Elia Kazan (1949)
The actor and director Burt Caesar introduced this BFI screening of Pinky. It was early Sunday evening and Caesar started by promising the NFT3 audience we weren’t in for a sermon. He spoke with such knowledgeable, sonorous solemnity that the intro did have a morally improving flavour about it, though some humour too. Caesar’s pause before his closing ‘thank you’ was actorishly timed but this is nitpicking. Given what BFI introductions are sometimes like, you could only be grateful for such a thoroughly expert curtain-raiser.
Burt Caesar kept his word in not giving away plot details but he made clear enough the main themes of Pinky. That led him to comment on the film’s most enduringly controversial aspect. The title character, Patricia ‘Pinky’ Johnson, a young woman of colour so light-skinned that she has passed for white, is played by a white actress, Jeanne Crain. Caesar suggested, with maybe a touch of irony, that Crain’s casting was defensible on the grounds that plenty of officially white people have non-white blood somewhere in their ancestry. He was making the point that race is largely a false construct, and fair enough. It’s nevertheless hard to watch Pinky without deploring the choice of lead, which pandered to public prejudices of the time. White audiences could rest assured that Jeanne Crain, a big name, was feigning being a ‘tragic mulatto’ – no less than Jane Wyman had feigned being a deaf mute in Johnny Belinda the previous year. (They’re just pretending – it’s what actors do …)
Pinky, who has been training as a nurse in Boston, returns to her childhood home in the South – to the shack where she was raised by her grandmother Dicey (Ethel Waters), an illiterate laundress. Able to deny her ethnicity without questions being asked in Boston, Pinky has done just that, and has fallen in love with a white doctor, Tom Adams (William Lundigan), who’s unaware of her race and background. When she first arrives at Dicey’s, Pinky says she’s planning to stay only a few days. Back in the place she started from, she doesn’t conceal her racial identity and is quickly reminded just how uncongenial that makes her native heath. Attempting to reclaim money owed to her grandmother for laundry work, Pinky is harassed by racist law officers. Two white men try to sexually assault her. When an African-American medic (Kenny Washington) encourages her to stay in the area to train black student nurses, Pinky tells him she’ll soon be heading back north. Her departure is delayed when she reluctantly agrees, at her grandmother’s urging, to provide care for Dicey’s ailing, elderly neighbour Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore). Pinky dislikes this old woman: she remembers that, as a child, she was shooed off the property. As a consequence, Pinky has always seen Miss Em as typical of local bigotry but, as the two spend more time together, warms to her patient. The feeling is mutual.
There’s another reason to regret that Jeanne Crain is Pinky: she isn’t very good. It’s a not unfamiliar performance from someone who has made their name in lighter roles (Crain’s biggest success had been in the musical State Fair): the actor betrays the weight of responsibility of playing a serious one – a responsibility that may have been felt more keenly in this case because of the race issues involved. Crain is committed but limited. She has a few good bits: when Miss Em makes Pinky laugh; more extendedly, when she inherits the old woman’s house and twenty acres of land and Pinky is increasingly determined to hold on to her inheritance, in spite of legal challenge from Miss Em’s family. For the most part, though, Crain’s effects are too obviously prepared. Her conspicuously unnatural movement makes Pinky odd-girl-out in the wrong way.
Elia Kazan inherited the cast, crew and settings from John Ford, whose surprising involvement in the project ended abruptly, shortly after shooting began. Kazan later expressed his dissatisfaction with Jeanne Crain (‘a sweet girl … but she was like a Sunday school teacher’[1]) and with 20th Century Fox’s refusal to let him shoot at least part of Pinky on location (‘Almost everything was shot in the studio … Naturally, there was no dirt, no sweat, no water, no anything’[2]). The approach to Dicey’s shack certainly looks like a stage set. In spite of Kazan’s lack of enthusiasm for the picture, he delivers some potent scenes – notably when Doc Joe (Griff Barnett), Miss Em’s physician and executor, informs Pinky and Dicey of the contents of Miss Em’s will. Because black-and-white films are now so unusual, it may be easier for a twenty-first century audience to see Joseph MacDonald’s cinematography as expressive in relation to the racial themes. Pinky’s white nurse’s uniform has particular impact.
Miss Em’s cousin Jeffers Wooley (Everett Glass) and, more volubly, his wife Melba (Evelyn Varden) contest the will that bequeaths Miss Em’s property to Pinky. As racist as she’s rapacious, Melba pays an entertaining visit to the old lady earlier in the film. When Pinky starts nursing her, Miss Em asks what she thinks of ‘my best brooch’; Pinky politely and correctly identifies it as ‘one of those rather clever imitations one can buy in the chain stores for a dollar’. Melba judges the same brooch ‘priceless – a real antique’; it’s a nice joke that she inherits Miss Em’s jewellery. The courtroom scenes are uneasy, dominated as they are by Dan Riss’s bizarrely unctuous interpretation of the plaintiffs’ lawyer[3]. Pinky is represented, though reluctantly, by the recently retired Judge Walker (Basil Ruysdael). Their prospects of winning the case seem bleak when Doc Joe can’t make it to court to give evidence in Pinky’s support (he’s busy delivering a baby at the time). The new judge (Raymond Greenleaf) confounds everyone, the film’s audience included, by ruling in her favour. The strongest moment in court comes, though, in Walker’s sting-in-the-tail words to his client: ‘Well, Pinky, you won. You got the house and the land. And you got justice. But I doubt if any other interests of this community have been served’.
Pinky benefits greatly from its two senior Ethels, whose performing styles are very different but equally effective. Ethel Barrymore, decidedly theatrical, plays Miss Em with incisive wit: she makes clear the old woman is a giant ego who scolds all-comers, regardless of their race or role. Ethel Waters’s celebrated ‘force of nature’ presence (impressive but, I think, wrong for her character in Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding three years later) is enriching here. Waters is especially affecting in suggesting Dicey’s mixed feelings about the provisions of the will. She’s already grieving the loss of someone she considered a friend; she knows that Pinky’s inheritance is bound to complicate their lives. (Miss Em leaves her entire wardrobe to Dicey, who’s particularly appreciative of the footwear: ‘Sometimes I think she always get her shoes extra big ‘cause when they fit her just right, they pinch my bunion’. Just as well the shoes fit: it’s hard to see how someone of Ethel Waters’s size could find much use for Ethel Barrymore’s clothes.)
Pinky takes to heart the precise wording of Miss Em’s bequest, ‘being an expression of my genuine regard for her and my confidence in the use to which she will put this property’. Being taken to court to fight for it sharpens Pinky’s determination to justify her benefactor’s ‘confidence’ and to live as a woman of colour. She’s already told Tom Adams, who has tracked Pinky down to Dicey’s shack, the truth of her ethnic identity. Tom still wants to marry her but on the understanding that she’ll continue to conceal her colour from the rest of the world. Pinky eventually tells him that ‘I can’t deny it – I can’t pretend to be anything else, and I don’t want to be anything else’, and Tom exits sharply.
In the film’s final sequence, Pinky has turned her inheritance into ‘Miss Em’s Nursery and Clinic’, peopled by African-American staff and children. Like the casting of Jeanne Crain, the ending is designed to appeal to white audiences (which Pinky certainly succeeded in doing: it was 20th Century Fox’s top-grossing film of 1949) and is a cop out. The screenplay, by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, is adapted from a novel, Quality, by Cid Ricketts Sumner. In his excellent book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks (1973), the black film historian Donald Bogle explains and comments as follows:
‘In Quality … Pinky won her courtroom case, but the Ku Klux Klan burned down Miss Em’s house in retaliation. That ending was far more honest than the optimistic everything’s-gonna-work-out-fine tone at the film’s end, when a group of cute ebony nurses are seen laughing in the converted hospital.’
2 February 2020
[1] Quoted by Lorraine LoBianco, tcm.com
[2] ibid.
[3] I assumed this actor wouldn’t have been in the film if Elia Kazan had had a say in the casting. It was a surprise to see Dan Riss, just a couple of days later, in Panic in the Streets, in which Kazan ‘handpicked everybody’. Dan Riss overacts in that film, too.
