Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood

Abstract

Many consider the 1930s the nadir of African American representation in film. Donald Bogle illustrated racialized archetypical stereotypes in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks in 1973. Unfortunately, scholarship on this era has moved little beyond Bogle's interpretive history of that decade. Miriam J. Petty of Northwestern University has destroyed this simplistic framework in one fell swoop. In Stealing the Show she delivers a sophisticated, highly readable yet complex study of this period that illustrates the nuanced relationships between African American actors, their screen roles, and the audiences viewing them in theaters. The author focuses on five seminal African American figures in 1930s Hollywood: Hattie McDaniel, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, and Stepin Fetchit (Lincoln Perry). Audiences recognized these five actors as having star potential, or, as Petty interrogates, “stealing the show.” Since it was almost impossible for black actors in the 1930s to fit into the dominant paradigm of “stardom,” due to highly codified racial types, Petty is fascinated by “performances that ‘steal’ our attention, managing to detract from the ostensible center of attention of a film, scene, or sequence” (p. 2). This phenomenon has been obliquely addressed by film scholars who specialize in African American cinematic representation but never to the thoughtful degree that Petty achieves. Black actors of the era executed “performances … generally confined to this liminal space” (of stereotype), and the perilous position of black actors in depression-era Hollywood meant that they were often balancing between “artistry and survival” (p. 3).