Disney's Most Notorious Film (13 page)

The film premiered at the Fox Theatre in downtown Atlanta on November 12. It was a large, three-day affair, with more than two dozen Southern reporters invited to cover the event. Walt himself had left for Atlanta several days early to attend. The day before
Song of the South
’s theatrical debut, the city was treated to a large parade, featuring giant floats of various Disney characters.
¹
The night of the film’s premiere,
Disney
was interviewed on the
Vox Pop
radio program from the Fox Theatre, along with Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield, descendants of Joel Chandler Harris, and the film star Gene Tierney (who did not appear in the film).
²
Also on hand were stars Ruth Warrick, Bobby Driscoll, and Luana Patten, along with actors and actresses who provided the voices of Donald Duck (Clarence Nash), Snow White (Adriana Caselotti), Pluto/Goofy (Pinto Colvig), and Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards). As was eventually noted by many, Georgia’s enforced segregation prevented
Song of the South
’s two African American stars, Baskett and McDaniel, from attending the festivities—something that even few Northern newspapers at the time made a point to mention.
³

Song of the South
’s eventual underperformance at the box office was not for lack of promotion. According to a studio advertisement at the time,
Song of the South
was sold throughout the country in “four-color ads in 75 of the biggest Sunday newspaper magazines and supplements in the country . . . saturating America with one of the most comprehensive campaigns on record! . . . including the most intensive and widespread music promotion ever devised.”
⁴
This campaign did not necessarily help
Song of the South
’s ultimate box office performance, but the music promotion paid off. According to
Variety
, “Sooner or Later” and “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” had already cracked the list of “Top 30” radio songs during the week of November 8–14
⁵
—just before the film was released. It is an oddly appropriate historical irony that “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” technically debuted and found immediate success even before the theatrical release of
Song of the South
, since today the song is still remembered and referenced more so than the film that featured it.

Unlike its soundtrack, however,
Song of the South
generated harsh critical reviews, offended many audiences, and garnered underwhelming box office returns. Despite later assumptions to the contrary,
Song of the South
was a commercial disappointment. In addition to the above promotional costs, the final production tab on the film itself ran over $2 million.
⁶
The film essentially broke even when it later grossed $3.4 million.
⁷
This was not a fiasco by any measure, but it was almost $2 million less than even Walt Disney had privately hoped.
⁸
In any case, it was certainly not enough to reenergize the studio, or to pull it out of the deep financial trouble it had dealt with throughout the 1940s. Moreover, final numbers were especially underwhelming given the various factors that appeared in
Song of the South
’s favor—Disney’s promotional efforts, the popularity of the film’s songs on the radio, the appeal of Disney’s brand name, and,
most
important, the built-in literary audience represented by generations of Harris readers. By opening first in the South, and then later distributing it to the East and West Coasts—its own “Southern strategy”—Disney anticipated that favorable Southern press would send
Song of the South
off on a path to huge box office success.
⁹

As it was rolled out much more slowly than films are today, however, the word of mouth certainly could not have helped: the film suffered widespread critical abuse for its aesthetics and politics. Even before the film was released, the
Chicago Defender
(a prominent African American publication) reported that
Song of the South
came under “considerable panning from the press when producer Walt Disney first announced his intention to film the whimsical story.”
¹⁰
That same
Defender
article also referred to the film as
Uncle Remus
before noting that the title was changed “following a Gallup Poll for a suitable title for the film.”
¹¹
This change from
Uncle Remus
to
Song of the South
was in part to avoid overt “Uncle Tom” connotations. But it also upset the Harris family and may have also alienated (or confused) his literary followers. There were many reasons why the film underperformed beyond the bad publicity that its Uncle Tom representations generated. But the negative word of mouth also tempered any excitement or anticipation the release might have elicited.

In the most recent scholarly account of
Song of the South
’s first reception in the 1940s, Douglas Brode in
Multiculturalism and the Mouse
argues that criticism of the film then was largely limited to white reviewers who were “overeager to display their newly acquired heightened awareness” of racial offenses.
¹²
Moreover, the book suggests that
Song of the South
was progressive for its time because Uncle Remus was a subversion of the Uncle Tom stereotype, at a time when audiences would not have otherwise accepted such a strong black lead character. “Over the next half-century,” writes Brode, “African American film historians would insist on the need for ‘black roles that challenged the stereotypes that had been the icons of earlier times’ [citing Thomas Cripps]. Achieving this necessitates purposefully evoking, then reevaluating the cliché. Disney’s approach ought to be analyzed and understood in terms of the time in which his movie was made. The filmmaker sensed that to utterly abandon the Tom and Mammy icons would disorient a mainstream audience in 1946.”
¹³
In fact, historical evidence in the following pages will reveal quite the opposite. Audiences were more conscious of the “cliché” than was Disney. After World War II many rejected the stereotypes for what they were—outdated, clichéd, and degrading images that presented
a
whole race of people in a negative light. On the subject of war, the most crucial historical event informing
Song of the South
’s first reception, Brode argues only that Disney’s film was one of the first major studio projects to heed the NAACP and Urban League’s respective calls for “a new [black] screen image” on the heels of African American contributions to the war effort. But
Song of the South
did not fulfill the NAACP’s desire for a more “positive” representation. In fact, the activist organization specifically cited the film as a step back in cinematic race relations.

While whites undoubtedly contributed a considerable portion of the criticism, it is presumptuous to assume that they would have all identified themselves as “liberal.” Moreover, the film was harshly criticized in black periodicals as well. One
Defender
article insisted that “critics of both races claim the tale-teller story based on the writings of Joel Chandler Harris glorifies slavery and holds the Negro up for ridicule.”
¹⁴
The newspaper also noted a month after the film’s premiere, with only a little overstatement, that
Song of the South
“caused Harlem and Chicago’s Southside to scream ‘terrible.’
”
¹⁵
But we should be also mindful of the conflicted attitudes toward
Song of the South
even within African American communities. Matthew Bernstein, for instance, has argued that a local Atlanta black newspaper, the
Daily World
, “was highly ambivalent. It displayed neither the unabashed enthusiasm of the white papers for the film as in one Atlantan’s phrase, ‘waking a nostalgia for a gentle way of life lost in the rush of years,’ nor the critical tone of black civil leaders and of the liberal white and Northern newspapers.”
¹⁶
Ambivalence in the South was due less to racial harmony between whites and blacks than to particular contexts. Both responses in Atlanta “were shaped by several factors, such as the element of hometown pride in Harris’ achievement, the shared heritage of the tales themselves, and by what was viewed as appealing aspects of the film.”
¹⁷
Not all African Americans criticized the film, even in the North. Yet such responses were still, on balance, distinctly negative.

It is important to start with an accurate historical account of what people said and why when
Song of the South
first was released in 1946. There are at least three common historical misperceptions underlining Brode’s argument: one, that only white liberals criticized the film; two, that its representation of race relations was at the very least typical of the time and, at best, even modestly progressive; and, finally, that the activism of World War II did not significantly change how audiences read these stereotypes after the war. As I show in later chapters, these inaccuracies migrate increasingly from the realm of popular conservative
myth to “historical truth” for newer audiences trying to understand the film. This chapter takes as one of its central functions the need to articulate what people really said about
Song of the South
when it was first released, even if those conditions have shifted in countless ways in the nearly seventy years since.

Responses to
Song of the South
were not universally bad, but audiences then were more critical and better informed than has been properly acknowledged. As Janet Staiger, Richard Dyer, and others have shown, movie audiences long before the 1940s negotiated images of African Americans in Hollywood cinema with complexity, contradiction, and a practical understanding of history. Staiger’s work on the reception of D. W. Griffith’s racist
Birth of a Nation
(1915), for example, shows how audiences then saw the film as offensive even in its own time, through a variety of historical factors that informed and complicated these divergent responses. “Any individual (then or now),” she writes, “might have conflicting or overdetermined views about
Birth of a Nation
depending on that person’s attitudes toward and judgments of its representation, its technical presentation, and censorship.”
¹⁸

In many ways, the complexity of both supportive and resistant
Song of the South
readings echo what Staiger uncovered in her work on
Birth of a Nation
’s reception. Liberal critics of
Birth of the Nation
when it was first released would often resist calls to ban the film based on larger moral objections to censorship. Meanwhile, Marxist attacks on the film in the 1930s had more to do with its perpetuation of a capitalist work ethic than with its racism. Proponents of the film then might be more likely to champion the film’s technological innovation than to defend its presentation of history. Staiger acknowledges too that notions of conservative and progressive audiences are historically problematic categories themselves, given how connotations shift from decade to decade. But they were quite conscious of the offensive black stereotypes (the “brute,” the “coon,” the “Tom,” and so forth) in
Birth of the Nation
in the early twentieth century—long before
Song of the South
ever hit the big screen. She notes that as early as 1906, “few individuals encouraged representing blacks as beasts”
¹⁹
—the most egregious, but far from the only, offensive stereotype later perpetuated by Griffith’s film.

The historical contexts established in the previous chapter play a central role in informing initial reactions to
Song of the South
. Looking at newspapers and magazines from the 1940s reveals that the primary reading formation at work in
Song of the South
’s first release was not progress, but rather a retreat from the social advances of World War II.
During
the conflict, the federal government worked to promote positive, non-stereotypical images (e.g.,
Bataan
, 1943;
Negro Soldier
, 1944;
Henry Browne, Farmer
, 1942) to help boost African American morale as part of the war effort.
Song of the South
undermined this cause in 1946. There were also other contexts at work in the film’s reception, some of which were outlined in the previous chapter—Disney’s artistic reputation, political activism by various associations and unions, and an awareness of the damaging legacy of literary and cinematic African American representations up to that point. All of these influences played a part in
Song of the South
’s often-hostile greeting. At its core, though, post–World War II racial consciousness framed much of the resistant reception to the film. This heightened activism was seen in the work of African American newspapers (like the
Chicago Defender
), the NAACP, members of Congress, and progressive teachers unions. This cultural perception, too, intermingled with the film’s artistic rejection by others. Film critics such as Bosley Crowther were equally critical, though it was more often because of their disappointment with the film’s aesthetics than with its racial politics. Having developed a great fondness for what they saw as Disney’s innovative artistic achievements in the 1930s, critics found
Song of the South
uninspired and generally beneath the company’s high standards. In the end, the most supportive voices were often studio industry ones, like
Variety
and the gossip columnist Louella Parsons.

A final note about methodology: much of my research here privileges the historical writings and quotations of newspaper critics and political activists whose positions of power granted them the greatest media visibility at the time. This then risks unconsciously repeating a sense of cultural elitism that their opinions may betray, since focusing on people who can speak invariably risks marginalizing those who cannot. This is largely the result of a basic scholarly limitation—what remains in printed form from the 1940s constitutes much of what we can know about what audiences at the time really said. As the range of opinions in the entire book suggests, I do not intend to create the impression that these people speak for everyone who may have seen
Song of the South
upon its initial release in 1946. Their reaction overall, however, does provide a consistent framework for reading the dominant critical climate in which Disney’s film first appeared. Moreover, the generally negative reactions of these writers are supported by many of the letters written to newspaper editors by private individuals. There was no reactive outpouring of objection then, as there would be in the 1980s, to criticism of
Song of the South
in the press. Finally, this critical consensus is further corroborated by the
fi
lm’s mostly disappointing box office performance and by Disney’s subsequent ambivalence toward it over the next twenty-plus years. All this clearly demonstrates that there was really no widespread love for
Song of the South
in 1946. In light of this evidence, its eventual success becomes all the more fascinating, and troubling.