Word: screens
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...films: the 1939 musical "Way Down South," a collaboration with Langston Hughes (the only movie work the poet-playwright-essayist did), and, the following year, "Broken Strings," a sweet-tempered indie drama in which Muse starred. An impressive resume. Just as impressive is that he achieved this screen familiarity without bending overmuch to the meanest stereotypes expected of black actors...
...face, figure and elegance made for the movie screen. "Her features were sharply defined, her hair long, dark and straight, and her eyes a vibrant green," writes Bogle of Fredericka Carolyn Washington. "In Harlem society in the 1920s and 1930s, she and her sister, Isabelle, were legendary beauties, hotly pursued and discussed." Washington's light-skinned beauty both enhanced and abridged her showbiz career; but her exotic outsider status pursued her, defined her, wherever she went. Her husband, Lawrence Brown, was a trombonist with Duke Ellington, and in the 30s she would occasionally accompany the orchestra on dates...
...following year she was Louise Beavers' passing-for-white daughter in "Imitation of Life" - the meatiest role Hollywood had yet offered a young black actress in an A-budget film. The stocky, seraph-faced Beavers, who had worked as a maid to silent screen star Beatrice Joy (Mrs. John Gilbert), went on to play maids in many movies; she also followed Ethel Waters and Hattie McDaniel as the problem-solving maid in the early-50s sitcom "Beulah." In "Imitation," from the Fannie Hurst novel that has generated at least four movies, Beavers is Delilah, a single mom whose recipe...
...That's Washington. Seeing her, the white viewer thinks: Join us! Elevate the race - ours. The movie screen is only skin-deep, and surely glamour counts more than an ancestor's color. Peola thinks that; she glides on the edges of white society and wonders why, if Bea could ascend to it via money, a light-skinned young woman couldn't do it with prettiness. She has a wonderful mother who is exactly the wrong mother for her, so far apart are their respective ideas of what is possible and proper. Peola runs away from home, finds a job - cashier...
...this, his one "race" film, Robeson plays both the venal "Reverend" Isaiah T. Jenkins - an ex-con who wows the faithful with his sermons and woos them with a brutal hand - and Isaiah's saintly brother Sylvester. Of course it's Isaiah who gets the screen time, because Robeson could seize the screen by pouring more of his roguish majesty into the part. Isaiah wows the church ladies with his orations, then sullies their virgin daughters and pockets his victims' life savings (hidden in a Bible!). The actor's playing here is as broad as Broadway, but Micheaux wasn...