Hollywood be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (review)

In 1940, the vocalist and actress Ethel Waters was offered a role as the character Petunia in a Broadway musical production eventually titled Cabin in the Sky. She wrote in her autobiography, His Eyes is on the Sparrow, that "I [initially] rejected the part because it seemed to me a man's play more than a woman's. Petunia was no more than a punching bag for the [character] little Joe. I also objected to the manner in which religion was being handled." Later in the autobiography Waters observed that she had been offered another role in an episodic film, Tales of Manhattan. Her interest in the part was piqued because "they told me the story they were using for our episode. Realizing what a large part God plays in [black people's] daily lives, the producers were eager to inject religion in our part of the picture." And it is precisely this use of African American religion by the Hollywood film industry that the religious historian Judith Weisenfeld examines in her groundbreaking book Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949.

Weisenfeld argues "that religion was central to American film's representation of African Americans" in Hollywood's formative generation of sound motion pictures. Not only was black and mainly Protestant religiosity central in cinematic representation she contends, but it was consciously used by both black and white filmmakers in competing and conflicting ways—financial gain, stereotypical entertainment, racial uplift, and religious proselytization. Weisenfeld offers the reader a behind the scenes evaluation of the American film's industry use of African American religion, which aids her to search other important subtext about religious and cultural anxieties stemming from intellectual modernism, urbanization, and secularization. She judiciously notes that "[w]hile African Americans' access to explicitly religious black films was occasioned at best, the existence of these films—as well as accounts of their emotional impact and commercial success—call on us to think expansively about what constitutes the stuff of black religious life, including the various visual arts, commercial or otherwise, alongside the well-mined textual and musical sources" (6-7).

Weisenfeld achieves her goals for the book by probing every nook and cranny of the film industry records. Her research is thorough and includes the records of Production Code Administration (PCA) the Hollywood film industry's censorious rating board. She also provides sound analysis of the various filmmakers and what their films both consciously and unconsciously depicted about black life. She also brings to the reader's attention neglected historical sources, black film critics who wrote for black-owned newspapers such as Pittsburgh Courier, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the Chicago Defender. And in addition, the book has thirty-nine illustrations including handbills, advertisement posters, and still photographs used to advertise and promote these films to audiences. By being so meticulous in doing research Weisenfeld makes an invaluable contribution both methodologically and historically to the nexus between African American religiosity and American entertainment complex. In the aftermath of Hollywood Be Thy Name religious and cultural studies scholars are bound to explore this relationship more using Weisenfeld's well researched monograph as a model of scholarship.