Motion Pictures, the Theater, and Race Relations

Abstract

T HE American entertainment film medium could be and perhaps should be one of Nation's most effective means of dispelling group prejudice. Yet until war years there had. been no consistent effort by or through Hollywood film medium to do so. As author and film writer, Dalton Trumbo, summed it up at Hollywood Writers' Congress in October 1943, the most gigantic milestones of our appeal to public patronage have been anti-Negro pictures, The Birth of a Nation, and Gone With Wind. For sake of forceful argument, Trumbo's summing up is obviously more rhetorical than right since it brushes past many less gigantic but more rewarding milestones such as D. W. Griffith's Intolerance, Fritz Lang's Fury, a treatment of lynch hysteria, and The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's decisively effective film of treatment of migrant worker in California farm valleys. There are many other searching film treatments of various forms of prejudice in between Trumbo's elliptical milestones but his point is well taken in so far as it dramatizes fact that in twenty-five years separating them Hollywood had never accepted as its responsibility function of helping destroy race and group prejudice. The Production Code of Ethics of