June 13th 2013. Pick Of The Day.
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Film Forum's definitive trib to Yasujiro Ozu is only getting started, today offering a 2-fer of the cinematic sensei's AN INN IN TOKYO and THE ONLY SON. The former concerns the plight of a migrant worker mother in depression-era Japan, and the latter was the directot's first talkie, about a mom sacrificing everything for her son's great future, and the duo's differing definition of that term.
I'll be choosing plenty of films in this series as my Pick, so today I again take a pass. A more deserving actress steals my attention this day.
Jacques Rivette's Nouvelle Vague puzzler PARIS BELONGS TO US screens as part of MoMA's ongoing Auteurist History of Film series. Begun in 1958, a full year before his Cahiers Du Cinema cohorts Truffaut and Chabrol kicked the movement off with their debut features, and two years before Godard's BREATHLESS, Rivette's obtuse examination of a bohemian Paris tilting betwen decades remains a smart charmer. Misses again as today's Pick. A certain female shall not be denied this day.
The Library for the Performing Arts proceeds with their Robert Altman trib, tonight screening one of the fauxteurs 80's play adaps, David Rabe's STREAMERS. I find this to be one of the director's more tolerable efforts, perhaps because Rabe would've belted him had he strayed too far from the author's TONY nommed classic. Whatevz, ya dig yer B-Alt, ya got yer B-Alt.
Finally tonight MoMA's exhaustive retrospective to film pioneer Allan Dwan provides a second chance to catch yesterday's programme. This afternoon's screening of the Gloria Swanson glamour vehicle ZAZA was only just yesterday my Pick, but chosen at great cost to another actress, one whose career was nowhere near as storied, but had the country been not as ass-backward in its thinking in the 30's her CV may have well indeed matched or even surpassed the great and glamorous Swanson. In any event, Fredi Washington deserves a second look. Now and forever.
Fredericka Carolyn Washington was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1903. Losing her mother as a child, she helped as second oldest child to maintain the household through a second marriage that would also end in untimely childbirth demise and third marriage that yielded four more siblings. The promise of work took the family north to Harlem in the 1920's. Fredi soon found work as a dancer in some of Broadway's first African-American dance shows, not always under the most dignified circumstances. Still something beyond the performer's natural knockout looks entranced audience and producer alike. She quickly rose through the ranks, her fair skin serving at first as career boost. She graduated to film with a small role in Dudley Murphy's adap of Eugene O'Neill's THE EMPEROR JONES, featuring Paul Robeson in the role that made his name on the stage. Here her troubles began. Studio heads begged her to employ makeup to lighten her skin so that she might graduate to lead roles, others implored her to darken it using the same means to cast her in more trad "Negro" roles. It was the 30's, but it still stings for a reason. She made her most indelible onscreen impression in John M. Stahl's IMITATION OF LIFE, playing a "mulatto" maid struggling with the same issues Washington faced in the real world. Her last screen perf would be for Allan Dwan, and unspools this eve, which finds the thespian cast as a "mixed race" seamstress who must prove her maternity when she and her lily skinned daughter are brought to court.
Washington quit the biz in the onscreen capacity after this flick, but next helped to found and eventually led the Negro Actors Guild of America, helping to pry open doors long welded shut to her and her African-American colleagues. On the decision to lighten or darken her appearance, in other words being made to choose one lineage over the other, Fredi Washington had this to say:
"I am an American citizen and by God, we all have inalienable rights, and whenever those rights are tampered with there is nothing left to do but fight. And I fight. How many people do you think there are in this country that do not have mixed blood? There's very few, if any. What makes us who we are are our culture and experience. No matter how white I look, on the inside I feel black. There are many whites who are mixed blood, but still go by white. Why such a big deal if I go as Negro, because people can't believe that I am proud to go as Negro and not white. To prove I don't buy white superiority I chose to be a Negro."
The fight, unfortunatley goes on, but from protests seemingly insignificant in their time, from an American burdened with dual prejudice, doors have been knocked down, voices are now routinely heard due to artistic meritocracy, and Idris Elba may well be the next James Bond. Thank you Ms. Washington, and I look forward to seeing you in all your glory later tonight.
Fredi Washington conducts a seminar in what might have been in ONE MILE FROM HEAVEN, screening at 8pm as part of MoMA's retrospective Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios. How do I reconcile my equal parts reverence and hubba-hubba for this grand broad?
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Be safe and sound and make sure the next knucklehead is too, Stockahz! Back manana with a brand new Pick! Bust out the galoshes, apparently it's still April! Go Yanks!
-Joe Walsh
