Word: fetchit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...