That is not a criticism. Cripps is a historian first, not a film scholar--and so he is not under the obligation to provide a tightly wound thesis which would neatly draw together everything he wants to say. Rather than form a linear argument, Cripps is more interested in constructing a linear timeline, with incidental arguments dropped in here and there.
Of course, larger concerns emerge. Slow Fade to Black, for instance, posits a narrative of achievement, whereby African-Americans do indeed gain increasing visibility and respect in Hollywood, following in the wake of seemingly divergent trends such as the especially belligerent racism of film's early days, and the disappointments of an initial black independent film movement.
Cripps believes the exigencies of WWII played a seminal role in Hollywood agreeing to pay greater attention to the sensitivities of African-Americans, and to making a conscious effort to avoid older racist stereotypes (i.e., "Stepin Fechit", "Uncle Tom", and so forth). In particular, Cripps centers this point on an unofficial pact agreed to between Hollywood studios and the NAACP in March of 1942 to "liberalize their depiction of Negroes on the screen in keeping with the changing times" (SLB, 376). While Cripps acknowledges that things did not exactly change overnight, representations did gradually shift in a more positive direction.
"Positive" for him largely seems to connote non-Southern stereotypes of African-Americans. The US government--Roosevelt's administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of War Information (OWI)--was a key player here (productions such as The Negro Soldier, Henry Browne, Farmer, The Negro College in Wartime). The Second World War, along with the Great Depression, created opportunities for the NAACP to lean on the Hollywood and the US government and:
finally destroy [. . .] the monopoly of Southern racial attitudes on the screen and made cinematic racism untenable. The next twenty-five years or so allowed blacks the opportunity to reshape and define a new black image still in process. (SFB, 383)
Was this a bit too optimistic? Perhaps. Making Movies Black, then, articulates this "new black image still in process," revisiting the WWII era, emphasizing the "social consciousness" movement of the late 1940s, and culminating in the accomplishments of Sidney Poitier, which Cripps believes was undervalued by over-anxious critics who feared Poitier played a stereotypical black man made safe for whites.
Clearly, Cripps likes the utopic narratives of progress, despite the decline of figures such as Poitier. This isn't to suggest that he reads race in Hollywood history unproblematically (in the way that scholars such as Thomas Doherty, in Projections of War, or Douglas Brode, in Multiculturalism and the Mouse, do--in fact, the latter I think badly misrepresents Cripps' work). Cripps spends a great deal of time on the difficulties and missteps--he acknowledges the divides within the African-American communities alongside the sometimes cynical motivations of white Hollywood. But, in the end, Cripps wishes to believe in the good.
At the very end of Slow Fade to Black, he even reads the popular contemporary criticism of Song of the South--a film which would seems to complicate his thesis about post-war representations--as a sign that things had changed for the better.
Interestingly, however, Cripps complicates his own reading of Song of the South in Making Movies Black, where he argues that--while the criticisms and protests at the time were valid--they were ultimately ineffective because African-American communities were sympathetic to James Baskett's performance as Uncle Remus, and could not quite agree on what exactly was so offensive about the film.
The protest to Song of the South began before the film was even in production, and thus Disney was very conscious of potential problems while he made it (even though he clearly didn't care that much what the African-American community ultimately thought). Cripps' work reminds us of the important fact that Disney's film was successfully innocuous for its time. In this regard, Cripps does not explicitly foreground what any competent Hollywood film scholar could tell you--while the subject matter seemed to put a bull's eye on Song of the South's chest, in fact it was as carefully neutral and politically ambiguous as most any major Hollywood production, and thus a slippery target, which it remains to this day.
In the second book, meanwhile, Cripps does a similar rereading of Gone with the Wind--a film he praised in the first volume as successfully negotiating political extremes. David O. Selznick's version removed a lot of the overt racism from the novel, while also managing not to seem as though it was celebrating the victory of the Civil War at the expense of an offended South. In Making Movies Black, however, Cripps approaches the film more critically--without denying Selznick's crafty tight-rope act, he also acknowledges that black audiences did not necessarily respond well, and that Gone With the Wind's careful neutrality also negated the significance (even the visibility) of black struggles for equality.
Yet there is still a sense in which Gone with the Wind's limitations set the stage for the progressive possibilities of World War II and the social consciousness it left in its cinematic wake. Ultimately, Cripps relies on the notion of the "thermidor"--the idea that, after moments of upheaval or crisis--social attitudes swing violently back in the opposite direction. For example, Song of the South was symptomatic of a reaction against the progress of blacks during the war.
Meanwhile, only war--or the Civil Rights Movement--were strong enough to disrupt the equilibrium of the conservatism in-between. Even in the end, with the passing of Poitier's success, Cripps believed new opportunities (albeit, then directionless) awaited African-Americans in the cinema of the 1970s--"a fresh response to new conditions created by the civil rights movement" (MMB, 294).
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