The Talkie Melting Pot

Hollywood promoted the melting-pot ethos with a vengeance. In films like THE KING OF JAZZ , we see Italians, Spaniards, Irish, Scots, Russians, Mexicans, Polish Jews, English, and Germans stirred into a literal pot to produce jazz. (African Americans were not ingredients in this mixture.) Eddie Cantor, in W HOOPEE !, shows the comic exploits of a Jew who goes to the Wild West. (The plot twist revolving around an Indian who turns out to have no Indian blood and can therefore marry the heroine is almost a burlesque of   GOLDEN DAWN .) The Marx Brothers, especially in ANIMAL CRACKERS , squeeze laughs from the hardships and cultural dissonance of immigration. It is difficult to evaluate the effect of such films. On the one hand, they may have raised the audience’s consciousness of its ethnic minority constituency, but on the other hand, they may have reinforced (perhaps even created) minority prejudices. On a general level, the tendency was to dilute these groups’ separateness, either by showing the minority’s inevitable assimilation or by making its resistance to assimilation into a joke. Hollywood’s traditional response to ethnicity has been to wipe out difference under the guise of promoting its distinctiveness. Desser has commented on this propagandistic tendency in commercial film:

Whether [they] did so out of fear of outside censorship or control, or out of an inchoate sense of gratitude on the part of the major emerging film producers to their new American home, American movie-makers worked toward envisioning a unified society of white, middle-class citizens. One of the problems of this society, one of its contradictions, was between a vision of unified culture and the facts of difference, primarily ethnic difference. Ethnicity was a fact of American life, as was racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry and discrimination. (David Desser, “The Cinematic Melting Pot,” in Lester D. Friedman, ed., Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991], p. 383)

The talkies provided a handy means for exploiting this contradiction. Ethnic voices and musical traditions could readily be expropriated, transformed into entertainment, while both cordoning off and erasing the source.

The acoustic melting pot is caricatured brilliantly in HURDY GURDY (dir. Hal Roach, 1929). The Irish cop Edgar Kennedy just wants to escape the heat wave by taking a nap on his Delancey Street tenement fire escape. All around him, though, his neighbors carry on in a Babel of ethnic New Yorkese—Spanish, Italian, Yiddish, German, and generic Brooklyn. Kennedy, ironically of course, refers to them as “foreigners” in his strong Irish brogue. (Judging from the film, no African Americans lived on Delancey Street.) The film calls attention to New York’s multi-ethnicity by foregrounding these various accents. But by identifying them as non-American, it also suggests that they should be (and probably will be) assimilated.

The sound film quickly became a showdown for ethnicity. During the introductory period, performers like Rubin, Sidney, Brice, Cantor, Jolson, Edgar Kennedy, Charlie Murray, and Stepin Fetchit were admired for their ethnically specific vocal characterizations. After 1930, though, many of these differences were effaced. (Cantors PALMY DAYS ¹⁹³¹, in which the star’s Jewishness was soft-pedaled, is a case in point.) In Hollywood, the coming of sound was a time of great opportunity for African Americans in show business, strictly in terms of employment prospects. But the roles were limited to a few categories: servant, jockey, country bumpkin, plantation worker. Characterization, expressed most often in speech, was highly conventional. Actors like Clarence Muse joked about having to learn how to speak in Hollywood Negro dialect. The producers tried (and succeeded) in molding screen blacks into their preconception (based on memories of minstrelsy) of how African Americans behaved and talked. Even when blacks were placed on pedestals as superhumanly gifted singers and dancers or shown to possess extraordinary spirituality and religion, these celebratory gestures just isolated them further as cinematic spectacle. The role of blacks on the screen during this period is analogous to the uses of jazz by society at large. The entertainers, like the musical form, were absorbed by white culture to serve its own purposes.

Minority filmmaking and ethnic-language production could have continued indefinitely, with separate (but unequal) production the norm and with segregated exhibition continuing the patterns of silent film days. The Depression ended this possibility. Big studios honed their product to appeal to the largest common denominator. Minority filmmakers did not have the resources because their small markets could not support them. Both race cinema for blacks and Yiddish cinema avoided sensitive issues like whites’ racism and anti-Semitism. They seldom if ever addressed external issues like segregation or discrimination. Rather, the filmmakers tended to be interested in stories that would teach and delight. Often the films were about the difficulty of coping with domestic hardships. These melodramas lend themselves to interpretation as symbolic discourses about minority culture, but it is necessary to read between the lines to see in the family crises they depict metaphors for larger and unmentionable themes of oppression.

These other voices faded after the mid-1930s. The saturation of American society by radio and the talkies undoubtedly had a leveling effect on the spread of ethnic sounds and images. At the time, social critics claimed that the media would eliminate regional differences in American speech. On a national level, that did not happen. But with ethnic minorities, assimilation gradually stirred “foreign” ways of speaking into the melting pot. Now the surviving fragments of this filmmaking are among the few artifacts of a distant era of cultural history.