More than a "Passing" Sophistication: Dress, Film Regulation, and the Color Line in 1930s American Films

When we think of African American representations of 1930s Hollywood, we likely first envision the maid or butler—Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939) or Gertrude Howard as Beulah Thorndyke in I'm No Angel (1933). These films arguably normalize black servitude as an inevitable part of an intractable and glamorous class system. Ramona Curry argues that Mae West's maids "augment West's featured—and fetishized—status, enhancing the star's aura of power and sexual allure through their roles as servants and through their vividly contrasting visual presence, their dark skin, hair and costumes, setting off West's shimmering bleached-blonde whiteness" (1996, 87).¹ However, the composite image I describe above rests on a vague impression that black characters were uniformly servants and that onscreen servants always appeared in uniform. Take, as a counterexample, Morning Glory (1933), where maid Emma (Sana Rayya) seems to step out of the margins when she changes from her uniform into her fashionable leisure clothes. What is surprising is that despite Emma's narrative insignificance, the transition is emphasized by lighting and framing—and an audacious saunter (fig. 1). Her placement at the center of the frame, between the arguing white protagonists, interrupts narrative attention, raising perhaps the ultimate cinematic question: who is she? The uniform, black and white and designedly nondescript, helps to set up the subsequent dramatic reveal of her flattering furs and hat, heightening the suddenness of the camera's central attention to her and highlighting the inability of her uniform to contain or represent its wearer.

Fig 1.

Frame captures from Morning Glory (1933).

While the servant image was clearly the dominant black Hollywood representation during this era, it is also true that sometimes dress communicated a subtle roundness to black women's characters and an interracial parity at a moment when censorship threatened overt statements of racial equality and images of white and black intimacy.

The Motion Picture Producer and Distributors of America's Production Code of 1930 (commonly known as the "Hays Code") famously repressed onscreen sexuality.² But race was a part of a more daring, turmoil-ridden early Depression-era pre-Code cinema, which registered the desperate revolt of fallen women and forgotten men against a failing social system (Doherty 1999, 256). Accordingly, race also became a regulatory concern, as seen in the Code clause barring "miscegenation" and in the industry policy against racially motivated lynching (Courtney 2005; Wood 2009, 229). Costume, however, was a realm generally outside of censors' close scrutiny in the 1930s and was thus a freer space of racial inscription than the narrative.³ Not only was costume essential to Depression-era screen narratives of class rise (and fall); it sometimes operated to complicate the narrative, threatening to distract viewers with its overwrought embellishment of a character's affect and personality or glamorizing the "low" figures—the gold digger and the fallen women—that censors reviled (Gaines 1990, 188; Foster 2007; Jacobs 1997, 58-59).⁴ The lack of racial fixity in some 1930s Hollywood films revealed, if only incompletely, black women's modern, urban personalities and small-scale revolts against the color line. Through motifs in dress—the quick-changing maid, interracial sartorial and sardonic parity, and stylized idealization of interracial spaces—aspects of these films silently normalized racial similarity and undermined the uniform servitude of the 1930s black image.

In these surprising moments black women stepped out of their prescribed subservience to glamorously become the center point of the camera's gaze in ways that cast doubt on the naturalness of black inferiority and sometimes disrupted prevailing narratives of gender, race, and power. I begin with analysis of several pre-Code-era films and end with readings of Code-era films starring light-skinned black actress Fredi Washington, who became the vessel for dress-borne tensions about the color line latent in earlier films. Following Robert Stam's call to resuscitate marginalized ethnic "voices" from Hollywood texts, I magnify those brief but...