ERASING THE PAST

Anna Appel strong-arms young Sidney Miller, who played Jewish "types" in countless films of the early 1930s, including Symphony of Six Million (1932)

But what the hell, it’s a funny joke.  And the last thing I’d want to do is suppress dozens of vintage movies because there are outdated ethnic characters in them.

The Bowery (1933) manages to offend a whole raft of racial and ethnic groups in its first ten minutes, but it’s still a wonderful movie. 

If we can’t accept these films as products of their time, warts and all, then we haven’t progressed very far in the decades since they were made.  If we aren’t willing—or even curious—to learn about the attitudes and prejudices of those times gone by, how can we consider ourselves to be superior?         

That’s why I’m so annoyed by Fox Movie Channel’s decision to cancel its Charlie Chan film festival this summer, after an Asian-American organization stirred up this ancient hornet’s nest. 

They don’t like the fact that Charlie Chan was played by Caucasians.  Fair enough, but what do we accomplish by taking those movies out of circulation?  Do we convince young Asian-Americans that such casting never existed?  Moreover, does anyone gain anything by wiping this piece of movie (and social) history off the map?  Why should we obliterate the good work of such Asian-American actors as Keye Luke and Victor Sen Yung, who played Charlie’s sons so well? 

Instead of pretending these movies never existed, they should serve as a springboard for intelligent discussion about racial stereotyping and Hollywood casting.

But in this era of political-correctness-run-rampant, dumb decisions are being made all around us.  I was shocked, almost beyond words, when the executive council of the Directors Guild of America decided to remove D.W. Griffith’s name from its most

Keye Luke, as the very Americanized Number One Son, confers with Warner Oland, as his Old World "Pop," in Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936)

prestigious annual award in the 1990s.  The apparent “revelation” that Griffith was racist was not only yesterday’s news, but irrelevant in this context.  To deal with a sensitivity issue by eradicating the name of America’s first great film director from this award was a triumph of ignorance, not progressiveness.   (I shudder to think what might happen when the same people who voted that day see some of the recurring black stereotypes in the films of John Ford and Frank Capra, two still-revered DGA icons!)

Griffith has been a lightning-rod for controversy for almost ninety years.  But Turner Classic Movies found the right solution when it decided to air The Birth of a Nation (1915) a while back:  the showing was accompanied by a panel discussion involving African-American scholars and film experts alike.

I’ve been lucky enough to have several opportunities to put vintage films into historical context, from the Little Rascals comedies, which were released uncensored on home video to great acclaim in the 1990s, to an ongoing series of DVDs called Walt Disney Treasures, which contain parental warnings about cartoons with outdated or possibly offensive material.  After all, it’s children we should be concerned about.

This can extend to a broad spectrum of social mores.  Young people who see The Thin Man (1934) for the first time are astonished at Nick and Nora Charles’ prodigious consumption of liquor...yet drinking was not only socially acceptable but commonplace in those days, much like smoking.  Shocking as it may seem, even what we now call spousal abuse was “acceptable” for much of the 20^th century.

Does this mean that we should reevaluate every piece of fiction, every movie, every citation ever given to a public figure who may not meet our modern standards of proper behavior?  This is no more possible than it is practical.

Instead, we should all attempt to learn from the

Find out more about Leonard's brand-new newsletter. It's Movie Crazy, too.

past, in order to improve ourselves. As Cicero said, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to forever remain a child.”

As a movie buff, I feel especially sad.  I’ve loved the Charlie Chan movies since I was a kid; they’re enormously entertaining.  And unlike many other ethnic groups who have a valid complaint about their portrayal in films gone by, Asian Americans have in Chan a genuine hero—a warm, wise, witty crime-solver and behavioral psychologist who is invariably smarter than any white man in the movie.  If this is racial slander, I must confess that I just don’t see it.

But for now, he has been silenced.  With him goes a chunk of Hollywood history, a prime piece of popular culture, and an opportunity to learn and grow.