Remarkable Woman

Butterfly McQueen owes her place in the Black Filmmakers’ Hall of Fame to her portrayal of Prissy, Scarlett O’Hara’s simple-minded and (to some) comically inept servant in Gone With the Wind (1939). After this performance, the actress played similar roles in a few films, most famously in Duel in the Sun (1946), before she became disgusted with the demeaning nature of the parts on offer and turned her back, more or less for good, on motion picture acting. “I didn’t mind being funny,” she once said, “but I didn’t like being stupid.” Stephen Bourne’s portrait of this remarkable woman is not just a study of her life, work and beliefs. It is also a more general account of the plight of African American actors in the Hollywood studio system and a reexamination of the nature and meaning of their performances.

McQueen got the job in David O. Selznick’s Civil War epic because of a role in What a Life, a successful Broadway comedy of 1937. From the outset, however, her experience of the film colony was disillusioning and even distressing. One reason was that the Gone With the Wind set operated under a kind of unofficial segregation. On location, for example, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and other white players drove around in swank limousines; McQueen and her fellow black performers were crammed together in a communal car. Another reason was the director. George Cukor, the first of three directors on the project, supervised the majority of McQueen’s scenes. In Bourne’s account, this sensitive Hollywood artist comes across as a racist bully. For instance, he berated the actress when she called for the camera to stop after one scene in which Vivien Leigh had slapped her too hard; if she did not get an action right, he would make dubious jokes about selling her down the river and using a Simon Legree whip.

It could be argued that Cukor was a bully to everyone; he admitted to Gavin Lambert that he once slapped Katharine Hepburn on set. Even so, the stories offered here leave a very nasty taste, as do the accounts of Selznick trying to be all things to all Americans. It is typical, for instance, that to gain good coverage in the black press, the mogul wanted McQueen and Hattie McDaniel to attend the Atlanta premiere, but then he withdrew the offer because he became more afraid of upsetting white Southerners’ sensibilities.

Much later in life, McQueen changed her attitude towards Prissy; in 1989, she even took part in the film’s fiftieth anniversary festivities. One can see why she mellowed. After all those years, she was still recognized in the street, and her fame was a good advertisement for her cabaret act. It is possible, though, that she had started to sense a turn in the critical tide. Bourne, a black British writer, remembers that in the 1960s, actors like McQueen and McDaniel were regarded by his contemporaries as embarrassing reminders of the bad old days and the offensive old stereotypes.

All this changed in the 1970s when Donald Bogle, an African American film scholar, re-examined the performers of the earlier generation. In his view, actors like McQueen might be working within the limits of comic servants and shiftless buffoons, but this did not mean that they succumbed to, or colluded in, the caricature. On the contrary, they offered firm resistance by investing their roles with humanity and strength. Thus, as Bourne observes, Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) in Gone With the Wind sometimes gives the impression of being the master rather than the servant, while McQueen in Mildred Pierce (1945) appears to be on equal, even intimate terms with her employer, Joan Crawford.

After she had turned her back on Hollywood, McQueen worked in cabaret, television (the very successful Beulah comedy series) and Off-Broadway, but much of her life was spent away from show business. She worked for various community projects in her home district of Harlem; she was a tour guide; she gained a degree from the City...