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7 Noble Savages (1956–1957)
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c h a p t e r 7 NOBLE SAVAGES (1956–1957) v ‘‘Negro Actors Get Pix Breaks,’’ announced Variety in May 1956. No longer confined to playing maids, porters, singers, or dancers, black actors now had small but important parts in a few pictures. But progress was slow. Although black urbanites thirsted for more roles like Poitier’s turn in Blackboard Jungle, the major studios still had to consider the substantial southern market. ‘‘In the question of Negro casting,’’ the trade journal summarized, ‘‘Hollywood is somewhat caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.’’∞ At the time, Poitier was shooting Edge of the City, a picture that illustrated this dilemma. The film confronted racial discrimination, and it featured a compelling black character. Yet it found few bookings or willing theatergoers in the South. Without its low budget and independent production team, Edge of the City never would have been made.≤ Poitier’s next role promised a better opportunity for large-scale success . He reunited with MGM producer Pandro Berman and writer/director Richard Brooks for Something of Value, a film based on Robert Ruark’s novel about the recent Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. The studio poured enormous resources into the project, paying a record $300,000 for the film rights in January 1955, three months before the book’s publication date. It borrowed Rock Hudson from Universal for $400,000 and paid the actor $200,000. It claimed to have spent $250,000 factchecking Ruark’s novel. Then in September 1955, Brooks and Berman scouted locations in East Africa. MGM seemed determined to create an entertaining, big-budget picture that portrayed racial conflict in an African nation.≥ Ruark’s book, meanwhile, became a bestseller. The Scripps-Howard columnist reshaped his Kenyan experiences into a novel about two friends—one white, one black—and how political circumstances divide them. Echoing Alan Paton, Ruark lamented that whites destroyed black 124 race man tribal life and failed to replace it with ‘‘something of value.’’ But the book’s appeal lay more in its lurid depictions of Africa: grotesque female circumcisions, blood-soaked massacres, and brotherhood oaths involving animal penises, sodomy, and the consumption of human brains. The New Yorker snickered that the novel had ‘‘the lean and hungry look of imitation Hemingway,’’ and Ruark himself seemed a pastiche of the legendary writer. Hefty, hearty, and more than a little pompous, Ruark bragged that between movie rights and book sales, he made over three million dollars from Something of Value.∂ MGM banked on similar success. Following the formula of Blackboard Jungle, Brooks adapted a popular novel based on current events. Both projects depicted violence frankly. Both included roles for popular leading men such as Glenn Ford and Rock Hudson. And both cast Sidney Poitier as a young black man torn between two codes of behavior. Just as Poitier’s race lent a key subtext to the anxiety provoked by Blackboard Jungle, his Mau Mau rebel implied a threat of black rebellion in America. Again, that danger was defused. v When Poitier arrived in Kenya, he saw mostly black faces. Nevertheless, it was a white man’s country. When settling Kenya in the late nineteenth century, the British envisioned a fertile land of European farmers and subservient African peasants. Whites seized land and political control. Wage labor and tax codes weakened traditional systems of land ownership and local rule, creating a huge, rootless black underclass from Nairobi to the countryside.∑ World War II stimulated change. Returning black veterans demanded jobs and political reforms, and protest organizations sprung in both cities and rural areas. Some developed elaborate oaths. By 1950, rebel protests included murder, arson, and the maiming of animals. By 1952, the government had declared a state of emergency, imprisoned leader Jomo Kenyatta , and summoned the British army. By 1955, the so-called Mau Mau rebellion had been suppressed.∏ Press reports, government statements, and missionary accounts shaped a popular image of Mau Maus as bloodthirsty savages captivated by primitive voodoo rituals. Few examined the legitimate nationalist sentiment behind their actions, and fewer understood that most black Kenyans desired the same reforms as the rebels. Ruark’s novel—the bestknown account of the Mau Mau—enshrined the myth that blacks either stayed loyal or betrayed paternalistic whites. It never questioned the En- [18.213.110.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:23 GMT) noble savages (1956–1957) 125 glish right to ‘‘civilize’’ blacks. And it graphically described Mau Mau savagery, dominating...