Until I got interested in Awful British Comedians my experience of the n word in old British movies was limited to THE MYSTERY OF THE MARIE CELESTE, a moody but soporific thriller-melo with an imported Bela Lugosi. I can’t quite recall how the word turns up in it but I believe it’s spoken by a sailor, and could be interpreted as rough realism. (The poster image looks amusingly like a man who has just caught himself accidentally saying a racism.) I do remember that it was fairly gratuitous and quite shocking, though: the Hays Code seems to have banned such expressions in American films of the time — either under (1) Profane and vulgar expression or (11) Willful offense to any nation, race or creed. Or both, quite possibly.
I’m sympathetic to the intention behind (11) but of course it stifles realism. It’s notable that when American movies were finally allowed to use profane and vulgar expression and show characters giving willful offense, they used it to display and condemn unpleasant social mores. But it’s questionable if that’s the use they’d have made of such license in the 1930s.
I’ve already written of the startling use by Will Hay (not to be confused with Will Hays, he of the Code) in HEY! HEY! USA! of the offending word. The attitudes that come bounding out of the screen at you like labrador puppies with leprosy are truly startling — it’s like coming across the word in P.G. Wodehouse (he does, alas, use it intermittently). There’s no awareness of possible offense at all, it’s just presented as casual informal speech. The movie also contains cinema’s second most uncomfortable use of a statue of Lincoln (Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES places a distant third, I guess).
(I was struck as a kid, reading To Kill a Mocking Bird, by Atticus Finch’s explanation of why his daughter should not use the dread word: “It’s common.” Which doesn’t seem adequate to the issue, to me. But it’s an indication of a flaw in Finch, isn’t it, a less-than-Gregory-Peckish imperfection. And can everybody stop saying the book suffers from white saviour syndrome? Who, may I ask, does Finch save? The true white, indeed pasty, saviour is [spoiler] Boo Radley, but he only saves Finch’s kids.)
Well, Mr. Hay did it again. Or one of his films did. OLD BONES OF THE RIVER (1938) is a hugely problematic film anyway, with its casual, cheerful, unthinking imperialism. Hay is a teacher as he often is, this time in Darkest Africa, and his class consist of naked Black boys. Apart from the outmoded racial attitudes the frequent child nudity may be keeping this one on the shelf. The village has rival leaders, the kind and subservient Bosambo (argh — Robert Adams) — and his evil, English-educated brother Mbapi (Jack London — not that one). When Mbapi’s sinister schemes to drive the white man out of Africa (it’s made clear that his higher education has corrupted him) becomes clear, Bosambo curses him out: “You’re a damn n_____!”
Which is, uh. Ugh.
It’s really impossible for me to decide if this is meant to be in any way humorous — the absurdity of a Black man saying that to another Black man — or if it’s part of the film’s more serious side — questionable whether it truly has one, but the tribe, misled, revert to human sacrifice and Hay has to rescue a very cute baby from Moloch or whoever the local god is, and that doesn’t seem too humorous.
The Tom Walls-Ralph Lynn-Ben Travers films are maybe worse though. If you want casual…
So far none of them have been nearly as good as A CUCKOO IN THE NEST. And they’ve also had these startling moments…
FOR VALOUR has some fun stuff — Walls and Lynn get to play dual roles, as their own father and grandfather respectively — I got confused — thought they were both dads, but Lynn says “grandfather” a lot in act III. He also says the n word.
Not only do the comics play two characters but they play them at different ages, so it’s a real work-out. And Walls is only really effective, I think, in some kind of character disguise. Here his old age makeup includes a spectacular ridge to his nose, added on top of the real one, and an ear that’s bent double, canine-fashion. Splitscreen effects allow Walls and Lynn to play with themselves, if you’ll pardon the expression.
And in one scene, we see the younger versions as kids, and they’ve been dubbed with Walls and Lynn’s voices, which is amusing (Lynn’s throaty rasp is impossible to imagine emanating from a child. Disappointingly, he wears no monocle.) Since both kids are criminally inclined, they discuss various misdeeds, and Lynn says he’s committed “whitemail. That’s when you blackmail a n_____.”
This is a pathetically poor joke, quite apart from the racism. It doesn’t make minimal sense. There’s no logical reason why having a Black victim should put the crime into negative. It’s usually a bad idea when you shoehorn a joke into a comedy, especially a farce — what you really want is funny dramatic situations. But because these usually take time to establish, so writers get nervous.
STORMY WEATHER (1935) is a fascinating hot mess of a film, full of Limehouse yellow peril cliches (Walls, never the most exciting director, almost comes to life in his enthusiasm for Shanghai Lil debauchery), and there’s a kindhearted Chinese girl (played by beautiful Malaysian actor Stella Moya) who speaks an appalling pidgin English, helps the heroes, but is then treated as a passive sexual object by them. But the standout moment of racial discomfort is when Sir Duncan Craggs (Walls) checks up on one of his department stores. Since Lynn is running it (with a very young Graham Moffatt as sloppy office boy), the place is very poorly organised and the sales girls are uninterested in their jobs who won’t even return Craggs’ (uncomfortably predatory) flirtations.
One of them sullenly recites the three shades of ladies’ stockings they sell. I forget what the first two are called, because the name of the third has knocked them clean out of my head. You can probably guess what the third shade is called, huh?
Now that’s gratuitous.
I actually appreciate awful stuff like this in old films because it teaches us history. It shouldn’t be smugly taken as evidence that everything’s fine now, or wallowed in as anti-woke racist nostalgia, but you can’t really get a full sense of historic racism and sexism just from history books, and newsreels give you only a partial account. Movies add another facet to our appreciation of specific awfulnesses in our past. The shock of seeing the words spoken and the attitudes expressed in popular entertainment can be, I think, somewhat salutary.
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