A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

Being a fan of the Golden Age of Hollywood comes with a price. As much as you can celebrate the writing, the glamour, the celebrity even the innovation of those times, it’s very hard to immerse yourself in that era without coming up against a sad truth. Maybe it will be a scene somewhere in the film that casually drops in racism. Or an offensive stereotype with but a few seconds of screen time. And sometimes it will be the appearance of someone who you have learnt was a horrible bigot.

I think different fans have different ways of reconciling themselves to these moments. Some folk just don’t care and simply don’t want to know. Others will rationalise the content and its creators: “They were all products of their time,” the argument goes, “and we can’t judge the past with our modern values.”

But there’s a problem with that, in my view. It presupposes that there weren’t a great many people at the time who weren’t calling this stuff out as racist. It’s just that thanks to the power structures at the time their voices didn’t get widely reported at the time, and so we don’t think they existed. I think many modern watchers of Golden Age cinema align their own realisation of some of the problematic content with the idea that Hollywood itself went through a similar progression. Just as it wouldn’t be fair to still judge them for not realising how offensive certain stereotypes were, we shouldn’t do the same for Hollywood.

I was reminded of all this during a recent rewatch of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and more specifically with the appearance of Charles Coburn. Playing an elderly, wealthy admirer of Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei, he gets to wheel out all his strengths as a movie star: a combination of elderly charm with a hint of youthful rebelliousness that saw him, time and time again, play avuncular roles to perfection. He’s fantastic in The Lady Eve and a solid player in the likes of Heaven Can Wait, Bachelor Mother and The Devil And Miss Jones.

And yet, as a person Charles Coburn seems to have had some utterly vile tendencies. Sam’s column last week on dealing with the performance and the career of the performer reminded me of trying to mentally deal with this actor’s real-life antics. An avowed white supremacist, Coburn opposed the civil rights movement and was a vocal supporter of laws designed to prevent races mixing. He was also meant to have been a menace to most women on set, assaulting costars off-camera with his “wandering” hands.

So there’s a reaction when he comes on screen. A reaction that can’t be handwaved away by trying to convince myself that there would be perfectly normal reasons for the time to oppose civil rights, given that the time is the late Fifties. But at the same time, I don’t want to not watch the great films of the Golden Age ever again.

And so the fan of the Golden Age comes back to the problem I opened with, one I really don’t have a simple answer for. What I will say, though, is that for me I am glad to learn the truth about many of these actors, that I don’t need to pretend they were all lovely in order to enjoy the films. Indeed, for me at least, the fact that this strange melange of rampant capitalism, ruthless studio bosses, loathsome actors – alongside exiles, crackpots and outsiders – somehow created these fascinating films makes the era seem richer and more interesting to me. The dark shadows hiding behind the happy glitzy smiles of Hollywood is integral to its story in this age.

I can still enjoy The Lady Eve even if my brain pipes up with “What a ****” when he first appears. Or indeed when many of the major players on that particular film turn up. A farrago of hate in front of camera ended up producing a carefree comedy. Now that’s one of the fascinating angles that keep me coming back to the era.

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