In the June 21, 2020, edition of the Sunday Chicago Tribune, the question was posed whether WarnerMedia, which controls the rights to Gone With the Wind (1939), should give up their copyright and allow the film to fall into public domain. Would Disney, likewise, do this with their equally controversial Song of the South (1946), so that no profits could be made from it? Both films contain racial stereotypes and depictions of African-Americans that are out of touch with audiences, especially now during the “Black Lives Matter” movement. One film is currently under siege while the other remains locked away.
In the Trib column, Professor Kristen Warner of the University of Alabama was quoted as saying, “It would show that this is something they (the studio) can yield to the public domain so that people can remix it and modify it and get to the nuts and bolts of it and make it into whatever they want it to be. It’s more valuable to let it become part of remix culture, where experimental filmmakers or students can play with it and critique it and see that it’s fungible and malleable. I think that would actually be really remarkable and quite savvy if Warner Bros. let that happen.”
From the standpoint of our cinema heritage, that’s a particularly ludicrous statement for her to make. We live in an outrage culture where everyone finds it necessary to re-write history according to how they view it now; you see it every day with this agenda to re-name, re-brand, re-label, or simply remove aspects of our cultural identity. There’s a radical component of society that wants to tear it all down and remove anything that is offensive to modern sensibilities. And when I see statues– from Columbus to Washington– being defaced or brought down, I question what separates these protestors from the Taliban, toppling over everything that is offensive to their beliefs.
It is within this cultural divide that people get on their platforms. Gone With the Wind is a monument of sorts, not unlike those statues being toppled across America. In fact, it is probably the epitome of Hollywood studio film-making. The goal is that if this film could be brought down– one of the most popular in our culture– then everything else from our past that is deemed offensive could follow and be shelved, hidden, or relegated to a museum.
Are all the actors who had performed in blackface going to be banned now– from Al Jolson to Bing Crosby? Will movies containing controversial scenes– far more controversial than anything in GWTW— be removed from our streaming services, if not our national consciousness? I wonder what these SJWs would think of director John Ford’s films starring Will Rogers. Two of which feature Stepin Fetchit in supporting performances that are admittedly unintelligible. I’m sure none of the detractors would have seen these films or cared about the humanity contained in them, of course, but they’d want them out of circulation just the same.
In this political atmosphere of the Cancel Culture Age, you’re guilty by association– a new retro-active blacklist. Just last year at Bowling Green State University, a theatre named after the great actress Lillian Gish was renamed because she had starred in The Birth of a Nation. Just like that, her name was erased by academic cowards. Fredric March, the finest actor of his generation and a vocal critic of racism, was once honored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison when they named their Play Circle Theatre after him. However, more recently, his name was literally covered up because of his involvement with a student fraternity called the Ku Klux Klan, which was formed in 1919. (Except for the name, this fraternity was in no way associated with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.) So much for remembering Fredric March at the university! These are knee-jerk, political reactions by people who don’t know anything about the subjects involved. More recently, USC’s “School of Cinematic Arts” dishonored itself by removing a John Wayne Exhibit. Students there were protesting the actor because of racist comments he made decades ago.
It is an absurdity beyond comprehension to turn over a film like GWTW to a generation– this “remix” generation– that can’t produce anything comparable. Whether you’re a fan of the film or not, GWTW was the creative vision of talented artists– and a great showman, David O. Selznick. How would he feel today if his greatest achievement was surrendered to a generation that can’t understand or accept its historical context? To them, it’s simply “white supremacist propaganda.” Because it does not jive with their sensibilities, it somehow has to be reconstructed?
I’m one of the few to have actually seen Song of the South— uncut and a very good copy of it. It’s the movie Disney does not want you to see. Released theatrically in 1946 and re-released in theatres only a handful of times since, it remains the only Disney movie to never be distributed on dvd in the United States. Film critic Roger Ebert didn’t think it should be made available at all. Former Disney CEO Bob Iger once called the film “fairly offensive,” but Disney should be more embarrassed by Jungle Book 2 or Planes. Song of the South is actually a great film, all the more beautiful with the Technicolor photography by Gregg Toland. Artistically speaking, Song of the South outranks the majority of the studio’s product from the last fifty years.
In the story, Bobby Driscoll plays a young boy, Johnny, who is forced to stay with his mom on his grandmother’s plantation while his father is away. Uncle Remus, a sharecropper who regales the children with colorful tales of Brer Rabbit, becomes a surrogate for Johnny’s father. His stories, brought to life through animation in the film, help Johnny deal with the challenges of boyhood. In the end, it is clear what Remus’ value is to the family. In an era when the country was still segregated by Jim Crow laws, here’s a major motion picture depicting an African-American as part of the family unit.
Song of the South remains controversial because you have a black man happily singing (the Academy Award-winning) “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” on a plantation, and the film uses black dialect. One misconception is that the film depicts slaves, which it does not. Song of the South is set in the Reconstruction era, and Uncle Remus is free to come and go as he pleases. As for its stereotypical dialogue, well… I’ve read enough African-American literature at Columbia College Chicago to know that writing in a black vernacular is not in itself racist, but a viewer can judge Disney’s attempt to do it here– if the film can ever be seen by the public, that is.
The important thing to consider is that Walt Disney was making the attempt in 1946. For decades, blacks had been depicted as caricatures in Hollywood films– pretty much any time an actor like Willie Best or Mantan Moreland appeared on screen– but here was a major filmmaker, Disney, making a sincere effort to bring the Uncle Remus folk tales to the screen for children. Racist implies hate, and that isn’t evident with anything that is on the screen in this film. You could use other words– condescending, one-dimensional, whatever– but it’s not in the Birth of a Nation category, not even remotely.
At the time of the film’s release, there was generally negative criticism from the NAACP and the black press, but not everyone hated it. Critic Herman Hill, who later became a civil rights activist, wrote in The Pittsburgh Courier that Song of the South could “prove of inestimable goodwill in the furthering of interracial relations,” and labeled criticisms of the movie as “unadulterated hogwash symptomatic of the unfortunate racial neurosis that seems to be gripping so many of our humorless brethren these days.”
The film’s detractors will say that the character of Uncle Remus is too much in line with the Uncle Tom tradition, but James Baskett brought a dignity and intelligence to the character despite the limitations in its overall scope. It’s a performance that received an honorary Oscar– the first African-American man to win any such award. Hattie McDaniel, who also co-stars in the film as Aunt Tempe, had been the first woman to win an Oscar for her supporting performance in Gone With the Wind. Ironically, these two “firsts” occur in films some would like to banish from existence. McDaniel and Baskett were pioneers, paving the way for those to come.
Film, like society itself, is an evolution. We can document and see the progress. But we simply can’t go back and judge a film from an earlier period– or try to erase it. To do so is a dishonor to all those involved in making it. If Disney has any artistic integrity left, they would release the film regardless of the political climate.
~MCH
Glenn Leedy, James Baskett, and Bobby Driscoll. (Baskett would pass away two years later in 1948.)
