The Movie Musical: Stormy Weather & Bamboozled

Raymond Knapp

Marginalization of Blacks in Hollywood

• Singin’ in the Rain makes only oblique references to The Jazz Singer’s use of blackface
• Marginalization of blacks in Hollywood
• Permitted the perpetuation of blackface of blackface
• Systematically denied blacks a central place within mainstream films
• “Natural order of things”
• Blacks consigned to mostly comic and servant roles, or to musical numbers, well into the 40s
• Often in films featuring whites in blackface
• Black performance sequences were often separated from the substance of the plot so that they could be deleted from “Southern” versions of the film…

“Although Hollywood did not invent blackface and race-based hiring practices, it both perpetuated them within a medium that produced more lasting and widely distributed artifacts than minstrelsy, vaudeville, or burlesque and, after this heritage became an embarrassment, conspired to conceal the extent and lasting effects of those practices, while to a large extent continuing them, albeit less obviously” (79)

Responsibility

• Assigning responsibility for these continuing practices is difficult
• Intractable restraints placed onto filmmakers of the time
• Hays Code
• post-WWII repressive atmosphere
• Assigning retroactive blame to specific targets is a losing game since the issues were systemic, not exactly perpetuated by select individuals
• These scapegoats draws attention away from the widespread practices
• Guilt was felt and even hinted at (or denied unfortunately), yet nothing substantial changed for a very long time…

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Outer Appearance and “Race Films”

• Black performers kept in the margins
• Despite there being other marginal groups at the time (queer performers, Jewish performers, etc.), they could adopt the outer mask of white, heterosexual “normalcy”
• While perhaps covertly including elements that might mean something quite difference to an audience “in the know”
• This “luxury” was not afforded to people of color
• As a result, many people of color sustained their careers making “race films”
• Produced by black-owned companies and distributed to mainly “colored” theaters
• Micheaux Company one of the most well known and successful

“Stormy Weather is one of only three feature films made by the major Hollywood studios with all-black casts between 1930 and 1954. All three were written and directed by whites, and none is without serious problems when considered as a possibly viable alternative to the more common all-white film” (81)

Three Hollywood-Produced All-Black Films

• The Green Pastures (Keighley & Connelly, 1936) - produced by Warner Bros
• Retelling of biblical stories by a black southern preacher in “Uncle Remus” mode
• Adapted from Ol’ Man Adam an’ his Chillun (Bradford, 1928)
• Cabin in the Sky (Minnelli, 1943) - produced by MGM
• Many critics found little to redeem its perpetuation of black stereotypes
• Stormy Weather (Stone, 1943) - produced by 20th-Century Fox
• All-star cast of the time!
• Hollow at its center, hackneyed plot
• Bill Robinson criticized for being an “Uncle Tom”...
• Cynically supports the war effort…

Stormy Weather

• Basic rationale as an alternative to white perspectives on blacks, yet it partakes in several images and tropes of blackface minstrelsy
• Cakewalk number (14:15) (celebrating African American heroism during WWI) is based on two tunes familiar from late 19th-century minstrelsy
• Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” and Kerry Mills’s “At a Georgia Camp Meeting”
• Blackface bonnets…
• Riverboat number (17:45)
• Several “minstrelisms” like “educated feet”
• Two “African” numbers (28:45 & 32:00)
• Fantasy, primitive version of Africa with stereotypical signifiers throughout

Stormy Weather Cont…

• Dooley Wilson plays shiftless “bootblack” specializing in promoting great wealth
• A stereotypical “trickster” character
• Wilson made famous as Sam in Casablanca!
• Bill Robinson’s character’s own show includes a blackface number by “The Shadracks” (44:00)
• Classic “indefinite talk” routine
• Stormy Weather number (58:20)
• One of the most famous musical numbers in Hollywood history
• Beautiful arrangement, complex diegetic structure, etc.
• Look! Hollywood is progressive…
• Other problematic numbers are usually forgotten…

Bamboozled & Stormy Weather

• Issues of “black complicity” taken up in Bamboozled (Lee, 2000)
• Depictions of minstrel performance on TV show
• White and black audiences at first repelled, then eventually totally taken with the show
• If Stormy Weather is a hollow, cliche-ridden story as an excuse for numbers, then “its reversion to minstrelsy cannot but offend, even if the relevant numbers are in themselves creditably performed” (85)
• Most “tainted” minstrelsy numbers connected to the film’s villains
• “...should encourage us to understand the film as ‘integrated’ in the sense that its song and dance numbers are…situational and not merely a succession of hits…” (85)

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson

• Robinson’s performance as Williamson undermines the possible integrated commentary
• The typical understanding of him playing a version of himself is wrong
• It’s a fictional biopic since Robinson’s own career is quite different
• The focus is on his Shirley Temple years and those characters he portrays
• “Both onstage and off, then, Robinson projects a performance history that belies his appearance throughout the film in exclusively black settings; this is clearly someone who has learned how to behave, as an actor and dancer, for white audiences and within predominantly white contexts” (86)
• He was 70 years old at time of filming…

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson Cont…

• Robinson is somewhat inadequate to his central role and prestige, especially when compared to other performers in the film?
• He has an inherent gentleness not seen in the other performers of the film
• African Americans’ contributions in WWI and their musical contributions
• The film’s story and musical numbers end up making sense and commenting on each other (as well as race relations of the time) as the film progresses

Other Performances

• Ada Brown and Fats Waller numbers (20:30 & 24:30)
• Waller serves as the “end men” to Ada Brown’s interlocutor
• Their back and forth as a sense of play in minstrelsy and jazz
• Waller’s feminine, possibly subtextually gay performance
• Cab Calloway as a kind of three-in-one: woman, man, and virtuosic instrument
• Established as the god-like emcee, orchestrating plot’s resolution from on-high
• The film’s final numbers are now in the present, not being remembered from Williamson’s past
• “Live” dimension of final numbers

Stormy Weather Number

• Lena Horne beautiful performance
• Katherine Dunham beautiful performance
• Transition from stage, to street scene, to balletic stage production, then back again to Horne
• Similar to Busby Berkeley’s numbers at the end of his 30s backstage musicals
• However, this motivation seems different than his
• We’re seemingly inside her imagination and memory

“Bamboozled seems only critical, finding musicals to be escapist and shamelessly commercial, and built directly on the backs of African Americans. Indeed, notwithstanding important European roots for the American musical, what makes it distinctively American is its use of American ‘vernacular’ music and dance styles, all intricately intertwined with minstrelsy, jazz, blues, spirituals, and tap dance” (91)

“The basic question, then, for both films, is, How viable is the genre itself for African Americans?” (91)

Bamboozled and Stormy Weather Cont…

• Bamboozled as “anti-musical”
• Present numbers as if they successfully transcend their problematic roots, though they ultimately do not
• At no point do the performers feel at ease, despite them successfully making the audience feel at ease
• Smiling and sweating simultaneously
• Stormy Weather betrays a similar discomfort
• Trying to fit the generic mold of the American musical with resistant content
• “...hollow central characters, emptied of genuine humanity except while performing, may seem analogous to the sweat on Glover’s brow, a telltale sign of something very basically wrong” (91)

Commentary in Stormy Weather

• By later numbers commenting on earlier numbers, the film could be engaging in social/racial commentary
• “The Nicholas Brothers, by dancing on the music desks of the band players, and later on the piano itself - and in tuxedos rather than war paint - eclipse the ‘jungle’ association of Williamson’s earlier breakout number while also recalling, in their interactions with the pianist, Waller’s earlier interactions with his drummer during ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’” (92)
• They also eclipse Robinson’s famous staircase dance at the end…

The Little Colonel (Butler, 1935) & Stormy Weather (Stone, 1943)

“This quality of inflected response transforms their dancing into an integrated component of the music; unlike Robinson’s, theirs is a species of jazz dance that truly partakes of jazz” (92)

“...Stormy Weather seems to join with Bamboozled in refusing to ‘buy into’ the reality of its musical alternatives. Yet, in another sense, by staying within the mode of musical performance, Stormy Weather makes that mode the one that matters, so that the transformative story told through its musical trajectory takes on additional power, using the film’s principal inadequacies as a foil of sorts” (93-94)

“Thus, its wooden acting and its early reliance on minstrelsy and ‘jungle’ tropes provide the base material, which the alchemies of jazz and jive transform into pure gold” (94)