Six Films Featuring Blackface

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Aug. 13, 2008

Tropic Thunder

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903):

In the very first filmic take on Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling tome, the anti-slavery message is a bit, shall we say, mucked up by a cast of nothing but white folks in dark makeup.

 

Wonder Bar (1934):

Yes, there's a blackfaced Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. But cinephiles know the real offense came seven years later, when Jolson, again blackfaced, played a slave ascending to the afterlife in the lavish Busby Berkeley-helmed "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule"--a number that lasts a whole reel.

 

Othello (1965):

Orson Welles. Anthony Hopkins. Countless stage thesps since the 15th century. Many have scrubbed black paint on their face to play Shakespeare's Moor of Venice. But when Laurence Olivier tried it at the height of the civil rights movement, he wasn't content with mere darkened skin. He also threw in a special walk, a fake bass voice and an "exotic" accent.

 

Silver Streak (1976):

By the '70s blackface had become a satirical joke, and to prove it Richard Pryor himself applied shoe polish to Gene Wilder and let him whip out the most minstrelly impersonation imaginable of a jive-walking soul brotha.

 

Soul Man (1986):

In the 1964 film adaptation of Black Like Me, James Whitmore lightly colored his face so as to experience racism firsthand. Two decades later C. Thomas Howell did the same thing in a raunchy college sex comedy. Surely Howell's obscurity has been a form of cosmic karma.

 

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