Day at the Racist
I know it was a different time and everything, but it was tough watching the Marx Brothers' 1937 film A Day at the Races, featuring a scene in which Harpo is mistaken for the angel Gabriel and leads a group of poor, eye-popping Negroes through the colored part of town. The sweaty-but-noble, God-fearing mass of them end up in a barn where they all dance away their troubles. The party is broken up by the sherriff, who scatters the towsfolk (for dancing?) but the Marx Brothers escape, wearing blackface.Awesome.
That the premise of this film is that the Marxes are saving a sanitarium (?) from being turned into a casino by betting at the racetrack is a head-scratcher, too.
This was considered the last of their "great" films. Zeppo, absent from several of the films and hardly a presence in others, can be seen in the background dragging a homosexual through the dirt in his pickup truck.
posted
by Marty Barrett at Sunday, August 07, 2005
1 Comments:
I didn't think Day at the Races was all that racist. For the time, it was downright pro-black. The black people were by far the coolest people in the movie; they got the one good musical number (the rest of those songs were pretty crappy) and there was very little Steppin Fetchit shuckin' and jivin' going on.
I had a little twinge of liberal-guilt when Groucho et. al donned blackface, but they didn't do any coon impressions or anything. They were just trying to get away from the cops. (when you think about it, blackface is the very worst way to avoid being hassled by the po-po...)
If you shot the remake today, Will Ferrell, as the uptight white guy who forgot how to love, would go into "da hood" and his fear would be replaced by joy as the friendly black people teach him how to groove. Hip-hop would be employed.
Sure, the black people in Day at the Races exist only to help the white people solve their problems, but that's what all movie-black-people do; then, now, and hopefully next summer when the dream factory craps out more delicious entertainment product for us to enjoy.
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