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104 Between 1927 and 1954, the major Hollywood studios produced only six feature films that took place in an all-black milieu: Hallelujah! (MGM, 1929), Hearts in Dixie (Fox, 1929), The Green Pastures (Warner Brothers, 1936), Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943), Stormy Weather (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1944), and Carmen Jones (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1954). Two other pictures represented blackness in a less substantial way: Tales of Manhattan (Paramount, 1942), which is an anthology film with one episode devoted to black characters, and Song of the South (Disney, 1946), which is a blend of animation and live action. The period in question was the heyday of classic cinema, bounded at one end by the introduction of sound and at the other by a shift toward a decentered , “package unit” mode of production (see Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, 330–38). More importantly, 1954 was also the year when the Supreme Court ordered public schools desegregated, paving the way for a civil rights movement that would have a lasting effect on all the media. Until then, any studio film purporting to deal exclusively with black experience was truly exceptional and controversial. The films listed above are therefore among the most unusual products of American show business, and no proper history of the movies should ignore them. Viewed from today’s perspective, one of the most interesting of the “all Negro” productions was MGM’s Cabin in the Sky, starring Ethel Waters, Eddie Anderson, Lena Horne, and a host of well-known black performers— interesting not only because of its entertainment value but also because it appeared at a crucial historical juncture, when African Americans were increasing their demands for better treatment from the movie industry, when black musical performers were achieving a degree of celebrity they had not enjoyed before, and when the federal government was engaged in a semiofficial drive to encourage more pictures with black casts. Although Uptown Folk Blackness and Entertainment in Cabin in the Sky Uptown Folk / 105 Cabin was manufactured at a conservative studio, it was designed to appeal to a variety of audiences, binding them together in the name of wartime solidarity; in certain ways it can be described as a liberal or historically transitional work, telling us important things about the complex, sometimes troubled relations between ethnicity and modernity. In general terms, Cabin was no different from the other five studioproduced films about blacks. All were symptoms of a segregated society; all were written, produced, and directed by whites; and all were musicals or melodramatic narratives that made extensive use of song and dance, thus reinforcing the white culture’s perception of African Americans as a funloving , “rhythmic” people. As a group, the six films also depended upon a vivid opposition between city and country that structured both classic Hollywood and many aspects of the culture at large. This opposition was always crucial to any art or entertainment that involved blackness; notice, for example, how the country-city polarity functioned in early uses of “jazz,” a term that had been appropriated by white songwriters from Tin Pan Alley and turned into an ambiguous, highly flexible signifier. Was jazz a primitive music, a people’s music, or an entertainment music? All three possibilities were suggested by critics, and the term seemed to oscillate between diametrically opposed meanings: on the one hand, jazz was associated with flappers, skyscrapers, and the entire panoply of interwar modernity ; on the other hand, because it originated with African Americans who migrated to the northern cities, it connoted agrarian or precapitalist social relations and could be linked to a pastoral myth. Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927) and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935)—two celebrated “modern” stage musicals—were grounded in folkloric treatments of blacks. Even Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer (1927) evoked both city and country : jazz represents a force of modernization that disrupts a conservative Jewish household, but when the protagonist enters show business he reasserts old-fashioned values by donning blackface and singing “Mammy.” The same oppositions can be observed everywhere in Cabin in the Sky, which uses black-influenced popular music to tell a story about a rural community threatened by gamblers and nightclubs. But Cabin creates a slightly different effect from earlier pictures of its type. Whatever its artistic merits (and these are far from negligible), its treatment of the country/ city motif is ironic or insincere, signaling a modest change in mainstream cinema’s negotiation of racial issues. Even though the film is never...

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