Word: fetchit
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DIED. Lincoln Theodore Perry (stage name: Stepin Fetchit), 83, black comedian who, adopting the name of a horse he had won money on, played a gentle, shuffling, eye-rolling subservient in movies of the 1920s and '30s (Show Boat, Stand Up and Cheer); of congestive heart failure and pneumonia; in Woodland Hills, Calif. When a 1968 TV documentary accused Stepin Fetchit of popularizing the stereotype of the lazy Negro, Perry brought an unsuccessful $3 million defamation suit. "I had to defy a law that said Negroes were supposed to be inferior," he said. "I was a star--the first Negro...
...like a bullet or a bull terrier, his torso a few seconds ahead of his legs; anyone without a dancer's equilibrium would have fallen on his face. Henry Fonda was just the opposite: a triumph of convex geometry, his thin body a question mark that ambled at Stepin Fetchit pace toward a girl or a cause. Katharine Hepburn seemed always on the ascendant, scaling the invisible ramp of her own confidence. But of all the Golden Age Hollywood stars it was Fred Astaire who defined screen movement, for the 30s and forever. With athletic nonchalance, he showed moviegoers...
...Williams' work vacillates between inert and abysmal. The rural comedy of "Juke Joint" is logy, as if the heat had gotten to the movie; even the musical scenes, featuring North Texas jazzman Red Calhoun, move at the turtle tempo of Hollywood's favorite black of the period, Stepin Fetchit. And there were technical gaffes galore: in a late-night scene in "Dirty Gertie," actress Francine Everett clicks on a bedside lamp and the screen actually darkens for a moment before full lights finally come up. Yet at least one Williams film, his debut "Blood of Jesus" (1941), has a naive...
...Juice was no hero to African Americans. His postfootball success was largely due to his ability to make whites comfortable as he played golf with ceos at country clubs from which other blacks were excluded or shucked and jived his way through goofy movies like some modern Stepin Fetchit. Never one to speak out about civil rights, he seemed to shed his racial identity, crossing over into a sort of colorless minor celebrity as easily as he escaped from tacklers--or from the black wife he traded in for a white teenager. By trial time Simpson wasn't exactly white...
From the '50s onward, then, Hollywood began to move away from the bug-eyed, watermelon-eating portrayals of African-Americans that abounded in the '30s, introducing a wider variety of characters. As Stepin Fetchit became a phenomenon of the past, stars like Lena Horne and Sidney Poitier were born. Nevertheless, the roles available to Blacks were still basically tame--musicians, functionaries, and other characters that did little to challenge the status quo. The few movies that did have an edge to them were poorly distributed or received criticism for being too incendiary. For example, 20th Century Fox's controversial...