Back in black

I decided to celebrate Black History Month (February here in the US, although it's October in the UK) by tracking down some movies about race in America that seem to have disappeared from circulation. Although you can always find copies of nakedly racist or revisionist movies such as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, some others are deemed so embarrassing or offensive that the people who own the rights seem ashamed to rerelease them.

You can see why the Walt Disney organisation has long balked at reissuing Song of the South, its 1946 adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris' Tales of Uncle Remus. The movie was hugely popular on its initial release, but was almost immediately condemned by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for its absurdly sunny depiction of the Old South. Its star, James Basket, was unable to attend the film's premiere in segregated Atlanta, which rather gave the lie to Uncle Remus' claim that, "Yessuh, things are lookin' mighty satisfactual."

Harris, who died in 1908, was a controversial figure during his lifetime, with HL Mencken dismissing him as the "amanuensis" of the poor black sharecroppers he'd heard his stories from. Alice Walker, in an essay called Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine, claimed Harris had "stolen a good part of my heritage". Add all that to the submerged racist tendencies in such Disney movies as Dumbo and Fantasia, and to Disney's own midwestern prejudices, and you get pretty much the movie you'd expect.

Song of the South is conventionally warmhearted, but every one of Remus' lessons could have come straight from that other racially questionable hit, Forrest Gump: stay home, play it safe, know your place, don't get too smart, and so on. Indirectly it gives us a snapshot of the mindset of America on race in 1946, a year after the war fought for democracy, and 18 years before the Civil Rights Act was passed. No wonder Disney has repeatedly promised to rerelease the movie in America, before backtracking every time.

Song of the South's polar opposite is Mandingo, Richard Fleischer's 1975 melodrama about slavery's effects on its victims and practitioners. It seems like no one wants this movie back in circulation - there is apparently just a single copy of it left - but renewed acquaintance suggests that, despite its reputation as a sleazy southern-gothic interracial bodice-ripper, it's one of Fleischer's very best works, the climax of blaxploitation, and easily the most politically astute big-budget movie about slavery ever backed by a major studio.

So why no DVD reissue? Because the movie is so brutally frank about the moral ethos, the mindset, the economics of slavery, and about the way in which it first degrades the slaves, and then drives their owners insane. Set in 1840, a decade after Nat Turner's violent slave uprising, Mandingo delineates with remarkable clarity the poisonous relations between slave and master, the one as livestock for the other to breed and sell, or as sexual chattel subject to arbitrary droit du seigneur. It took Gone With the Wind to wipe the loathsome reality of slavery out of the white American folk-memory for decades, but Mandingo kicks Rhett and Scarlett right back out the door. Falconhurst, Mandingo's plantation, is sometimes closer to Auschwitz than Tara, and the slave owners' obsession with breeding, primitive eugenics and enforced euthanasia for elderly slaves and black babies born to white women offers echoes of Nazism that may still divide American audiences today, especially the specious "southern heritage" crowd.

I say that both movies should be rereleased immediately. One shows us how embarrassing our racial attitudes used to be, the other is a nearly great film, lost to us for more than 30 years, misunderstood on its original release (when it was a huge hit), whose power to shock is undiminished today. And both are essential parts of the rich and grotesque tapestry that is the history of race on film in the United States.