek viewpoints on Pinky, and since such moral upbraidings of the cagey shifts of Hollywood opportunists are so common, they deserve serious examination.

All of the mixed and negative criticisms of Pinky seem to be based on a fundamental premise, which is very often applied to films and to any art form which seems at all mimetic. The premise is, basically, that a film containing subject matter dealing with contemporary trends or problems should be judged according to the realism of its observation of those problems. This viewpoint stems from a view of film as fundamentally a medium for recording reality, a documentary medium. It tends to downplay and degrade the film's power of creating illusions, its affinity for the skillful manipulation of audience psychology in order to create an imaginative, unrealistic world, which, nevertheless, can influence the way an audience reacts to the world beyond the screen. The etiology of this "realistic" viewpoint, if explored, would reveal its roots in the photographic school of film criticism, which consistently stresses the importance of the screen's image of recorded reality, the document which compels belief. As I will show in this paper, such a purist perspective on Pinky would almost completely invalidate it as a worthwhile object of study in matters dealing with the treatment of blacks in film and popular media. As an observer of contemporary American television can witness, such a purist outlook on the use of black stereotypes in entertainment media relegates to the background an area that needs extensive exploration rather than dismissal.

The purely documentary approach to Pinky would make the film absurd primarily because the heroine of the film is brought to life by a white actress. As we watch the film, the movie camera unmistakably confirms this fact in every frame that is exposed. We see a white person pretending to live the problems of a black. The very substance of the film then, is fantasy. Are we on firm critical ground then, if we criticize the film for being what it baldly shows itself to be?

Also, to a trained observer of American popular media, Pinky could never be mistaken for a documented, sociologically oriented observation of black problems of the period. I have little experience with such material, but I have a good deal of experience of popular fiction and its adaptation for the screen. So I recognize that it is precisely this kind of background which shapes the film. I propose to examine this particularly limited, highly controlled, and strongly manipulative view of a social problem not primarily to understand the problem (which may indeed be farfetched, passe, irrelevant) but for the sake of understanding how viewpoints on similar problems seep into the popular media. This is the important issue concerning Pinky. The film is a skillful, dramatically compelling, Hollywood adaptation of a novel written originally for serialization in a woman's magazine. It is then, a redaction of a rather conventional, often stilted and stereotyped brand of fiction. If it presents racial observations, it does so only through its own idiosyncratic prism. Conventions of character, length, and mood affect the eventual treatment of the theme along with such considerations as audience psychology and racial attitudes. Since its earliest days, Hollywood has drawn upon novels for its subjects and has constantly faced the problem of balancing its ninety -minute time -allotment against the exigencies of adequate development of motivation. This one problem alone explains some of the weaknesses of Pinky. Also, the conflicting esthetic demands of the two media, one primarily visual, the other ideational, also explain problems which the vehicles confront in realizing a shared core of ideas and attitudes.

In examining these treatments of sensitive issues, a critic should make fine judgements of whether the content of a film or novel is determined by esthetic demands such as the need for a compact, dramatic film, by decisions about audience psychology and receptivity, or by outright and deliberate distortions of fact. By making such judgements we learn much about the process of adaptation and about the popular media's treatment and exploitation of current social issues. This kind of considered judgement has not been applied to Pinky, nor has it been applied to many films dealing with black subject matter or more general concerns. For example, Bogle suggests that the film's conclusion is compromising; he backs up his argument with some observations about the novel's contrasting finish: "In Quality, the novel by Cid Ricketts Sumner on which it was based, Pinky won her courtroom case, but the Ku Klux Klan burned down Miss Em's house in retaliation. That ending was far more honest than the optimistic everything's-gonna-work-out-fine tone at the film's end, when a group of cute ebony nurses are seen laughing in the the converted hospital."12 Actually Bogle's comparison of the two endings is an understandable oversimplification, typical of the survey type of book he has written, which has its own peculiar exigencies of time and space. In Quality there is no indication that the mansion is burned by the Ku Klux Klan; the vandalism seems a spontaneous outburst, and there is no evidence in the novel that the town's bigotry has shaped itself into a formal organization. Also, the houseburning only causes the heroine of the novel and her newfound black boyfriend to upliftingly rededicate themselves to the optimistic future. The vandalism also causes a good deal of breast-beating on the part of the good whites, who promise to support the new hospital. In tone, those protracted scenes from the novel are ten times more saccharine than the film's mercifully crisp happy ending. The adaptation of the novel Quality for the film Pinky was a complex and interesting process whose close study will yield more of importance than some hasty remarks about plot changes.

One area of the adaptation process which needs exploration and which would shed light on the different esthetic needs and audience considerations of the novel and the film is the treatment of the problematic "passing for white" situation. The believability of this situation is especially difficult film, Pinky. The reviewer who criticized the failure to explore the "Mendelian intricacies" of Pinky 's background, and the lack of clear motivation for her return to Aunt Dicey touched on a serious weakness in the film. Early in the film, the viewer begins to ask himself two questions: How can this woman be black? What is she doing returning to this town? These questions become more worrisome because of the "Westchester debutante," "Snow White" appearance of Jeanne Crain.

Typical of the way a novel gives more overt and expansive expression to meanings only latent in a film adaptation, Quality fills in many of the puzzling questions concerning Pinky 's background. On pages 105-107, Pinky figures out through conversation with her grandmother, Dicey Johnson, that Dicey had given birth to a daughter fathered by one "Stevie," a white foreman on Miss Em's estate. Knowing of this infidelity, Dicey 's black husband had deliberately caused Stevie's death by means of a farm "accident." This "bright child" of Stevie and Dicey went away to the North, came back when she was pregnant (by a white man) and died giving birth to Pinky. This explanation of Pinky 's racial inheritance makes her "passing" in the novel more believable. Pinky's repetition of her mother's flight from a white lover also makes her behavior seem more inevitable and fated.

The film adaptation makes no attempt whatsoever to explain Pinky's parentage. A partial motivation for this deficiency could have been the lack of time available for this intricate exposition. Perhaps the neat dramatic structure which the scenarists Dudley Nichols and Phillip Dunne fashioned just wouldn't allow for the potential impact of a scene where Pinky and her grandmother discuss such secrets. The scenarists' excision of many of the novel's other interesting scenes, and their retention of only a few of the most dramatic, argues for this possibility.

On the other hand, another possible motivation for this cutting involves a more complex blend of concerns about audience psychology, demands of the film medium vs. the novel, and so on. To begin with, the makers of this film had to face one problem that the novelist completely escaped. It seems almost too obvious, but it is nevertheless important. The film makers had to show the character of Pinky on the screen, visible in the person of an actress who, because of her personality, racial identity, and (in the case of this Hollywood film) star status, public relations and "hype," added a dimension to the character which was totally absent in the novel. In Quality we never really see Pinky. Even for a verbal medium like the novel, the physical description of Pinky in Quality does seem unusually vague. This vagueness makes it difficult to create in one's mind a sense of her as a physical entity. She is slim, has pale brown hair, "thin red lips," and seems to be a typical, slender adolescent heroine just indefinite enough for every woman's magazine reader to identify with. But apart from this rather unique vagueness about the physical Pinky , which also makes the "passing" idea easier to swallow in the novel, novels in general often shape character in a way more conceptual than visually representational. What matters is what is happening in the character's mind; what the novel reveals more easily than the film is the thought and feeling of the character.

Since the novel -reader never really sees Pinky, the contrivance of her miraculous passing is much less intrusive. The character can thus operate as an imaginative device which allows the reader to observe and smypathize with the curious and cruel changes in identity forced on Pinky when she returns to the hometown which knows her history. The scene with Jake and the "razor-toting" Rozalia, where the constable treats Pinky with respect and suddenly turns hostile when Pinky's black identity is revealed, seems more believable when one is not viewing an unmistakably white actress performing it. In the novel, one can suspend his disbelief a little more easily and accept for what it is this imaginative contrivance which reveals to us the oppression of a bigoted society. This Pinky provides the kind of dramatic irony a disguised character provides on the stage, without the contrivance and clumsiness.

As Richard Hulseberg writes in a recent issue of Literature /Film Quarterly, "The novelistic character's existence is confined to that mysterious arena where our imaginations embrace him on the page, and our sense of him is generated basically by the reciprocal interaction between our psyches and the words we read."1 ** Hulseberg's choice of "imagination," "psyche," "page," and "words" suggests the absence of visible physical barriers to the merging of reader and character. But the arena of film, being more public, more visible and less mysterious, does present such barriers, and especially in the film under discussion. The choice of the physical representative of the film character of Pinky becomes a very important one.

So if the character is to pass for white, i.e., show no appearance of black identity whatsoever, what could be gained by choosing for the role an actress such as Lena Home or Nina Mae McKinney, whose reputations as black actresses were established? The audience would know that the actress was black, and we have already established that a film audience finds it difficult, because of the actual physical presence of the actress, to separate actress from role. So if Jeanne Crain did not seem black, Lena Home would not have seemed to be "passing."

One might argue that, faced with two such problematic choices, the filmmakers could have been more honest by giving the role to a black actress, since Pinky strongly accepts her black identity in the end. It would have been less paternalistic to have a black actress play a role which makes such a strong statement against bigotry. But the makers of Pinky did not seem to be concerned with this, just as they were unconcerned with the device of having Miss Em, the epitome of the aristocratic old south, provide the solution to Pinky 's problems. This is paternalism at its strongest, the "Massuh" knows best syndrome.

The solution to the filmmaker's dilemma of casting the role of Pinky was provided by the consideration of audience psychology. This tipped the balance in favor of the white actress, because as a general distribution film, Pinky would be targeted at a predominantly white audience. When watching the film, such a white audience would consciously accept that, according to the more abstract "theme" of the film, they were watching the problems of a black person. But actually the white identity which the actress bore would unconsciously control the audience's reactions to a greater degree. The abuse which Pinky received from the townspeople, the humiliating comedo wns imposed by Aunt Dicey and Miss Em, are more undeserved and thus more terrifying, because they are directed at a white actress. Jeanne Crain just doesn't look like she belongs down there putting up with that Mammy's humility and the neanderthal reactions of the white trash. Why doesn't she get back on the train and go back to Boston where she could be a Breck-girl at least? These are the real questions that the white audience asks.

The white audience is with Pinky and against Aunt Dicey at the beginning of the film. Then when Dicey realizes that Pinky had been passing up North and tells her, "Denying yourself like Peter denied Jesus. They done educated the heart out of you," and when Miss Em tells her, "Nobody deserves respect as long as she pretends she's something she isn't," these lofty principles, suddenly introduced into the story, take precedence over the audience's protective feelings toward the "white" Pinky. We feel a bit guilty now that our earlier support of Pinky, based on our reaction to the abuse given her whiteness, is replaced by a belief in her principled commitment to helping her Negro brothers and sisters. The more visceral reaction to the actress as person, as physical being, as white person who doesn't deserve to be treated as a Negro, is replaced by the more ideological, principled reaction. As the plot snowballs, we get caught up in Pinky 's struggle, which seems all the more noble, both for her, because she could have "stayed white", and for us, because we have left behind our complacent, comfortable, slightly racist, and certainly ignoble selves.

There is no convert more zealous than the reformed sinner and the makers of Pinky have grasped this bit of religious psychology very keenly. Stirred so entertainingly by the propaganda of Pinky, like sinners at a camp meeting, we are apt to be less than discriminating about what it is we have been converted to. It is then that the conclusions of the film, separatist and paternalistic as they are, seem to be acceptable. I leave it for other viewers of the film to determine for themselves whether the tightly constructed, muscular script, with its mastery of audience identification, and the rousing revivalist force of its denouement, outweighs the racial attitudes which now seem dated. To do this one would have to look at the film in its post-war context, and weigh its skillful propaganda against the resistance to chanse which existed then. This would require expertise beyond my range.

So I return to the point I stressed earlier: my intention has been to avoid purely sociological questions and to concentrate on the way in which social attitudes are represented in the media. Correspondingly, I have tried to show how inherent characteristics of particular media can influence the ultimate portrayal of such attitudes. I think the most important point to be made here concerns the power which physical cinematic images have over the ideological content of the film. Along with the narrative or ideology which the script conveys, there is an infra-narrative, provided in part by the physical and psychological impact which a particular actor or actress, or a particular image, may have upon the audience. Often this impact is largely sub-conscious, and often it goes against the more acceptable "principles" of the script. Let me cite an example Bogle gives of this same phenomenon; in this case the example is derived from the career of the black actor, James Edwards:

Impressive as Edwards' early performances were, he did not develop into a star. In the ambivalent late 1940's and the apathetic 1950's, racial tolerance as a theme was fashionable but Negro actors were not. A nervousness and sexual ambiguity alienated him from white movie audiences. Sexy black men were never very popular in American motion pictures. In his feature films, Edwards was rendered sexless because he seldom had a love interest. Yet his sexualitv was still evident- even in the way he walked. He smiled, not in the boyish or romantic way of Sidney Poitier, but in a tentative and lewdly suggestive manner. Alwavs his eves looked straight ahead, burning with passion and resentment. His nerves seemed to be as taut and tense as his muscles. He was attractive and aggressive, and there was a distinct nervous charge in his voice. He seemed dangerous. The very first of the Good Sensitive Postwar Negroes scared his public, and for that reason he was denied movie stardom.14

Edwards failed for the same reason that Jeanne Crain as Pinky succeeded: his physical presence often went against the thematic grain of the role he was playing. When Jeanne Crain kisses her white lover in Pinky, we don't see love between a black woman and a white man, despite the opposing signals which the script gives us. Film is like that. It is especially potent in its subconscious control of audiences, often to the point of overwhelming its own verbal content. It bears watching.