African American History Month

KC over at Classic Movies reminds me that February is African American History Month. As I've written before, images of African Americans in movies were few and far between during the first half of the 20th century, usually limited to small supporting roles as domestics, Pullman porters or racist stereotypes so broadly drawn, they shock the conscience of a modern-day viewer.

And while there's definitely something to Hattie McDaniel's assertion that she'd "rather play a maid than be one," every now and then a performer appeared on screen in a role just tasty enough to make you hunger for what might have been.

Here are a half dozen who made a splash during the early sound era:

Nina Mae McKinney

Ethel Waters

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson

Louise Beavers

Paul Robeson

Hattie McDaniel

Katie Award Nominees For 1930-31

August 1, 1930-to-July 31, 1931, was one of those movie years where looking at the list of the Academy's nominees and winners, you'd walk away with a completely distorted idea of what was actually going on in movie history.

1931 was a pivotal year. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable all went from bit players to stars within the space of twelve months and in so doing, they gave the cinema a distinctly American feel for the first time. Instead of actors aping polished stage performers with British or faux-British accents, audiences heard for the first time the inflections and rhythms of urban wise guys like Cagney and Gable, or in the case of Robinson, who was born in Romania and raised in New York's Lower East Side, the voice of the American immigrant experience.

It was also the year of the gangster picture, a genre that dominated the rest of the 1930s. The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, starring Cagney and Robinson, respectively, proved to be big, if controversial, hits with critics and audiences both. Censors were not so thrilled, however, contending that the films (and Howard Hawks's Scarface the following year) glamorized crime, and Hollywood, as usual, proved to be of two minds on the subject, happy to bank the money that was rolling in while paying lip service at Oscar time to the notion that gangster pictures were bad for us.

It was the same story with Universal's cycle of great horror pictures, which began in 1931 with Dracula, and continued in November of that year (too late for a Katie nomination) with Frankenstein. Their stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, would dominate the genre and box office for years to come without either ever receiving any recognition from the Academy.

There was also the groundbreaking Western The Big Trail, starring an impossibly young John Wayne and featuring the first widescreen movie in history; two Joans—Blondell and Crawford—established themselves as major stars; and René Clair followed a winning lottery ticket from hand to hand in the French comedy Le Million.

And, of course, Groucho Marx gave us what was perhaps the most famous monologue of his career, confessing to audiences, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."

If, however, you look at the list of winners and nominees from the Academy Award ceremony held on November 10, 1931, you won't see any of these films or performers. It wasn't the first time the Oscars would prove to be so clueless, nor the last. But if you care about this sort of thing, it's galling nevertheless.

Admittedly, although the Academy failed to recognize the revolution in their midst, the only truly inexplicable award was giving Norman Taurog the Oscar for direction. Skippy is a pleasant enough comedy with a fine performance from child star Jackie Cooper, but in terms of what went on in the director's chair, it isn't much unless you count Taurog's threat to shoot Cooper's dog if the kid didn't cry on cue (he cried buckets and earned an Oscar nomination). Nothing compared to the accomplishments of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, who were eligible for the award, or Josef von Sternberg and Lewis Milestone, who were actually nominated.

Not to mention Taurog might be the worst director to ever win the award—aside from nabbing the Oscar itself, Taurog is mostly remembered now for directing, among other things, nine Elvis Presley movies (and not the good ones either). Well, okay, he directed Boys Town, I'll give him that. But that hardly makes up for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.

The award for best picture went to the now largely reviled Cimarron. Based on Edna Ferber's prize-winning novel, it's actually a pretty entertaining yarn as historical potboilers go, and if I don't think it's the best movie of the year, I do think it's unjustly underrated.

The story begins in 1889 with the Oklahoma Land Rush—where 50,000 people lined up at the border of Oklahoma and raced to claim the two million acres the U.S. government had opened up for settlement, a perfectly insane way to parcel out land—and ends in 1930 with the descendants of these settlers marinating in oil money. (The movie is mute on the question of how the Indian tribes who were living in Oklahoma at the time of the Land Rush felt about having their homes stolen out from under them. Reportedly, when the tribes complained the action violated long-standing treaty obligations, President Benjamin Harrison replied, "You f*cked up! You trusted us!") Plenty of people in the audience would have been old enough to remember the events depicted, which were roughly as distant in time to them as the moon landing is to us, and the movie was a popular hit.

As hard as it is to believe, given that the intervening years gave us Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Shane, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, The Good The Bad And The Ugly, The Wild Bunch and many, many more, Cimarron was the last Western to win the Oscar for best picture until Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves in 1991, and if you ever wonder what motivates otherwise seemingly sane people to start handing out crazy alternate Oscars like the Katies, there's a good part of your answer right there.

Cimarron was also the first of five Oscar nominations for Irene Dunne (no wins)—she lost to Marie Dressler in Min and Bill, one of the best performances of Dressler's career (I gave her a Katie for her supporting performance in Anna Christie just last year).

Lionel Barrymore won for best actor in A Free Soul, which was not just the only win of his career, but his only acting nomination (he got a best director nom the year before with Madame X). I have one problem with his win though: he's only the second best actor in the film, behind Clark Gable in a star-making performance.

The writing awards went to John Monk Saunders (for his original story, The Dawn Patrol) and Howard Estabrook (for his adaptation of the aforementioned Cimarron). Director Howard Hawks said later that Saunders hadn't written any of The Dawn Patrol, claiming instead that Saunders received $10,000 to attach his famous name to the screenplay to help Hawks get studio backing for the project. You can't prove it by me one way or the other.

Finally, I'll mention Fritz Lang's crime thriller, M, which premiered in Berlin on May 11, 1931. It didn't arrive on America's shores until 1933 and thus wasn't eligible for an Oscar this year, but when it comes to handing out Katies, I prefer to nominate them at the time of their initial release —gives you a better idea of their place in film history. I think that even if a general American audience hadn't seen it, the ideas and techniques Lang used in M were already percolating through the bedrock of Hollywood and had already influenced the movies by the time it officially premiered here. Thus, the three Katie nominations for M here rather than in 1933.

These are my nominees:

PICTURE
Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor)
City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford)

ACTOR
James Cagney (The Public Enemy)
Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
Bela Lugosi (Dracula)
The Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers)
Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)

ACTRESS
Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance)
Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)
Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
Irene Dunne (Cimarron)
Norma Shearer (A Free Soul)

DIRECTOR
Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
René Clair (Le Million)
Fritz Lang (M)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Clark Gable (A Free Soul)
Peter Lorre (M)
Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse)
Margaret Dumont (Animal Crackers)
Sylvia Sidney (An American Tragedy)

SCREENPLAY
Morrie Ryskind (Animal Crackers)
Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
René Clair (Le Million)

Nina Mae McKinney And The 1932 Short, "Pie, Pie Blackbird"

My old pal and movie mentor, bellotoot, and I have been exchanging comments about King Vidor's Hallelujah!, the all-black musical we both enjoyed starring Nina Mae McKinney as a jazz-singing temptress. In fact, bellotoot enjoyed Hallelujah! so much, he dug up this 1932 short, Pie, Pie Blackbird, one of the twenty movies McKinney made in her film career. It co-stars Eubie Blake and his orchestra as well as the tap dancing team, the Nicholas Brothers.

That Hollywood could ignore this much talent while stuffing musicals of the time full of non-entities like Charles King (see The Broadway Melody) only underscores the self-defeating nature of racism ...

Forewarned is forearmed: In setting the scene, McKinney uses a word (pickaninny) that has long been considered offensive. McKinney's use of the word is so casual, however, it prompted me to do some research on the word's origin and evolution. It is believed to have been derived from the Portuguese word "pequenino," an affectionate diminutive of the word "pequeno," which means "little," and was used in the American South prior to the Civil War to refer to African-American children. Later, the word became associated with particularly grotesque stereotypes which I will not pass along here, yet remained in general usage (see, e.g., Scott Joplin's "I Am Thinking Of My Pickaninny Days for clarinet," The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, etc.) at least until the 1940s. By the late 1950s, however, it had fallen strictly into the category of offensive and anybody using the term in the 21st century would rightly be considered a racist buffoon.

New Comments Policy

It was another busy movie weekend here at the Monkey. In addition to the essay about King Vidor's Hallelujah!, which off and on took all day Saturday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I watched Spike Lee's answer to Saving Private Ryan, Miracle at St. Anna, a very fine war movie about the experiences of the 92nd Division's "Buffalo Soldiers," an all-black division that fought in Italy during the Second World War. Here's a movie that somehow slipped through the cracks last year—no, actually here was one that critics and moviegoers alike stomped on and shoved through the cracks—but Katie and I both thought it was a superb movie and highly recommend it.

We also watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks because it was Angela Lansbury day on Turner Classic Movies and neither of us had seen the movie since its release in 1971. Turns out there's a reason for that. It's not good. It's dull and derivative and chock full of bad songs. Rent Mary Poppins instead.

On my own, I also watched a couple of Ernst Lubitsch movies, Design For Living, which you'll be hearing much more about later, and Monte Carlo, which you won't. The former is a Hays Code-busting comedy about a ménage à trois between Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March, with excellent support from Edward Everett Horton (support in a movie sense, that is). The latter proves that even the immortal Lubitsch can't overcome a fatal flaw in casting, in this case Jack Buchanan as the romantic lead. Who's Jack Buchanan, you say? Exactly.

As for the new comments policy, I enjoy hearing from my readers, even the ones who have been dead for years. But the comments section has gradually turned into something of the old Wild West lately and it has been called to my attention (possibly by the left side of my brain) that genteel folk have become afraid to walk the street in broad daylight.

So for the time being, my good friend, Sheriff John T. Chance, has agreed to review all comments before they are then posted on the blog. He says no cussin', at least nothing that even Two and a Half Men couldn't use, no racial slurs, no ad hominem attacks on readers who are still alive, no wearing tights in public, etc.

And leave all firearms with Dude at the end of town.

Likely, there will be some delay between when you submit your comment and when it shows up on the blog—Sheriff John T. is strictly old school when it comes to all this newfangled technology— and if you think your comment was unfairly rejected, take it up with Chance. If you dare.

Anyway, we'll see how this works out ...

King Vidor's Hallelujah!

Already one of Hollywood's most successful directors, with such hits as The Big Parade, The Crowd and Show People to his credit, King Vidor chose a decidedly off-beat and risky project for his first sound film, a musical based on an idea he had been trying to get off the ground for most of a decade, the story of the African-American experience in the deep South using an all-black cast.

MGM was wary of the project, believing white audiences would resist a film using blacks in leading roles, but Vidor believed so strongly in the project that he offered to work without salary and finally the studio relented. The resulting film, Hallelujah!, premiered in August 1929.

The story itself is pretty standard fare for a musical—a weak man (Daniel L. Haynes) is torn between the good girl who loves him and the jazz singing vamp (Nina Mae McKinney) who only wants to use him—set in the farmland outside Memphis, Tennessee, where the movie was filmed. After accidentally killing his own brother in a bar room brawl, Haynes's Zeke becomes an itinerant preacher only to be drawn back into McKinney's web when he runs into her at a tent revival meeting.

The music alternates between spirituals and jazz numbers, and while Mc- Kinney turns in a performance of Irving Berlin's "Swanee Shuffle" that audiences at the time found electrifying, it's the spirituals—"Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child," "Go Down Moses (Let My People Go)," and many others—Vidor is most interested in. He was determined to show the role religion and music played in the South he grew up in and, as a Tennessee boy myself, I think it's one of the few movies to come out of Hollywood that captures something of this aspect of Southern life without condescending to it, or worse.

Hallelujah! was also notable for its early success at combining sound recorded on location with sound recorded in the studio, a feat which was considered a great technical achievement at the time.

Hallelujah! is not a perfect movie and despite three Katie nominations, I don't want to oversell it. The plot is a stock Hollywood musical contrivance, the acting is amateurish (not surprising since Vidor mostly used amateurs) and the characters are often stock racial stereotypes, such as the sex-crazy black man or the wise "Mammy." Vidor himself later admitted that despite his best efforts, the story was at times condescending to the African-American experience.

And yet I have to say that while the black farmers, preachers and jazz singers of Vidor's Hallelujah! sometimes lack nuance, so too did Hollywood's portraits of flappers, gangsters, Broadway producers, newspapermen, housewives, politicians and pretty much anything else it set its sights on. Films of the Early Sound Era still had one foot firmly in the Silent Era when exposition was difficult and subtle characterizations nearly impossible. Filmmakers served up characters in a sort of visual shorthand—this is the good guy, this is the bad guy—for the quick understanding of the audience, and while modern audiences may find some of the portrayals in Hallelujah! startling, they aren't much different from the characters played in the all-white musical The Broadway Melody which won the Oscar for best picture the year before.

What distinguishes Hallelujah! from, say, The Birth Of A Nation, which is also filled with stock racial stereotypes, is that the characters and story are based on Vidor's actual, if flawed, observations of African-American life rather than D.W. Griffith's thoughtless regurgitation of racist stereotypes. Vidor was deeply sympathetic to and interested in the lives of black Americans (as, indeed, I get the impression he was of most people). I think the only regret Griffith felt about putting racial stereotypes on the screen was that he wasn't allowed to hit those who criticized him for it with a hammer.

Commercially, Hallelujah! was the flop MGM feared it would be, although certainly the studio's unwillingness to distribute the film to entire sections of the country for fear of a racist backlash was a major contributor to its failure. Critically, the reception has been a bit friendlier. The Academy recognized Vidor with an Oscar nomination for best director at the 1930 ceremony and in 2008, the National Film Preservation Board included Hallelujah! in the National Film Registry. That same year, in honor of Vintage Black Cinema, the U.S. Postal Service pictured an advertizing poster for Hallelujah! on a 42¢ stamp.

Nina Mae McKinney was just sixteen years old at the time of filming, but she made such an impression that MGM signed her to a five year contract. Unfortunately for McKinney, however, MGM was reluctant to cast a black actress in a significant role and most of her work was done on loan to other studios. She soon left Hollywood for Europe where she worked mostly in cabaret shows until World War II broke out. She made twenty movies altogether and died in 1967 at the age of fifty-four. She was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1978.

As for the film's other stars, Daniel L. Haynes appeared in a handful of movies, mostly uncredited bit parts, and also worked on the Broadway stage. Child actor Matthew "Stymie" Beard played in thirty-seven Our Gang comedies, usually wearing an oversized bowler hat (he was later replaced by Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas). Sam McDaniel, brother of Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel, appeared in over two hundred movies, usually in an uncredited role as a waiter, janitor or porter, including one role I remember, "Charlie the garage attendant" who provides Fred MacMurray with a critical alibi in Double Indemnity. Likewise, Blue Washington, one of the few veteran actors in the cast, continued playing bit parts until his final movie in 1957.

The rest of the cast quickly faded from view.

Despite the commercial failure of Hallelujah!, Vidor remained one of Hollywood's most sought-after directors, working on such films as The Champ, Stella Dallas and War and Peace. In 1939, when director Victor Fleming left the set of The Wizard of Oz to take over the troubled production of Gone With The Wind, Vidor stepped in and although he did not receive a screen credit, directed the film's Kansas scenes, including Judy Garland's beloved performance of "Over the Rainbow."

Vidor received three more nominations for direction and in 1979 was awarded an honorary Oscar "[f]or his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator." He died in 1982 at the age of eighty-eight.

Trivia: While Hal- lelujah! is often remem- bered as the first movie with an all-black cast, a much lesser known musical, Hearts in Dixie, also starring an all-black cast, predated it by five months. Hearts in Dixie starred Stepin Fetchit (real name Lincoln Perry), whose stage name has become synonymous with the negative stereotyping of African-Americans in film. Some revisionist historians consider him a trailblazer who paved the way for later African-American performers. Others point out that white audiences of the time often swallowed the characterization whole and used it as justification for racist policies. In any event, Perry became a millionaire playing the role in more than fifty movies (later blowing it all and declaring bankruptcy).

The NAACP presented him with a Special Image Award in 1976 and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame inducted him as a member in 1978. He died in 1985.

If you're interested, two biographies with very different takes on Lincoln Perry have been published within the last five years, Stepin Fetchit: The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry and Shuffling To Ignominy: The Tragedy Of Stepin Fetchit, both available in paperback.

This Weekend On Turner Classic Movies Sunday Silents: Broken Blossoms

I've theoretically left silent movies behind but I wanted to mention that TCM is showing my choice for the best movie of 1919, D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, on Monday, July 20, 2009, at 12:15 a.m. (i.e., Sunday night).

Like most of Griffith's work, the portrayals of race—in this case, a Chinese immigrant in London played by Richard Barthelmess—may make it a difficult movie for a modern audience. Plus, unlike the genres of comedy, horror or action, silent dramas generally don't hold up that well. But if you're approaching the work of D.W. Griffith for the first time, this might be the route to take.

In reviewing Broken Blossoms for his series on great movies, Roger Ebert noted that it was "perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies" and that it directly influenced Federico Fellini's classic, La Strada. He also said of its star, Lillian Gish, "her face is the first I think of among the silent actresses, just as Chaplin and Keaton stand side by side among the men." (He also passed along this anecdote from the filming of The Whales of August, a 1987 film co-starring Gish and screen legend Bette Davis: "One day after finishing a shot, [director Lindsay Anderson] said, 'Miss Gish, you have just given me the most marvelous closeup!' 'She should,' Bette Davis observed dryly. 'She invented them.'")

From TCM's website:

12:15 AM Broken Blossoms (1919)
In this silent film, an Asian man in London falls in love with an abused child. Cast: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp. Dir: D.W. Griffith. BW-89 mins, TV-PG

The Over-Under, Part Two: Another Round Of Katies

For a long time, long before I started this blog, I kicked around the idea of putting together a list of pre-Oscar era Katie Award winners.

But the idea was more academic than reflecting any passion of mine for silent movies. The thought of spending months writing essays about silent movies before I got to the movies I really loved, movies like Duck Soup and The Thin Man, struck me as nuts. So as you may recall, what I wound up doing was handing out four career achievement awards for the pre-Oscar Silent Era: The General (best picture), Charles Chaplin (best actor), Lillian Gish (best actress) and D.W. Griffith (best director).

Then something unexpected happened: I fell in love with silent movies. I discovered I like watching them, become absorbed in them, the good ones that is, the ones that figured out to tell stories without words, movies by Keaton and Murnau and Chaplin, with stars such as Fairbanks and Chaney and Garbo. And now I think I have a handle on what those pre-Oscar Katies would be.

Don't worry, though. I'm not going back and writing essays about all these winners. I'm not delaying my arrival at the sound era by another day. But I do hate to let all that hard work go to waste.

Even so, this expanded list only goes back as far as 1919. In truth, my first-hand know- ledge of movies made before that date is pretty much limited to a couple of D.W. Griffith movies (The Birth Of A Nation and Intolerance), a handful of Mary Pickford classics and a bunch of Charlie Chaplin shorts. Griffith may have invented the language of cinema with an impressive if controversial run from 1915 to 1921, but to my mind, movies didn't really take off as both a modern art form and as a fun, visceral experience until the German Expressionists Robert Weine and F.W. Murnau came along.

If you're interested, this is my rough draft of Katie winners for the years 1919 through July 31, 1927, but I'm warning you that until you've dipped heavily into the list of twenty silent movies I gave you a while back and convinced yourself that silent movies are your cup o' joe, I wouldn't go wading into this at random:

1919
Picture: Broken Blossoms (prod. D.W. Griffith)
Actor: Richard Barthelmess (Broken Blossoms)
Actress: Gloria Swanson (Male and Female)
Director: D.W. Griffith (Broken Blossoms)

1920
Picture: The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (prod. Rudolf Meinert and Erich Pommer)
Actor: Douglas Fairbanks (The Mark Of Zorro)
Actress: Lillian Gish (Way Down East)
Director: Robert Weine (The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari)

1921
Picture: The Kid (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Actor: Charles Chaplin (The Kid)
Actress: Dorothy Gish (Orphans Of The Storm)
Director: Charles Chaplin (The Kid)

1922
Picture: Nosferatu (prod. Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau)
Actor: Erich von Stroheim (Foolish Wives)
Actress: Anna May Wong (The Toll Of The Sea)
Director: F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu)

1923
Picture: Safety Last! (prod. Hal Roach)
Actor: Harold Lloyd (Safety Last!)
Actress: Edna Purviance (A Woman Of Paris)
Director: Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone (Our Hospitality)

1924
Picture: The Thief Of Bagdad (prod. Douglas Fairbanks)
Actor: Emil Jannings (The Last Laugh)
Actress: Zasu Pitts (Greed)
Director: Raoul Walsh (The Thief Of Bagdad)

1925
Picture: The Big Parade (prod. King Vidor)
Actor: Lon Chaney (The Phantom Of The Opera)
Actress: Irene Rich (Lady Windermere's Fan)
Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin)

1926
Picture: Faust (prod. Erich Pommer)
Actor: John Gilbert (Flesh And The Devil)
Actress: Greta Garbo (Flesh And The Devil)
Director: F.W. Murnau (Faust)

1927 (January 1 - July 31, 1927)
Picture: The General (prod. Joseph M. Schenck and Buster Keaton)
Actor: Buster Keaton (The General)
Actress: Brigitte Helm (Metropolis)
Director: Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman (The General)

Subject to revision and the threat that someday I'll write bushel baskets full of essays about the winners, you may consider these to be official Katie Awards. Which should please faithful reader Douglas Fairbanks no end.

Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are expecting an invitation to Pickfair for the after-ceremony party.

Note: For those with an interest in such things, I included a producer credit for each of the best picture winners. Some interesting names on there, including the heretofore unmentioned Hal Roach, who produced some of the greatest comedy acts of all time—Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and Will Rogers, among others. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1992 and lived to be 100.

One name shows up twice, Erich Pommer, maybe the most important producer in the influential German film industry during the 1920s and early 1930s. He fled Germany when Hitler came to power and ended up working in an American porcelain factory during World War II. Pommer eventually became a U.S. citizen, returned to making movies after the war and died in 1966.

By the way, if you're keeping score, William Fox produced Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, the Katie winner for 1927-28. As for the best picture winner of 1928-29, The Passion of Joan of Arc, all I have is the name of a company, Société générale des films. Maybe the board of directors can come down and pick up the award.

Late Programming Note: A Mary Pickford And Douglas Fairbanks Double Feature On TCM Tonight

Straight from the Turner Classic Movies website:

8:00 PM Ramona (1910) In this silent short, a rancher's daughter runs off with a Native. Cast: Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, Francis J. Grandon. Dir: D.W. Griffith. C-17 mins,

8:30 PM Mark of Zorro, The (1920) In this silent film, a Mexican Robin Hood harasses corrupt Spanish invaders. Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite de la Motte, Noah Beery. Dir: Fred Niblo. BW-107 mins, TV-G

I confess I know nothing about Ramona other than to say it is very early Mary Pickford and only 17 minutes long. The Mark Of Zorro is classic Douglas Fairbanks.

I think this is part of TCM's on-going series "Race and Hollywood." This month the network is highlighting Latino Images In Film.

Best Director Of The Silent Era: D.W. Griffith

I am more conflicted about the choice of D.W. Griffith as the best director of the Silent Era than I am about any other choice I am likely make throughout the course of writing this blog.

On the one hand, Griffith directed the most popular film of the Silent Era and introduced story-telling techniques to the movies—such as the close-up, the flashback and cross-cutting between multiple locations and storylines—that are so commonplace now, you almost forget that someone had to invent them.

And he was a master of the action sequence. The Civil War battle scenes in The Birth Of A Nation, for example, are as good as any ever filmed, and there's a sequence in Way Down East—where a man races across a disintegrating ice floe to save a young woman before she plunges over a waterfall—that is amazing.

These scenes were without precedent and audiences were electrified. The Birth Of A Nation was the most popular movie of the Silent Era, grossing more than half-again as much as the second movie on the list.

But on the other hand, you can't talk about D.W. Griffith's legacy without eventually coming to the subject of racism, because while he was the era's greatest innovator and an undisputed master of film technique, he also included in The Birth of A Nation sequences—for example, Ku Klux Klansmen riding to the rescue of white women being raped by actors wearing black-face—that are so grotesque in their depictions of race and distortions of history that you can't believe that you are seeing them.

As the Directors Guild Of America noted in 1999 upon removing Griffith's name from its top film award, his movies "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes."

And before you complain that I am condemning Griffith with the smug benefit of politically-correct hindsight, the fact is that even judging strictly by the standards that were evolving at the time, The Birth Of A Nation was widely regarded as a virulently racist film. Audiences in some northern cities rioted after seeing it, and President Woodrow Wilson, who at a private screening had said "It was like writing history with lightning," felt compelled to issue a statement disowning its politics.

I mean, really, a three hour paean to the Ku Klux Klan?

Even Griffith seemed to realize what a bad idea that was, following it up the next year with Intolerance, a 197-minute apology that nevertheless saw nothing ironic in the fact that not a single African-American appears in a movie railing against prejudice.

It wasn't the last time that Griffith tried to apologize on film for The Birth Of A Nation, but there was, to my eye at least, something always clueless about the effort, like that of a man who recognizes that he's done something wrong but doesn't quite know what.

In fact, there are even those who suggest that Griffith wasn't apologizing for the racism of The Birth Of A Nation at all but was instead condemning the "intolerance" of those who had dared to attack him. All I can say after watching the movies themselves is, it's possible.

From what I've read about him, Griffith did not consciously set out to serve an evil cause, ala Leni Riefenstahl who cheerfully made documentaries praising Adolf Hitler. He was instead a wholly apolitical man—Griffith "didn't have a coherent political idea in his head," writes Slate's Bryan Curtis—astonishingly unaware of the world outside the immediate bubble he lived in, in his case a Hollywood film set. This makes him, I suspect, a typical, if unadmirable, human being.

As a matter of fact, watching his most famous works before writing this essay suggested to me that Griffith's primary fixation was not on race relations but on the imperiled virginity of innocent young women, no matter whose clutches they fell into—be they freed slaves (The Birth Of A Nation), brutal fathers and kindly Asian shopkeepers (Broken Blossoms), wealthy womanizers (Way Down East) or French aristocrats (Orphans Of The Storm).

Despite the lavish productions and impressive action sequences, the formula wears thin quickly and maybe that's why Griffith's movies fell out of favor with the public long before the advent of sound. Griffith lived until 1948, but he made his last movie in 1931, and he hadn't had a bona fide hit in the ten years before that.

More watchable choices for best director of the Silent Era, safer choices certainly, and very worthy choices—okay, let's just say it: maybe better choices—would include Charles Chaplin (The Kid; The Gold Rush), Buster Keaton (The General; Sherlock, Jr.), F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin), in about that order, I think.

For that matter, maybe the award should go to Edwin S. Porter, who directed The Great Train Robbery in 1903. That was a pretty cutting-edge piece of work, even if it's only eleven minutes long.

I don't know. Who is more worthy of praise, the guy who discovered fire or the guy who warms your house with it?

In any event, there are two things that you can say about D.W. Griffith. He was an innovative pioneer who influenced generations of filmmakers, perhaps more so than any other director of the Silent Era. And there's not a critic or historian alive who doesn't wish he had set the world on its ear with something, anything, else.

But he didn't. And history is what it is.