Four Special Movies Tonight on TCM (Turner Classic Movies)

Problem Pictures of 1949 – 11/19


By Roger Fristoe

November 8, 2020

During the post-World War II years, Hollywood produced a number of “problem pictures” that included studies of U.S. race relations which were being reevaluated by such circumstances as the war itself and the burgeoning civil rights movement. Nineteen-forty-nine became a seminal year for such movies, with several films that broke new ground in the depiction of African Americans and the prejudices they faced.

TCM presents four of these pictures in a night co-hosted by noted film scholar and expert in Black history, Donald Bogle. Bogle is also an instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and at the University of Pennsylvania. Among Bogle’s seven books on the topic are Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in FilmsBrown Sugar: Eighty Years of America’s Black Female SuperstarsBlacks in American Film and Television: An Illustrated Encyclopedia; and Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood.

Two of the TCM films focus on “racial passing,” with Black characters who present themselves as white. In both instances, the films were written and produced by white filmmakers and performed by white actors in the key roles.

Lost Boundaries (1949) is the study of a light-skinned doctor (Mel Ferrer) and his family who, for years, pass for white in a New Hampshire town. The film, directed by Alfred L. Werker, was based on William Lindsay White’s nonfiction story about Dr. Albert C. Johnston and his family, who lived through the same situation in New England in the 1930s and ’40s. (8 PM Eastern)

Home of the Brave (1949) takes on both the psychological damages of combat and the destructive forces of racism in its story of a sensitive Black soldier (James Edwards) who suffers from battle fatigue (later known as PTSD). In flashbacks we learn that during the war in the South Pacific, he was sent with four white comrades on a dangerous mission to a Japanese-held island. One of the men (Lloyd Bridges) is an old and loyal friend, but another (Steve Brodie) is a racist whose behavior threatens the integrity of the mission. Mark Robson directs a screenplay based on a play by Arthur Laurents in which the protagonist was Jewish and the problem was anti-Semitism. (10 PM Eastern)

Pinky (1949) tells of a light-skinned young black woman (Jeanne Crain) who has passed as white while training in a Northern city to become a nurse. Upon returning to her Southern hometown, she faces an identity crisis while dealing with two older women – her grandmother (Ethel Waters) and a white neighbor (Ethel Barrymore) who becomes her benefactress. Elia Kazan directed from a screenplay based on the 1946 novel Quality by Cid Ricketts Sumner. The movie became 20th Century-Fox’s second most successful picture of the year, and all three leading actresses were Oscar-nominated: Crain as Best Actress and Waters and Barrymore in the supporting category. (11:45 PM Eastern)

Intruder in the Dust (1949) is MGM’s film version of the William Faulkner novel about a Black man (Juano Hernandez) unjustly accused of murder in a Mississippi town and the white adolescent boy (Claude Jarman Jr.) who helps in proving his innocence. Clarence Brown directed a cast that also includes David Brian, Will Geer and Elizabeth Patterson. Brown and Hernandez were nominated as Best Director and Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle awards. In 2001, Donald Bogle wrote that Hernandez’s “performance and extraordinary presence still rank above that of almost any other Black actor to appear in an American movie. (1:45 AM Eastern)

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1:58 pm on November 19, 2020