Burbanking bigger and bette the bitch.

It surprises no one that Native Son (1940) was not adapted to film by Warner Brothers Studio. In fact, an analysis of the novel's rejection by Hollywood may seem an exercise in the obvious: Hollywood studios of the studio era (1928-1948) were oligopolies invested in producing conservative films thought to be universally consumable. Richard Wright's novel, a fierce critique of the bloody consequences of white racism, seems hardly the kind of pre-sold property Hollywood was looking for. But rather than accept studio racism as given, I wish here to begin to pry it apart--to interrogate the lesser-known industrial practices that worked to create the well-known industrial product. Through an analysis of studio archival records, I will examine one adaptation strategy widely employed by studio story departments, the custom of "Burbanking," to argue that this strategy had the effect of racializing studio narrative as white.

David Bordwell has shown that the narrative logic of classical Hollywood cinema centers on the psychology and actions of a protagonist who responds to conflict through a chain of cause-and-effect events ("Story Causality" 13-23). The story is generally incited by a temporary threat to social order (an injustice, a crime, a misunderstanding) perpetrated by an inappropriately self-interested antagonist; the story progresses through the actions that the protagonist takes to thwart the antagonist to restore social order. When the studios chose to purchase an existing story, that story would be adapted to this narrative model to a greater or lesser degree. As Nick Roddick has argued about Warner Brothers film production in the 1930s, "a standard code of practice was adopted in terms of decision-taking, planning, scripting, shooting, editing, publicity, and release. This necessarily involved fitting the variable story material into as regular a narrative pattern and cinematic style as possible, with the crux of the plot ... illuminated through a central character...." (254) If a purchased story presented as this central character's problem a corrupt social order, Hollywood would often resituate the corruption within a single individual preferring to critique "bad seeds" over bad systems. Because the Warner Brothers West Coast office was in Burbank, California, and this self-styled studio of "social conscience" was particularly fond of this kind of narrative adaptation, the trade newspaper Variety dubbed the practice "Burbanking." As Roddick and Tino Balio have argued, Burbanking had the conservative effect of maintaining current social order because injustice was portrayed as a result of individual villainy that would likely succumb to individual heroism (Balio 281). I would add more specifically that this adaptation practice, which functioned as an ideological narrative technology, rendered black protagonists unrepresentable in studio era film.

James Snead wrote that in "all Hollywood film portrayals of blacks ... the political is never far from the sexual, for it is both as a political and as a sexual threat that the black skin appears on screen" (8). Of course, the disappearance of black skin from the screen had its political and sexual effects as well: conservative studio era film cannot help but be marked by the radical race narratives that it attempts to suppress.

To demonstrate this point, I first examine the reaction of the Warner Brothers story department to Native Son and to Ann Petry's novel The Street (1946), to argue that it was the narrative ideal of Burbanking that made these novels unadaptable to Hollywood film. Next, I analyze a novel that the studio did see fit to adapt, Ellen Glasgow's Pulitzer Prizewinning In This Our Life (1941). Like Native Son, In This Our Life features a black male chauffeur who is accused of murder and a young white woman determined to disregard social restraints on her sexual behavior. I show that Glasgow's novel was ripe for studio consumption because it was, in a sense, always already Burbanked by the author herself. Lastly, I explore some of the narrative fallout of the Burbanking strategy, in particular an excessive symptom of demonized white femininity that erupts from studio-era film and is best exemplified by Bette Davis, star of Warner Brothers' In This Our Life (1942). This fallout was not confined to the medium of film, however; both the Wright and Glasgow novels suggest that the hyperbolic white female "star" may be symptomatic of a repression of plots of black male potency.

Dynamite and Whitewash: Native Son and The Street at Warner Brothers

Wright finished a typescript of Native Son on June 10, 1939, and less than two weeks later Paul Reynolds, Wright's literary agent, submitted this version of the novel to the Warner Brothers New York office. (1) Warner Brothers was not the only studio to consider Wright's work but its exceptionally complete story department archive provides us an illuminating glimpse into industry-wide source acquisition practices. The studio had already reviewed Wright's Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas (1938), "Bright and Morning Star" (1939), and "Almos' A Man" (1940), and would eventually review "The Man Who Lived Underground" (1944), "Early Days in Chicago" (1945), The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), and The Long Dream (1958). (2) The studio would also consider unpublished Wright works, including a version of Black Hope, a story of racial "passing" and Wright's only novel with a female protagonist, and Melody Limited, an original screenplay about the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. (3) None of Wright s work, however, garnered as much studio attention as Native Son.

Warner Brothers story analyst Irving Deakin furnished his superiors with a report on Native Son on June 28, 1939. After summarizing the story in some detail, Deakin prepared a memorandum that broadly sketched his impressions of the novel:

   Harper has, as an important novel on
   their Fall list, a work by Richard
   Wright entitled NATIVE SON, a report
   on which I am handing you herewith.
   It is a fine and powerful novel, telling,
   in fictional form, the spiritual problem
   and struggle of the American negro in
   the face of the restricting white civilization
   in the United States. Mr.
   Wright's central character, a negro
   boy, in revolting against the un-understood
   restrictions put upon his life in
   the slums of Chicago, kills a white girl
   by accident, is caught after a short
   flight and brought to trial. Only a communist
   lawyer seems to understand
   the motives which had prompted him;
   but a plea for mercy to the judge avails
   nothing, and the boy awaits death with
   some satisfaction in the knowledge
   that for his soul at least, there would
   be no further suffering, once he had
   given his life in the electric chair.
   (Memorandum 1)

In just this short introduction to Deakin's report, the problems of Burbanking Wright's story begin to reveal themselves. At first glance, the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is depicted as engaged in a psychological "struggle" with forces greater than himself and which compel him to action; in this sense, Deakin relates a studio-ready story. On greater inspection, however, we see that the struggle is not Bigger's alone, but one common to "the American negro." As such, the story is not propelled by the choices of a purely autonomous individual, but by the condition of a social group. Deakin does not depict this condition in typical Burbanking language--as a problematic deviation from an ideal social order, perpetrated by an evil individual. Bigger's treatment at the hands of whites is not in fact described as unjust or wrong or immoral; rather, his oppression is a mere "restriction" that is "un-understood." Deakin chooses here to situate the narrative problem not with the oppressors but with the oppressed, whose "spirit" suffers apparently as much from a lack of comprehension of his social situation as from the situation itself. How would the studios create their own brand of protagonist-driven plot around a young man Deakin had characterized earlier in his synopsis as "ape-like"?

Despite Wright's interest in potential theatrical and film adaptations of Native Son, he was understandably ambivalent about these venues, and predicted how the book might be received. Given "the limitations of the screen and stage in America," he wondered, "Can such a book be done in a light that presents Bigger Thomas as a human being?" (Wright, Letter). For good reason, Wright's anxiety focused on the depiction of Bigger's "humanity," which would prove always to trouble the novel's reception. From Dorothy Canfield Fisher's infamous introduction to the Book-of-the-Month club edition that likens Bigger to a neurotic lab rat, to James Baldwin's condemnation of Bigger as "Uncle Tom's descendant" imbedded in a story haunted by a "rejection of life ... [and] ... the human being," critics have been compelled to place the character on a continuum of authentic humanity, where his ability to determine his own fate is measured against his helplessness within social constructs ("Everybody's" 18). But with the creation of Bigger, Wright was not capitulating to a racist culture that opposed blackness and individuality; he was graphically illustrating the psychic effects of such an opposition. Among the critics who defended Wright's construction of the human yet socially-constructed Bigger was Alain Locke, who made the point that individualized characters able to transcend social conditions like racism are likely the figures least oppressed by those conditions (19). A critical or industrial valuation of the "individuality" of a character may be, therefore, merely a code for privileging whiteness. When Wright constructs "Bigger" as a floating signifier in his essay "How Bigger Was Born"--as a symbol of the bullying, rebellious, defiant, and fascistic tendencies in humankind, black and white, American and foreign--he does so not to strip the character of his humanity, but to untether the concept of humanity from the fantasy of unmediated self-determination. It is this fantasy, however, that provides Hollywood with its narrative foundation and creates the need for the Burbanking adaptation strategy.

Ross Pudaloff has argued that it is, ironically, the mass media as depicted within the novel that strips Bigger of an "inherent character" (156). Wright is careful, Pudaloff contends, to link Bigger's fate to his obsession with his own representation in media and as media, "fail[ing] to distinguish an authentic personal identity from an identity formed by mass culture" (164). Pudaloff makes the case that Bigger's violence, especially against Bessie, is shaped by an emulation of the 1930s' hard-boiled "tough guy" in film and popular fiction. Because Bigger performs as the mobster-hero, he lives his life "as if it were taking place upon a movie screen, participat[ing] in the dehumanization of self" (160). Warner Brothers was a primary agent in the popularization of the tough guy in films like Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931). If Hollywood production as depicted within the novel is indeed one of the significant forces that rob Bigger of his individuality, how would Hollywood then treat this character, one partially of its own creation, one truly a "native son" of the studios' cultural apparatus?

In his report Deakin worries that "the technique of [Native Son] enables the author to explain much of the inner workings of the boy's mind--a thing which is, of course, difficult to do in pictures." This assessment of the novel's technique is certainly accurate, as is a recognition of the limitations of film's visually-based narrativity. But studio strategies for transforming a novel's interior monologues were familiar enough, including exteriorization through voice-over, action, or visual symbol. If a novel's reliance on interior monologues in fact presented an insurmountable obstacle to film adaptation, Glasgow's ponderously psychological In This Our Life would never have been purchased by the Warners. Perhaps Deakin's problem with Native Son's interior monologues was not their preponderance, but their source: the "inner workings" of a black man's mind. To adapt a textually-represented psychology to a visual medium, the studio would of course need first to acknowledge the existence of that psychology and in so doing to confront black male subjectivity.

Deakin asserts that his "instinct and experience tells ... [him] that this is probably not a subject which would interest us as picture material." But he quickly hedges, declaring that Native Son "is, however, a novel with some powerful action, dramatic situations, and a really magnificent characterization in the person of the young negro boy." Deakin might have struggled with an acknowledgment that while Native Son would be challenging if not impossible to Burbank, the novel does follow a generic structure beloved by his studio at the time: the fugitive drama. The Warner Brothers romance with the fugitive began with the acclaimed film I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), an adaptation of Robert E. Burns's experiences as a down-and-out veteran trapped by circumstance into a life in a Georgia prison camp. His story in many ways resembles Bigger's: once escaped, the protagonist laments, "I hide in rooms all day and travel by night. No friends, no rest, no peace." Burns's narrative is also similar to Native Son in that a social system is implicated in the fate of the criminal protagonist. But while once considered bold in its criticism of a part of the American penal system, the Burbanked version of I Am a Fugitive suggests, in the words of Balio, "that if the chain gang is removed and the administration of justice in Georgia is reformed, all will be well. Moreover, by focusing on the plight of the protagonist, the film obscures such issues in the story as why the state of Georgia tolerated the chain-gang system, why the federal government turned its back on World War I veterans, and why the economy had turned sour" (283). By 1939, the year Deakin reported on Native Son, the studio had Burbanked the genre even further: the 1939 Warner Brothers fugitive dramas Each Dawn I Die, Dust be My Destiny, and They Made Me a Criminal each deflected social responsibility for crime by making the white fugitive on the run for murder actually an innocent man wrongly accused. Like Bigger, these fugitives are positioned in conflict with a corrupt social system. But unlike Bigger, they ultimately find the corruptions to be superficial and surmountable: justice recognizes their innocence in the end. Wright's novel would clearly provide no such miraculous exoneration and no return to a comfortable social order.

Indeed, Deakin contends that it is precisely "because [Native Son's] controversial idea presents a splendid social problem, and one worthy of serious treatment, my feeling is that it is the sort of thing which can be done much more dramatically in book form." He continues:

   On the debit side, moreover, racial
   controversy crops up very strongly
   towards the end of the book; and for
   this reason, it is questionable to me
   whether such a picture would be either
   in good taste or even good business,
   for the author, in his brilliant courtroom
   speech, has implied that unless
   the white civilization of this country
   relaxes sufficiently to give underprivileged
   negroes their chance in the
   world for life, there lurks a possibility
   of another Civil War--but this time it
   would be a war of blacks against
   whites.

Deakin's vacillations are arrested here, and his warning to the studio clear. On the basis of Deakin's report, Warner Brothers story editor Irene Lee rejected Native Son without comment on July 13, 1939. But Lee's history with the novel does not end there.

Lee had long worked closely with producer Hal Wallis at the studio. She would in 1941 persuade Wallis to purchase the rights to Everybody Comes to Rick's, the play that became the film Casablanca (1942). After the rejection of Native Son, news soon reached the studio that the Book-of-the-Month club was interested in the novel and that Harper pushed the release date from Fall 1939 to Spring 1940 to allow Wright the time to make the club's required revisions, which, as I explain below, were considerable. When finally published in March 1940, the novel boasted such praise and sales that all of Hollywood was quickly persuaded to reconsider the property.

Amid the buzz generated by the release, Warner Brothers began its second review of Native Son--this time reading the published, Book-of-the-Month club version. Story analyst Alice Goldberg finished a new report on the novel by March 12. The synopsis reveals that Goldberg was influenced by the "lab rat" thesis of Fisher's newly-added introduction. Goldberg's report functioned for the studio in much the same way as Fisher's introduction functioned for the book club readers: a white mediation for a white audience of a black author's work. But rather than justifying Native Son, Goldberg, like Deakin, constructs in her report an elaborate, escalating case against studio consumption of the novel. She begins, however, with praise: "This is a strong, beautifully written book and one of the best on the negro question I have ever read." She then moves quickly to what she sees as the novel's dangers:

   ... my opinion is that it is dynamite
   for the screen. It is not impossible, but
   fairly improbable, that this can get
   across on the screen with the honesty
   and the impact of the book. The grave
   danger is that if it misses at all, it is apt
   to have an exactly opposite effect, and
   to appear an anti-negro story. This, of
   course, would be bad policy and bad
   box office. Once again, I think it will be
   the most difficult job in the world to
   explain Bigger to a screen audience,
   and make him sympathetic in terms of
   psychological and intellectual values,
   as the book does. For another, this
   method of presenting the book could
   also be interpreted by an audience,
   only as an anti-negro book. To repeat,
   this is a tremendously dramatic book
   but for my money, very, very dangerous
   dynamite. (1)

A potential adaptation would be "bad policy" for revealing a less than ideal model of black subjectivity and "bad business," perhaps, for revealing black subjectivity at all. Here Goldberg performs what Thomas Cripps calls the "conscience-liberalism" of studio era Hollywood, which "strumm[ed] a liberal tune while ratifying the status quo" (5). The studios were, for the most part, moving away from the grossest of black stereotypes of the silent era, but were at a loss as to what might stand in their place. Hollywood's "aversion to the racial contradictions in American life," Cripps writes, "reduced African Americans to absent, alibied for, dependent victims of marketing strategies aimed at profitable universality" (5). This "buttering [of] ideological bread on both sides" creates a space where a representation of a "false" Negro is unacceptably dishonest and a representation of a "real" Negro is unacceptably reckless (6).

Two months after this second report was written, story editor Lee traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to pay Richard Wright a visit. Although Wright biographer Rowley identifies Lee as then an agent of producer Samuel Goldwyn, she was more likely representing Hal Wallis and Warner Brothers at this meeting (203). She visited while Wright was in the process of deciding whom he could trust with the stage rights and theatrical adaptation of his novel. According to Rowley, Lee had some influence on his eventual choice:

   [Lee] put the case for [the Mercury
   Theatre's John] Houseman and
   [Orson] Welles.... Lee said he would
   be wiser to put Native Son on the stage
   before they thought about a movie,
   and there was some latitude in the
   choice of the person to write the script.
   Wright mentioned Paul Green, a white
   dramatist who said he was interested.
   Lee stressed that Wright himself
   should have some input. Wright mentioned
   Ted Ward as a possible choice
   for Bigger Thomas. Lee was open to
   suggestions. (203-04)

Wright would eventually agree to begin a long and difficult collaboration with Paul Green for the Mercury Theatre stage adaptation. By suggesting that Wright stage the play before selling the film rights, Lee was likely hoping to use the stage as a testing ground before committing studio resources to what was clearly a commercially risky property. Despite Lee's enthusiasm for the play, Native Son was again rejected by Warner Brothers on May 24, 1940, shortly after her return from Mexico. The story department continued to watch the evolution of the Mercury Theatre production, however: it carefully collected news clippings about the play's progress and filed them away with the studio's reports on the novel. While in rehearsals even the play's director, Orson Welles, considered mounting a film version for RKO. MGM and Fox also indicated an interest in the screen rights.

But after the play opened in March 1941, ticket sales were far less spectacular than had been expected. Rowley explains Hollywood's reaction: "after all the excited talk only one definite bid came in for the picture rights: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered twenty-five thousand dollars to shoot the film with an all-white cast. Wright was horrified" (247).

Despite its outrageousness, the suggestion that a studio "whitewash" a prominent black novel was not unusual. Like MGM, Warner Brothers might have toyed with the idea of using an all-white cast for Native Son, as Goldberg's report perhaps suggests: "The book is sufficiently dramatic to make it seem, perhaps, that its main thesis can be discarded, and a picture made based on its plot alone, overlooking the basic racial question, and psychological interpretation of the main character" (1).While Warner Brothers did not ultimately choose to pursue a whitewashed Native Son, the studio was not above such a strategy.

Warner Brothers story analyst Virginia Volland would propose a similar reworking of Ann Petry's novel The Street in 1946. Volland commended the "fast-moving, solidly constructed, and intensely engrossing" novel that "reads with the entertainment value of a whodunit ... the most satisfactory thing about this author's writing is the feeling of authenticity and life that pervades the pages. This story is real ... in spite of the fact that it is good entertainment" (1). This "reality" for Volland stems from the author's ability to address issues of race while still presenting the reader with an individuated protagonist; it is this particular ability that distinguishes the novel for Volland from Wright's work: "one of the most impressive things about [The Street] is the treatment of the black/ white relationship. Lutie is motivated as an individual, alive, complete, with a racial problem to face, indeed, but she is conceived as a human being, not as a protagonist of racial equality or inequality, as in Native Son, Black Boy, etc. It is a story about a woman who happens to be colored ... and in that is part of its strength" (1). Lutie is apparently preferred over Bigger because, unlike Wright's character, Petry's protagonist just "happens to be colored" in Volland's estimation; the social conflict of racism is readily excised then, and the character is easy to Burbank. Volland continues: "Although one's first reaction is that this is not a book suitable for picture adaptation, because Lutie is a Negress, I believe that it would still hold if the heroine were white. The basic tragedy arises from the lack of money, and if circumstances were evolved that kept a white girl from earning enough to live on decently, the same chain of happenings could apply" (1). The story department at Warner Brothers was clearly operating under two particular assumptions when considering black characters for studio representation: black characters needed to be individuated and self-determining to function in Burbanked narrative; and if black characters were individuated and self-determining, they might as well be white.

Not everyone in the story department was as comfortable as Volland with the idea of a white Lutie. Story editor Tom Chapman commented in a memo that "Volland thinks that the girl [Lutie] could be white instead of colored, perhaps a member of minority group, like the Poles or Shanty Irish. I suppose it is barely conceivable, but the strength of the story lies in its uncompromising presentation of the racial discrimination problem" (Chapman to Kay). If Chapman was concerned about what would be left of Petry's novel after such a narrative lobotomy, his concerns did not prevent him from recommending The Street to his superiors five days later. His strategy in doing so is particularly revealing: "The author of this is not a Negro. The novel just won the Houghton, Mifflin scholarship award. I think you'll find it interesting. Perhaps the woman has possibilities as a writer" (Chapman to McDermid). We cannot know if Chapman was trying to deceive the recipient of this memo (perhaps to get a less biased reading of the story) or if he truly believed that Petry was "not a Negro." But the later seems more likely, given that when he suggests that Petry would have "possibilities as a writer," he almost certainly means a studio staff writer--and on staff Petry's race would be known. (4) For whatever reason, Chapman's tentative acceptance of a whitewashed The Street miraculously extends to the author herself. Apparently, both Lutie and Petry are "incidentally colored." Could this occurrence be attributed to the fact that, within cinematic narrative, race adheres to the black female body differently than to the black male body? If black representation in studio-era film was structured around an anxiety about black male/white female relationships, black female characters would have no solid representational ground on which to stand, save for being transformed into white women.

Wright understandably rejected the notion of a white Bigger Thomas and chose to produce and star in a filmed version of Native Son himself. (5) What would--what could?--a white Bigger Thomas look like? Such a fantastic transformation seems only laughable until we consider the possibility that the studios produced films like In This Our Life in lieu of a white Bigger Thomas. Could Glasgow's predatory villain Stanley Timberlake be the ready-made white Bigger Thomas Hollywood really wanted?

Saints, Sluts, and Symptoms: The Warner Brothers Negro in In This Our Life

In March 1943, Warner Brothers story analyst Lucy Land prepared a report on Chocolate Sailor, an original story submitted to the studio by Charles Leonard and Langston Hughes. (6) The report tells us that Chocolate Sailor charts the rise and fall of a black chanteuse who leaves the home of her pastor father to pursue a glamorous night club life in the company of gamblers and racketeers; in the end, she realizes her true calling as a US Navy nurse ministering to her fiance and other patriotic black wounded in Guadalcanal. Land writes that "this story is bad, in spite of the honest but limited attempts of the Negro author, Langstan [sic] Hughes" (1) (Charles Leonard, Sailor's non-Negro author, apparently does merit such an elaborate--and back-handed--apology.) Land then admonishes Sailor for "exploit[ing] all the cheap and unattractive aspects of Negro life" and declares that "[as] our studio has always portrayed the Negro as a human being and not in the traditional subservient manner, we could never be interested in a story of this kind." Land is careful to conclude her report by mentioning an instance when the studio did manage to successfully meet its own standards of black representation. Warner Brothers, she contends, "stands high in the honor role [sic] as an organization to improve racial relations and only recently has been awarded commendation for its outstanding contribution to Democracy by its portrayal of the Negro in 'In This Our Life.' " Thus Land affirms that the studio is interested in depicting Negroes, that these depictions are consciously and constructively political (having the effect of improving race relations), and that the studio's shining example of its "contribution to Democracy" is director John Huston's 1942 adaptation of Glasgow's In This Our Life.

The fate of Chocolate Sailor aside, then, Land's report is useful because it suggests within the studio's discourse of the time a collectively understood figure of what we could call a "Warner Brothers Negro"--a narrative representation of blackness perceived by the corporation as profitable. In This Our Life's Parry Clay, as portrayed in the film by Ernest Anderson, is a diligent, polite, university-bound member of the "talented tenth," whose dreams are crushed by a racist society. Clay was exactly the character that many black audience members had long waited for Hollywood to portray.

One soldier stationed at Fort Bragg sent a postcard to the studio to express his gratitude for In This Our Life: "please give us more pictures like this one, which depicts Negroes as flesh and blood human beings, and not as clowns. Thank God you see the light. Thank you" (Samuels). An officer of the Alpha Kappa Sorority wrote that "Our Sorority, composed of four thousand college and university Negro women, offers its heartfelt gratitude and appreciation for the splendid part assigned to Mr. Anderson in 'In This Our Life.'... The type of role portrayed by Mr. Anderson is a step toward the goal of portraying the Negro citizen as a 'normal human being'" (Johnson). Common in other letters to the studio was the sentiment of one letter writer that with In This Our Life Warner Brothers had "taken a step in democratizing filmland" (McDougald). The executive editor of the Pittsburgh Courier declared that "a very grievous side of the life of almost every colored American is exposed in the role of Parry Clay. The writer wishes to commend the company for its liberality and courage, recognizing as he does that the people, the public, least want to see or hear the truth if it hurts. 'In This Our Life' is a contribution to Americanism; it is a nudge on the way to that better America (Prattis). Even Walter White of the NAACP thanked Harry Warner for the "refreshing change" that the depiction of In This Our Life's Parry Clay represented (Cripps 45). Another fan promised that "several million colored movie-goers will be watching future Warner Brothers productions with anticipation" (Holley). While some writers tempered their praise with criticism of the stereotypes that persisted in the film, the overwhelming response was one of gratitude for what was seen as a progressive step toward positive black representation.

But as K. Anthony Appiah has argued, "positive" representation through an "exemplary Negro" is not necessarily equivalent to politically progressive representation (77-88). The trope of the black "saint" that Appiah identifies in contemporary film--"the noble good-hearted black man or woman, friendly to whites, working-class but better educated that most working-class Americans, and oh so decent" (88)--could certainly find a studio era forefather in Parry Clay. The Hollywood black saint, a West Coast relative of the southern "pet negro" that Zora Neale Hurston described, operates as a discursive strategy that satisfies liberal taste while still managing to deny black subjectivity. While acknowledging the barriers of racial representation broken by Anderson's portrayal of Parry in In This Our Life, we should ask whether this dismantling did not itself create new representational barriers, both for people of color and for white women. Such an interrogation begins to explain why the representational revolution so praised by the letter writers quoted above amounted to so little.

To explicate the narrative function of the black saint Parry in the film, I examine his function in Glasgow's novel and, specifically, how this character was from the outset a ready-made Warner Brothers Negro. Although Glasgow characterized her writing as "a solitary revolt against the formal the false, the affected, the sentimental and the pretentious in Southern writing," those unfamiliar with In This Our Life should know that it is certainly affected, sentimental, and pretentious in its mourning for a past gentility and social order (Certain 8). The story centers on Asa Timberlake and his daughter Roy: two sensitive, moral people who live trampled by the cruelties of the modern South. The pauper-gentleman Asa futilely dreams of a life free from his vacuous, invalid wife. Days before Roy's sister Stanley is to be married, Stanley runs off with Roy's husband, and Roy is shattered. Stanley soon drives Roy's husband to drink, then suicide. Superficially repentant, Stanley returns to her family. In a frenzy over the fact that she cannot seduce her old fiance, she drives her car so recklessly that she kills a child in a hit-and-run accident. She seeks to exonerate herself by claiming that during the time of the accident, her car was in the possession of her black chauffeur, Parry, whose family had been in service to the Timberlakes since before the abolition of slavery. (7) Parry denies Stanley's accusations, and Asa and Roy know Stanley well enough to suspect her duplicity. Long resigned to his own powerlessness, Asa is finally moved to action and, against his wife's wishes, reveals the truth to all. Parry is exonerated but is forever psychologically broken. Stanley gets off with a light sentence, and Roy flees the family.

Glasgow reported that she intended her novel to be an "analysis in fiction of the modern temper," which in her estimation "appeared confused, vacillating, uncertain, and distracted from permanent values" (Certain 249-50). In her novel this confusion is specifically related to instabilities In gendered and raced identity. Though Glasgow contended that Stanley and Roy's names reflected the southern tradition of giving girls family names and not boy's names, many of the novel's conflicts are depicted as arising from the murkiness of modern gender roles, particularly the confused condition of white southern "womanhood." Female subjectivity in Glasgow's fictional Queenborough is precariously held: Stanley, with her "vacant and hungry mouth," is too ruthless and sexualized for her gender, and Roy, whom Asa describes as "square as a man," is "too hard" to be a woman.

Parry's fate, on the other hand, is shown as a product of his unstable racial identity. Glasgow felt her novel's theme "required ... a careful and truthful treatment of two separate races, with their accompanying gradations of color and of racial characteristics" (Certain 251). Glasgow presents Parry as sympathetic, but altogether too "gradiated." He is, she describes, a "delicate looking boy, very light in color, with a straight, slim figure, and an intelligent but moody expression. Unlike the greater part of Negroes (if, indeed, he could be called a Negro) in Queenborough, he was discontented with his lot" (ITOL 26). The "less colored [that Negroes] are," Glasgow has Asa decide at one point, "the more inscrutable they become, until, when they have so nearly crossed the borderline, like this boy Parry, they seem almost to speak another language, and to belong to another species than ours. ... Even when he smiled, and he had a pleasant smile, there was a shadow of bewilderment--or was it apprehension?--in his expression. Was it, Asa asked himself, the bewilderment of being so nearly white? Or was it the darker apprehension of being so little black?" (27-28). Asa later decides that the reason "he could never feel perfectly at ease with the boy" was that "There was something about Parry, who was neither white, brown nor black which appeared to defy grouping or classification.... The trouble with the boy was that he had no place anywhere" (214). The liminal racial identity of Parry--with a "face without edges," "kinkless hair," and skin light enough that if he "went North, nobody would ever guess he was colored"--unnerves many of Queenborough's residents, and clearly Glasgow herself; she apparently felt that his character "runs true to the Individual variation from type"--that type being the upwardly mobile but ultimately tragic mulatto (ITOL 196; Certain 257-58). To clarify Glasgow's own racial theories, it is worth pointing out that she once praised Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven for being "the best argument in favor of African slavery that I have ever read.... What interested me tremendously [in the book] is the way the Negro reacts to the freedom of Harlem. Only in the father of Mary (a very appealing character) do I find the slightest trace of the Negro that I know. The serene fatalism, the dignity of manner, the spiritual power, all these qualities decayed, it appeared, with the peculiar institution" (Glasgow to Van Vechten).

Glasgow clearly saw Negroes as a race hopelessly caught between the excess of freedom available in the North and the comfort of servility available in the South. For her, all modern Negroes, therefore, are tragic. Glasgow's Parry, being a light-skinned, articulate, and well-educated black man, epitomizes just another Negro whose tragedy happens to be evident on the surface of his body.

But in In This Our Life, the tragic mulatto Parry, like the white bitch Stanley, functions less as a vehicle for reader sympathy than as a warning sign of what was really wrong with the South: the displacement of white male (and, to a lesser extent, white female) southern nobility. Asa's and Roy's persistent longing for a vanished southern Arcadia renders the novel a modernist inheritor of the post-Reconstruction plantation tradition, a body of literature whose project was, in Lucinda H. Mackethan's words, "to turn a defeated way of life into a substantial legend" (209). Glasgow biographer Susan Goodman describes Glasgow's characters as toilers "within the context of a civilization she believed to be essentially uncivilized, one in which innocent souls suffer undeserved tragedies" (3). The novel's primary tragedies are shadows of plantation tradition ideals. Rather than performing as the benevolent planter patriarch, Asa is confined in poverty and social impotence. Rather than finding joy and fulfillment in courtship, the belle Roy is betrayed by a treacherous husband and sister. And rather than rejoicing in servility like the mythologized loyal slave, Parry chafes at the restrictions imposed on him.

But instead of drawing studied conclusions about the decay of southern civility, many readers of Glasgow's novel simply relished the melodramas of husband-snatching and racial scape-goating for their own sake, and were especially drawn to Stanley, the novel's insatiable Id. Glasgow was not pleased with this tendency:

   I may confess to annoyance whenever
   the careless reader appears to regard
   the soulless little pleasure-seeker,
   Stanley, as the core of this book. From
   the first page to the last, she is treated
   objectively, and this may be the reason
   that, to readers who do not look below
   the printed page, she has always
   seemed especially vivid. For me, she
   remains always part of the background,
   not vital in herself, but with
   clinging tendrils which reached out for
   support to the more real figures. She is
   not evil; she is insufficient. She is not
   hard; she is, on the contrary, so soft in
   fibre that she is ruled or swayed by
   sensation. (Certain 259)

Glasgow seems to be condemning readers who focus on Stanley as being a little too like Stanley in their pursuit of readerly pleasure. Glasgow's irritation at this "misreading" was extreme enough to lead to her to compose Beyond Defeat: An Epilogue to an Era (1966), a hastily written sequel to In This Our Life that was not published until after the author's death. Glasgow's clear goal was to excise the distracting Stanley from the family so those "careless readers" of the general public could no longer be swayed by her influence but would focus instead on the bleak wretchedness of Asa and Roy. (8)

Where did this "Stanley symptom" come from, one that the author herself was unable to contain? Goodman reveals that the car accident in In This Our Life was based on an actual experience involving Glasgow's family: a nephew of hers killed a black pedestrian in a car accident. Glasgow's reworking of this event for the novel performs a kind of Burbanking. Warner Brothers adapted stories in such a way as to discourage readings of their films as social critique. Glasgow, on the other hand, did want to perform social critique, but of a very particular type. If fictionalized more or less as it had occurred in Glasgow's family, the incident would likely be read as Glasgow herself interpreted it: as yet "another assault on a besieged race," and, in particular, as a metaphor for black victimization at the hands of southern white men (234). Glasgow might have "Burbanked" the text by making the white male character such a loathsome individual that his actions would be seen as unrepresentative of whiteness in general. But Glasgow allows her male characters in In This Our Life significant, if impotent, nobility. Rather than a white man, then, the driver in the novel is recast by Glasgow as a loathsome white woman; the black male victim of the accident then becomes the black male victim of the white woman's lies. Thus revised by Glasgow, the white man becomes not the perpetrator of violence against the black man, but the savior who rescues the black man from white female predation. Glasgow's reconstruction of the accident provides a miraculous outlet for white liberal guilt about the oppression of black men without incriminating white men. Rather than denying a social problem by recasting it on the individual level, as Hollywood's Burbanking strategy does, Glasgow acknowledges the social problem but attempts to contain it within a specifically white female vessel. Glasgow manages to narrativize racial victimization while deflecting the culpability for that victimization from white hegemony in general and white patriarchy in particular: all blame is placed at the feet of a single white bitch. It is little wonder, then, that it was this character that fascinated readers, much to Glasgow's distaste.

Hollywood, of course, also couldn't resist. Glasgow decided that $40,000 was the "absolute minimum" she would accept for the film rights, and Warner Brothers gave it to her. (9) Once it was produced, however, Glasgow refused to see the film. She wrote that "the advertisements were enough to make me understand that Hollywood had filmed a very different book, not mine at all, and had entirely missed the point of the novel" (Glasgow to Jones). Glasgow may have been referring to the In This Our Life poster with the teasing tagline: "No One is Better Than Bette When She's Bad!" (10)

Bette Davis: Letting the Demon Go

In "The Devil Finds Work," James Baldwin explores his complex childhood relationship with Hollywood film. At one point he describes his first reaction to seeing Bette Davis on screen: she "was a movie star: white: ... and she was ugly" (482). Davis's "ugliness" was not only a creation of Baldwin's identification strategy, as Jane Gaines has argued, but it was also an ugliness already being performed on film: a strangeness, an excess symptomatic of the representational politics studio-era Hollywood. (11)

A film critic once wrote that Davis "gives that curious feeling, of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet" (qtd. in Ringgold 65). Her power was often described as supernatural: a review of the film Dangerous (1935) declares that "Davis would probably have been burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago" (qtd. in Ringgold 65). Of her performance in Beyond the Forest (1949) another critic asserted that "this babe is a witch in spades, diamonds and clubs" (qtd. in Ringgold 143). Director John Huston called this quality Davis's "demon," and decided that in In This Our Life he would "let the demon go" (81).

Gwendolyn Foster has argued that "the white woman as virginal angel" in film "is an archetype designed to keep hybridity at bay" (33). Perhaps the demon's function becomes not to contain hybridity but to express it. Davis, or the cinematic sign we have come to know as Davis, certainly expresses gendered hybridity, relying on an ability to play extremes of the attractive and the repulsive, the feminine and the masculine. A critic of one of her films called her a "tank" in battle with Errol Flynn's "beanshooter"; others praised her "abundance of feminine charm," which somehow manifested itself "manfully" (qtd. in Ringgold 100). (12) However, Davis is a figure not only of gendered hybridity, but of racial hybridity as well.

Several scholars have commented on white female stars' discursive dependence on blackness. Foster suggests that Mae West in I'm No Angel (1933) performed a kind of "white blackness" in drag, creating a "site of contestation" against racial and hetero-normative stereotypes (39). Writing of the infamous "Hot Voodoo" number in von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932), in which Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) emerges from a gorilla suit, Snead argues that the "very ambiguity of the trope is part of its power: does every beautiful white woman have a primitive, male, black ape-like ardor within her, waiting to be unleashed?" (72). Snead goes on to demonstrate that Davis's performance of the sexy, scheming Julie in Jezebel (1938) is, like Dietrich's Helen, dependent on a backdrop of blackness--only in Julie's case the gorilla suit is replaced by a household of dutiful slaves. Snead emphasizes that the function of this backdrop "is not mimetic, but rhetorical comparative," and that the black characters in Jezebel "make the narrative point that Miss Julie is in many ways unadmirable, as if the superfluity of black hands and faces surrounding her, over which she has some control, were meant to symbolize her increasing surplus of vanity over which she has almost no control" (77).

Richard Dyer constructs a parallel argument about Davis's performance in the 1949 film Beyond the Forest, where her character's wickedness is linked to her association with a "racial inferior"--her Native American housemaid (White 62-63). bell hooks has made the case that the star persona Madonna constructs, maintains, and perpetuates white heterosexual patriarchy because the Material Girl's potency as a sign is again and again measured against the purported impotency of non-white and homosexual people (157-64). Ann Ducille argues a similar point about Shirley Temple, and makes an additional observation: Temple not only defines her whiteness through a comparison to black characters, she also takes the place of an adult white female when the appearance of an actual mature white woman would be culturally impossible (dancing with a black man, for example) (10-32). The non-white characters who surround the white female star are reduced to the narrative function of providing "blackdrop." The hyperbolic bitchiness of the Davis star persona is payback for her proximity to these racialized bodies and in particular for her "masculine" attempts to dominate those racialized bodies.

The monstrous self-interest that came to be associated with the "bad" Bette Davis is most often defined against and through her characters' dominance of male characters who are racialized, crippled, or both. Her Mildred in Of Human Bondage (1934) sadistically toys with the club-footed Philip Carey (Leslie Howard). As the unhinged Marie in Bordertown (1935), she ruthlessly attempts to implicate the Mexican-American Johnny Ramirez (Paul Muni) in the murder she alone has committed. In Dangerous (1935) her drunken Joyce Heath cripples her husband in an intentional car accident. As the calculated killer Leslie Crosbie in The Letter, (1940) she guns down her lover, who has become racialized by taking an Asian wife. Her hard-hearted Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes (1941) purposely refuses to fetch heart medication for her wheelchair-bound husband so that he will die and no longer pose a threat to her business schemes. As the flirtatious Fanny Trellis in Mr. Skeffington (1944), she marries the Jewish Job Skeffington for his money alone, truly loving him only when he returns blind from a Nazi concentration camp. Clearly, the racialized or physically enfeebled male presented the demonized Davis with particular narrative opportunity: patriarchy's anxiety about the castrating female could be expressed in her viciousness, but contained by her compromised choice of victim--surely a "whole" white male could not fall prey to her treachery.

Dyer argues that stars as signs always signify multiply: as represented characters and, simultaneously, as "themselves"--as constructed star personas (Stars 22). He explains that stars "are like characters in stories, representations of people," but

   unlike characters in stories, stars are
   also real people.... Because stars have
   an existence in the world independent
   of their screen/"fiction" appearances, it
   is possible to believe ... that as people
   they are more real than the characters
   in stories. This means that they serve
   to disguise the fact that they are just as
   much produced images, constructed
   personalities, as "characters" are. Thus
   the value embodied by a star is as it
   were harder to reject as "impossible"
   or "false," because the star's existence
   guarantees the existence of the value
   he or she embodies. (22)

The multiplicity of the star's signification--as both signifier and signified--creates a being that seems to straddle the real and the imaginary, and that therefore seems to belong nowhere. "The ugly object," in Slavoj Zizek's words, "is an object in the wrong place." Zizek continues: "This does not mean simply that the ugly object is no longer ugly the moment we move it to its proper place. Rather, the ugly object is "in itself" out of place, on account of the distorted balance between "representation" and "existence." The ugly and out-of-place is the excess of existence over representation" (165). If, as Laura Mulvey has argued, Hollywood cinema's scopophilic economy relegates women to object status, female stardom is particularly ugly. As woman, the white female star has only one place to occupy: the place of the object on the screen. But the stardom of the white female star--her simultaneous existence and signification on and off the screen--disrupts her role as screen object. The ugliness of the white female star, her semiotic instability coupled with her semiotic indispensability, offers a convenient locus for a range of cultural anxieties, including some about race.

In Native Son, Wright himself explored the function of the white female star as a vessel for deflected cultural anxiety about race. When he revised the novel to accommodate the taste of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the most considerable alteration was to the early movie theater scene: Wright was asked to eliminate Mary Dalton's appearance in the newsreel and all suggestion of masturbation (Rampersad xviii). Wright did remove the newsreel and references to Bigger's "polishing his nightstick," and these changes had the unsurprising effect of occluding the character's sexuality. Significantly, Wright chose to replace the Dalton newsreel with a fictional film of his own creation: The Gay Woman, a title that echoes MGM's The Gay Bride (1934), starring Carole Lombard, and RKO's The Gay Divorcee (1934), starring Ginger Rogers. In the film that Wright creates, Bigger encounters a world where: "amid scenes of cocktail drinking, dancing, golfing, swimming, and spinning roulette wheels, a rich young white woman kept clandestine appointments with her lover while her millionaire husband was busy in the offices of a vast paper mill. Several times Bigger nudged Jack in the ribs with his elbow as the giddy young woman duped her husband and kept from him the knowledge of what she was doing. (13)

Bigger and Jack would have encountered a similar cinematic world had they been watching the early work of MGM star Norma Shearer, whose films The Divorcee (1930), Let Us Be Gay (1930), and Strangers May Kiss (1931) highlighted marital infidelity. Also similar was Warner Brothers' Three On A Match (1932), a film that has the married and restless Vivian (Ann Dvorak) leave her wealthy husband and child to run off with a glamorous underworld gigolo. Wright's imagined film was of a genre and his white female star of a type that would have been immediately familiar to his readers. Wright apparently recognized that the repulsion that the Book-of-the-Month Club readers had for Bigger's desire directed toward the newsreel image of Mary Dalton did not extend to Bigger's desire directed toward the protagonist of The Gay Woman. The taste of the club demanded that Mary's celluloid image be protected from Bigger's gaze, but allowed his gaze to fall full on the white female star--in particular, the star playing a sexualized, cuckolding pleasure-seeker. Wright emphasizes this contradiction by adorning Bigger's room above the Dalton kitchen with photographs of white stars Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, and Janet Gaynor. Wright cannily responds to the censorship of the book club by presenting us with a paradoxical world where black male desire for a "real" white woman like Mary is socially unthinkable, but black male desire for a white female star like Davis is not only tolerated but, arguably, encouraged.

Nowhere is Davis's ugliness so explicitly linked to sexuality and race as in In This Our Life. In his biography, director John Huston's reminiscences of the production flow easily from the character of Parry to the star persona of Bette: "I never cared for In This Our Life, although there were some good things about it. It was the first time, I believe, that a black character was presented as anything other than a good and faithful servant or comic relief. Bette fascinated me. There is something elemental about Bette--a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears" (81). There is surely a link between the two features Huston most remembers about the film: the "positive" representation of the black male, and the demon "within" Davis, which Huston "unleashed." Baldwin's memories of watching In This Our Life also link the representation of Parry to Davis's role:

   Davis appeared to have read, and
   grasped, the script--which must have
   made her rather lonely--and she certainly
   understood the role. Her performance
   had the effect, rather, of exposing
   and shattering the film, so that she
   played in a kind of vacuum ... armed
   with her wealth, her color, and her sex,
   [Stanley] goes to the prison to persuade
   [Parry] to corroborate her story:
   and what she uses, through jailhouse
   bars, is her sex. She will pay for the
   chauffeur's silence, any price he
   demands. Indeed, the price is implicit
   in the fact that she knows he knows
   that she is guilty: she can have no
   secrets from him now. ("Devil" 521-22)

Both Huston and Baldwin view the film as something of a failure, despite the historic role for Anderson. Both also suggest that this failure is a product of the film's greatest strength: the "demonic" performance of Davis that "shatters" and "exposes." Baldwin situates this shattering at the moment when Stanley visits the jailhouse and coquettishly attempts to persuade Parry to support her lies. What is particularly interesting about this scene is that, while easily the most controversial in the film, it did not appear in the novel In This Our Life. In the novel only the men, Craig and Asa, visit Parry in jail, not Stanley.

Why would Warner Brothers engineer a sexually-charged face-to-face confrontation between a sympathetic black male character and the studio's most powerful white female star? The scene that the studio creates is, in a sense, a revision of the scene that the studio could never adapt: the death of Mary Dalton in Native Son. Terrified that Mary will cry out, Bigger smothers her before she can destroy him. In the parallel scene in Huston's In This Our Life, it is rather the white woman who is terrified that the black man will speak and destroy her. Her weapon against him is her sexuality. Within this scene many of the studio's narrative goals are accomplished in one stroke. By providing a noble (if emasculated) black male character unjustly victimized, the studio comfortably portrays itself as politically progressive. By providing a predatory white female star beloved for her badness, the studio Burbanks away any potential social critique. And finally, with the tantalizing suggestion that this white female star offers her sexuality as a potential item for barter with the black man, the studio provides an implicit justification for the doom that awaits such transgressors, both on and off the screen. If we could imagine that Wright had allowed his film The Gay Bride to play itself out, its conclusion likely would not have been pretty. While Glasgow allowed Stanley a light punishment at the end of In This Our Life, Warner Brothers threw the book at her. In the last moments of the film, Stanley dies in a car accident caused by her own recklessness; the pleasure that classic Hollywood cinema offers is a pleasure of consistently confirmed expectation.

Was Bette Davis the white Bigger Thomas that Hollywood really wanted? Undoubtedly, Davis's persona of the hyperbolic bitch allowed Warner Brothers a "safe" way to play with the narrative dynamite of miscegenation and racial oppression. And Baldwin was correct about Davis's performance having a "shattering" effect on the film: when In This Our Life was exhibited, the version shown in Harlem and in the southern states had the jailhouse confrontation between Stanley and Parry edited out. Clearly, the figures on either side of the cell bars were unable to contain a repressed narrative of black male sexuality and rage, and the film, so stressed, literally cracked in two.

Works Cited

Appiah, K. Anthony. "No Bad Nigger': Blacks as the Ethical Principle in the Movies." Media Spectacles. Eds. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. New York: Routledge, 1993. 77-90.

Baldwin, James. "The Devil Finds Work: An Essay." James Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. 479-572.

--. "Everybody's Protest Novel." James Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. 11-18.

Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Bordwell, David. "Story Causality and Motivation." The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Eds. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 12-23.

Chapman, Tom. Memorandum to Ellingwood Kay regarding Ann Petry's The Street. 23 Jan. 1946. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

--. Memorandum to Finlay McDermid regarding Ann Petry's The Street. January 28, 1946. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Deakin, Irving. Long Synopsis of Native Son. 28 June 1939. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

--. Memorandum to Irene Lee. 29 June 1939. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

--. Telegram to Hal Wallis. 21 Feb. 1941. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

duCille, Ann. "The Shirley Temple of My Familiar." Transition 73 (1997): 27. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979.

--. White. London: Routledge, 1997.

Ervin, Hazel Arnett. Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993.

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema. Albany: State U of New York P. 2003.

Gaines, Jane. Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, and K. A. Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Glasgow, Ellen. Beyond Defeat: An Epilogue to an Era. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1966.

--. A Certain Measure: An Interpretation of Prose Fiction. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943.

--. In This Our Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

--. Letter to Bessie Zaban Jones. 26 June 1942. Rouse 302-04.

--. Letter to Stanley Young. 13 Mar. 1941. Rouse 279-80.

--. Letter to Carl Van Vechten. 28 July 1926. Rouse 80-81.

Goldberg, Alice. Report on Richard Wright's Native Son. 12 Mar. 1940. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

Goodman, Susan. Ellen Glasgow: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Gustafson, Robert Wildof. "The Buying of Ideas: Source Acquisition at Warner Bros., 1930-1949." Diss. U of Wisconsin-Madison, 1983.

Holley, John S. Letter to Warner Bros. Studio. Aug. 1942. Production File of In This Our Life: Warner Bros. Archive, U of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End P, 1992.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "The Pet Negro System." The American Mercury May 1943. Rpt. in Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995.

Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Knopf, 1980.

Johnson, Thomasina W. Letter to Warner Bros. Studio. 30 Sept. 1942. Production File of In This Our Life: Warner Bros. Archive, U of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles.

Land, Lucy. Report on Charles Leonard's and Langston Hughes's Chocolate Sailor. 6 Mar. 1943. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

Locke, Alain. "Of Native Sons, Real and Otherwise." 1941. Gates and Appiah 19-25.

MacKethan, Lucinda H. "Plantation Fiction, 1865-1900." The History of Southern Literature. Ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Baton Rogue: Louisiana State UP, 1985. 209-18.

McDougald, Edith P. Letter to Warner Bros. Studio. 10 Aug. 1942(?). Production File of In This Our Life: Warner Bros. Archive, U of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles.

Petry, Ann. The Street. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

Prattis, P. L. Letter to Warner Bros. Studio. 6 June 1942. Production File of In This Our Life: Warner Bros. Archive, U of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles.

Pudaloff, Ross. "Celebrity as Identity: Native Son and Mass Culture." Gates and Appiah 156-70.

Rampersad, Arnold. "Introduction." Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. xi-xviii.

Ringgold, Gene. The Films of Bette Davis. New York: Cadillac, 1966.

Roddick, Nick. A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s. London: Garden House P, 1983.

Rouse, Blair, ed. Letters of Ellen Glasgow. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.

Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001.

Samuels, James. Letter to Warner Bros. Studio. 6 June 1942. Production File of In This Our Life: Warner Bros. Archive, U of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles.

Snead, James. White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. London: Routledge, 1994.

Volland, Virginia. Report on Ann Petry's The Street. 17 Jan. 1946. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

Wright, Richard. Letter to John Houseman and Orson Welles. Rowley 245.

--. Native Son. 1940. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. "Writer's Card" for Richard Wright. Story Department Files. Warner Bros. Studio Archive, Burbank, CA.

Zizek, Slavoj. "Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!" The Psychoanalysis of Race. Ed. Christopher Lane. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 154-75.

Filmography

Beyond the Forest. Dir. King Vidor. Warner Bros., 1949.

Blond Venus. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Paramount, 1932.

Bordertown. Dir. Archie Mayo. Warner Bros., 1935.

Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curitz. Warner Bros., 1942.

Dangerous. Dir. Alfred E. Green. Warner Bros., 1935.

The Divorcee. Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1930.

Dust Be My Destiny. Dir. Lewis Stiler. Warner Bros., 1939.

Each Dawn I Die. Dir. William Keighley. Warner Bros., 1939.

The Gay Bride. Dir. Jack Conway. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1934.

The Gay Divorcee. Dir. Mark Sandrich. RKO, 1934.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Warner Bros., 1932.

I'm No Angel Dir. Wesley Ruggles. Paramount, 1933.

In This Our Life. Dir. John Huston. Warner Bros., 1942.

Jezebel Dir. William Wyler. Warner Bros., 1938.

Let Us Be Gay. Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1930.

The Letter. Dir. William Wyler. Warner Bros., 1940.

Little Caesar. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Warner Bros., 1930.

The Little Foxes. Dir. William Wyler. Warner Bros., 1941.

Mr. Skeffington. Dir. Vincent Sherman. Warner Bros., 1944.

Of Human Bondage. Dir. John Cromwell. RKO, 1934.

The Public Enemy. Dir. William Wellman. Warner Bros., 1931.

Strangers May Kiss. Dir. George Fitzmaurice. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1931.

They Made Me a Criminal Dir. Busby Berkeley. Warner Bros., 1939.

Three On A Match. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Warner Bros., 1932.

Notes

(1.) While both Warner Brothers offices read submitted stories, the New York office, with its proximity to the publishing and theater worlds, oversaw the acquisition of "pre-sold" properties (such as novels and plays), and the Burbank office oversaw the adaptation of these properties and the generation of original material. See Gustafson 172.

(2.) See Wright's "Writer's Card." Notably absent from this list is Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), which was not read by Wamers until 1978, long after Wright's death (although a studio reader did refer to Black Boy in her report on Petry's The Street, as I discuss in this essay). The fact that Black Boy is autobiographical does not explain this omission; Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road(1942) was read and reviewed by the studio the year it was published.

(3.) No record remains as to the studio's reaction to either story. Black Hope was scheduled for publication in October 1942 (see Rowley 265) and reviewed by Warner Brothers on October 13, 1942. Rowley reveals that Wright heard the Fisk University Jubilee Singers in 1943 and "visualized a movie portraying the singers' dedication and adventures, the humiliations they endured on tour, and their ultimate triumph." The Melody Limited screenplay was written in 1944 and reviewed by Warner Brothers on November 22, 1950.

(4.) In 1958 Petry would write the screenplay "That Hill Girl" for Columbia as a potential vehicle for Kim Novak. See Ervin. Ellingwood Kay rejected The Street at Warner Brothers on February 8, 1946.

(5.) The film Native Son (1950) was directed by Pierre Chenal and shot in Argentina.

(6.) Russian-born Charles Leonard, who worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and script doctor from the 1920s to the 1940s, collaborated with Hughes on other projects. Eventually Leonard was blacklisted for his leftist affiliations.

(7.) According to Glasgow, the Clays were modeled on "a family that had belonged to my mother's ancestors for over a hundred and fifty years." See Glasgow's letter to Bessie Zaban Jones.

(8.) In this sequel Glasgow mentions Stanley only briefly, to indicate that she has chosen exile in California. Stanley's mother "sent her out there, and she was married within a few weeks. Her husband is quite old, but he is very wealthy. He has something to do with the movies." interestingly, Parry merits even less mention in the sequel.

(9.) See Deakin's telegram to Wallis of 21 Feb. 1941. Previously, Glasgow had sold the film rights of They Stooped to Folly (1924) for $25,000, and knew that Hollywood would have little concern for "fidelity" to the source text while adapting it for the screen. However, she still felt compelled to question her editor at Harcourt: "I suppose it is futile to suggest that the movie shall make a kind of "Mr. Chips" picture, treating Asa Timberlake as the major figure, instead of playing up the subject of callow youth or broken marriages?" (see Glasgow to Young).

(10.) Tagline for a poster advertising In This Our Life. See the Production File of In This Our Life.

(11.) For an analysis of Baldwin's reaction to Davis as it relates to black cinema spectatorship, see Gaines.

(12.) See reviews of The Man Who Played God(1932; Ringgold 25), In This Our Life (1942; Ringgold 118), and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939; Ringgold 100). See also reviews of That Certain Woman (1937; Ringgold 81).

(13.) See the notes of Native Son, Library of America Restored Text Edition, 1993, p. 491.

Elizabeth Binggeli received her PhD from the University of Southern California. She currently teaches cinema and narrative theory at California State University, Los Angeles.