Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

African Americans and Jews in Hollywood \\ 265
emancipation." And by the middle of the Depression, the Negrophile writer, Carl
Van Vechten, summed up, among other news items, the arrival of Bill Robinson
and Paul Robeson in Hollywood, and the release of unsentimental movies such
as Slave Ship, by predicting to Johnson "I think this is likely to be a NEGRO
WINTER." 2 ?
By the end of the decade, the sort of gestures that evoked such fulsome praise
had become calculated and firmly linked to an endemic anti-fascism that had been
rising in the wake o( the assumption to power of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and
Tojo in totalitarian states. Indeed, in the transformation of the regional novel,
Gone with the Wind into a national movie epic, David O. Selznick specifically
linked the need for a modernized portrayal of Blacks to the international war
against fascism. "In our picture I think we have to be awfully careful that the
Negroes come out on the right side of the ledger," rather than, as he told his
writer, risk their movie becoming "an advertisement for intolerant societies in
these fascist-ridden times." Later, many Black activists, in spite of themselves,
joined the house organ of the NAACP in finding in Gone with the Wind "no reason
for Negroes to feel indignant." Later still, when Sol Lesser attempted a sort of
B-movie version of the regionalisms of Gone with the Wind in his Way Down South,
he, like Selznick, wished for fairly drawn Black imagery. But unlike Selznick, he
went right to the source by engaging Clarence Muse and the poet, Langston
Hughes, to write as Black a movie as they could. Never mind that draft-by-draft
the movie compromised and embraced many Hollywood conventions; it had
begun as a product of a Jewish-Black alliance. "Messrs. Muse and Hughes are to
be given the utmost liberty in developing the Second Draft Screenplay," he wrote
to his production unit, "so that it will contain every element of their conception
of the story." 23
Clearly, the rnood of "conscience-liberalism" established by the onset of World
War II placed African Americans in an enhanced bargaining position in
Hollywood. Indeed, Sime Silverman's Variety gave such politics a banner headline:
"Better Breaks for Negroes in H'wood." And Jews saw the changes—particularly
those that seemed results of lobbying by Walter White of the NAACP—as especially
sanguine. One of White's Jewish correspondents saw in the casting of a
Black doctor in a Metro B-movie, Dr. Kildaire's New Assistant, an event "as stirring
and as promising as any of the principles set forth in the Atlantic Charter
[the pact that had defined the earliest of Allied war aims]." Routinely thereafter,
critics celebrated war movies such as Sahara (1943) as "an outstanding contribution
toward the objective stated by Mr. White." 24
Such movies came from a cadre of Jewish "moguls" who even in prewar days
had formed a Hollywood Anti-Nazi League to stand against Hitler's anti-
Semitism even before the government did. They almost relished the role of propaganda
warriors. In one instance of a polyethnic movie about a lost platoon,
Bataan (1943), the cast featured obligatory soldiers that included the Jewish
Sergeant Feinberg and a Black Corporal, Wesley Epps, a preacher and an artful