Audio transcription
John Quackenbush 0:01
January 7, 2017. The Harvard Film Archive screened Babes in Arms. This is the audio recording of the introduction by HFA programmer David Pendleton and scholar Rhae Lynn Barnes.
David Pendleton 0:15
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. David Pendleton here from the Harvard Film Archive. This audience, I think, represents the Venn diagram between hardy New Englander and hardcore cinephile. So I congratulate all of you for being here. It's true that these films rarely screen in 35mm. I think one of the reasons for that will be the subject of the main part of our introduction. I'm here just to start out with a couple of—with some words of welcome. Happy New Year. This is our second day of screening for 2017. And we're restarting our Busby Berkeley retrospective—a tribute to the filmmaker who, often through his production numbers, but not exclusively, was somebody who revolutionized the depiction of dance on screen—song and dance on screen. And in so doing, particularly in his earliest films, at Warner Bros., really also pioneered ways of representing space, of scale, of integrating abstraction into the image, and even touches of expressionism and surrealism.
Tonight's two films—both screenings tonight, however, represent Berkeley working in a different mode of the musical—the musical film, at MGM. The backstage musical that brought Berkeley to fame at Warner Bros. in the mid-1930s had sort of run its course, and was receding by the end of the 1930s in favor of a more integrated musical—musical numbers on a smaller scale, musical numbers that are more related to the plot and to the characters, or the personalities of the characters, in the films. And, in any case, Berkeley moved from Warner Bros. to MGM, which was one of the pioneers of this new kind of musical in the 1940s, picking up where people like—the people who worked on the Astaire/Rogers films in RKO in the mid- to late ‘30s, had left off.
So, for the—from 1939 to 1943, Berkeley was working at MGM, mostly with producer Arthur Freed at the fabled Freed Unit. In fact, Babes in Arms—the film we're about to see—was the first film of the Freed Unit. Freed had been a rising producer at MGM in the ‘30s. And his success with his work on the Wizard of Oz gave him his own unit, and the success of Babes in Arms, which was as successful, at the time, as the Wizard of Oz, made him a star producer there, and made stars out of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, as well.
I think that's all I'll say, because I'm here to really introduce our main speaker this evening, who is somebody who's a Harvard graduate who has gone on to become a cultural historian, Rhae Lynn Barnes, specializing in the history of North America, with particular interest in the history of racism, racial formation, gender, sexuality, and representation in popular culture. As you'll see—as we've mentioned before at a couple of screenings, and these two films tonight, in particular, have blackface numbers in them. Given the current political climate, and given the fact that the history of blackface is no longer—or so little understood nowadays—we thought it was important to have people come, and who knew more about blackface and minstrelsy than we did, to come and talk about these particular films. And so it's a pleasure to welcome Rhae Lynn Barnes here, who's working on a current book called Darkology: The Hidden History of Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of Modern America, 1860-1970, who has received funding and support from the Library of Congress, the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and a number of other places. So here to say a few words about blackface and imagery from the minstrel show in Babes in Arms, please welcome Rhae Lynn Barnes.
[APPLAUSE]
Rhae Lynn Barnes 4:36
Good evening. Thank you for braving the storm. All right. So, Babes in Arms, directed by Busby Berkeley, represents one of nine films starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland together. Babes in Arms, however, has the unique distinction of often being called the "most racist Rooney film." And if you've ever seen Breakfast at Tiffany's, where he's performing in yellowface, that really is saying something. It's also known as Judy Garland's blackface film. And on its grandest scale, Babes in Arms chronicles the story of a vaudevillian family during the Great Depression, struggling with the larger cultural trend off of vaudeville and blackface traveling shows towards film that's sound-based. And it's no coincidence that the first talkie film, The Jazz Singer, happens to star a blackface minstrel. This declension narrative of blackface and its predecessor, vaudeville, under "the shadow motion pictures," as a character in the film will describe it, is established in the opening scene. So I want you to pay attention to the subheadlines that will flash on screen from the Variety paper from 1924, reading "Vaudeville Biz Booms" and "Amateur Night Revived," because they establish a really important undercurrent in the film's narrative between the parents' role as the vaudevillian generation and the children as amateur producers in the musical variety. In larger American cultural history, this is a contested issue, about whether or not vaudeville was even in a declension narrative during the ascension of film. So that's really sort of the larger tension at stake. But as a cultural historian, my job here is to complicate this narrative. And on a more intimate level, this really is a movie about teenagers in love. Judy Garland sings. Mickey Rooney is a songwriter. He writes "Good Morning" in 1939, in this film, which will later be immortalized in Singin’ in the Rain in 1952. And in some ways, this movie is somewhat autobiographical because both Rooney and Garland did have vaudevillian parents, and they became the breadwinners for their family in motion pictures.
So now that I've given you a brief synopsis, let's jump into sort of the darker history dealing with blackface. In songs like "Daddy Was a Minstrel Man," which Judy Garland sings in this film, she specifically lists antebellum and Reconstruction blackface celebrities of the 19th century by name, like George Primrose, who was a nationally recognized and celebrated blackface performer, primarily during Reconstruction America, but he was performing up through the nineteen-teens. It's striking that this film in 1939 assumes an audience even possesses a familiarity and cultural knowledge of post-Civil War blackface comedians, and longs for them romantically. And in fact, my research has found that because of the prolificness of amateur blackface shows, the average American in the 1930s and 1940s actually did know who he was. And as an interesting aside, George Primrose also gets a shout-out in White Christmas. There's a minstrel scene with Danny Kaye, Bing Crosby, and Rosemary Clooney, and Rosemary Clooney says, “When Georgie Primrose used to sing and dance to a song like this,” which then leads into the "Mandy" number. And this evening, you'll see that Judy Garland is also representing Mandy in the blackface scene. So there's sort of this cultural recirculation of very specific minstrel tropes that's going on sort of at the top level in film and also bottom-up through amateur shows that are continuing during the Great Depression.
All right, so the backstory. After the Civil War, professional blackface minstrels like George Primrose were global celebrities. Post-Civil War, Democratic politicians and publishers began purchasing, for stage consumption, these plays that had previously been more based on wordplay and improvisation, and they began to write them down in script form, so that families could use them, churches could use them, schools could use them, for home and public production, usually as a form of charity—charity shows. There were about 79 publishing houses that produced these amateur blackface material. They were marketed nationally as local entertainment. And there are about nearly 10,000 plays that I have catalogued so far. And that's not even beginning to cover it. So these are really the material remnants of white supremacy’s intellectual life and effective history. Amateur blackface was central to the maintenance of racial identities and a prime way of socializing the American public into the pleasures of Negrophobia. These plays in the 20th century were used by pretty much every government institution, like the United States military, the Works Progress Administration, which is sort of referenced in passing often in this film, and state education boards, that began to set the standard for American classics that all schoolchildren were expected to know and systematically should be able to perform as a representation of Americanness. And so one of these things is, Steven Foster is sort of identified as the classic American songster. Amateur minstrel shows continued to rise in popularity, peaking during the Great Depression. And this is sort of counter to what we previously believed, that this was peaking in the 19th century. And this is happening simultaneously when Babes in Arms is filmed. So in 1937, the year the original musical was written—in ’39 we have the film adaptation—Harper's monthly claimed that 70 million people, in the United States alone, attended 250,000 amateur blackface shows. Amateur minstrel shows were encouraged by the federal government, and they transmitted word for word, lyric by lyric, antebellum popular culture written during slavery through every single government institution and civic institution in the United States. So that is how you end up with an audience—1939—knowing who George Primrose is. Because they're constantly being exposed to it throughout the different organizations in their life.
So really quickly, I'm just gonna sort of explain what a blackface show is, and then we will watch the movie. All right, so in its origin, blackface was a makeup technique that starts around Othello and Shakespeare, in which actors try to conceal any hint of blackness. So they're using burnt cork on their hands, on their face, they're using wool wigs, sometimes they use white gloves. And oftentimes, they're wearing tuxedos and top hats, so sort of evoke the image of the house slave—so the sort of proper big house slave. After 1842, shows followed a three-act formula: the first part, the olio, and the afterpiece. And these acts were not linear. During the first part, a live band blasted an upbeat song like Stephen Foster's "Camptown Races," which will be in this film, while the house lights remained on, blurring the separation of stage from the viewers. The minstrel performers parade towards the stage, dancing erratically. They're supposed to be represented as completely out of control, dancing up the aisles, encouraging the audience to clap their hands, stomp their feet, whistle, shout, laugh, and get the house to shake. The drunken goal was normally to try and get the chandelier to fall, and sometimes it actually did, with the assistance of fires. Yeah. [LAUGHS] The minstrel performers then were performing on stage, and the interlocutor then yells, "Gentlemen, take your seats!" And that will be represented in the film. The minstrels sat on the stage in a semicircle in front of a plantation scene, and then began, normally singing ballads like "Swanee River," "Oh, Susanna.” These are all Stephen Foster songs written between 1848 and 1851 that will be in the film. And normally then have tap dancing, or back-and-forth, stand-up comedy. To give you an idea of how pervasive these were, William Randolph Hearst performs in one at Harvard University in the 1880s. And they go all the way up through Bob Dylan, who claims he saw one in the late 1950s, and Florence Mars states that the infamous site of the 1964 slayings, where the civil rights workers who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, died on the very site where every single year the town staged the annual blackface minstrel show. Amateur blackface plays scripted their own possible uses, and created their own social spaces by asking readers, who were normally children, to both create the text and their projection of specific racial caricature that they began to master. So how does a black person talk? How do they walk? How do they look? So really trying to internalize and then physically embody stereotypes. And when you watch Mickey Rooney, it's sort of startling the way he changes his vocal intonations. It's sort of a raspy representation—a guttural somewhat jazz-man stereotype. And he also develops a sort of twitchy facial representation that will be interesting.
Two other quick things. It's really abnormal to ever see an amateur minstrel show where a woman is both in blackface and impersonating a man, which Judy Garland does in this film. However, in her second blackface scene, she becomes Mandy, who's a quadroon, mixed race Creole, and she has lighter skin. So I think this was sort of an attempt to feminize her, and sort of make the blackface okay. Two things to look out for. So, as stated, Busby Berkeley was really well-known for sort of his kaleidoscopic choreography, and that's not going on in this film. However, his sort of hypnotic legs, arms and blonde hair is instead replaced with another uniformity, which is the uniform stereotype of blackface, tuxedoed house slaves, in line in the circle. And finally, I don't want to give the ending away, but really sort of think about and reflect the use of blackface as a mode of expression for the struggling family during the Great Depression, and southern stereotypes of backwardness that are then going to be replaced with a very specific use of Yankee life and northern elite life. In the final scene, there's sort of an intense juxtaposition. So pay attention to that shift in terms of speech, costuming, and just overall demeanor and comportment. All right, so that's all I'm gonna say for now, and I hope you enjoy it. And if you have questions afterwards, I'd be happy to talk to you more. Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
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