Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 87

Miss Em’s Voyeuristic Gaze of P in k y

83

Notes
1.

9.
10.
II.

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

17.
18.
19.

Edward dc Grazia and Roger K. Newman, Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First
Amendment (New York: R. R. Bowker, Co., 1982), 70.
Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World Waril to the
Civil Rights Fra (New York: Oxtbrd UP, 1993), 27.
Ibid., 220.
Ralph Ellison. Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1953 [1964]), 280.
Ginger Clark, “Cinema of Compromise: Pinky and the Politics of Post War Film Production,”
The Western Journal of Black Studies, 21.3 (1997): 180-189. Clark thoroughly chronicles the
pre-production struggles that the film endured and contends that Jane White, a black actress [and
daughter of Walter White, secretary o f the NAACP-National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People], “managed to remove at least a few of the stereotypical references from the film
....” (p.l86). It is of note that in this article Esther Waters instead o f Ethel Waters is incorrectly
cited for the role of Dicey, a role for which Waters was highly commended.
Hortense Spillers, “Notes on an Alternative Model — Neither/Nor,” in The Difference Within:
Feminism and Critical Theory', eds. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins, 1989), 165.
Susan Courtney, “Picturizing Race: Hollywood's Censorship of Miscegenation and Production
o f Racial Visibility through Imitation of Life," Genders 27 (1998). (On-line journal - http://
www.genders.org/g27/g27_pr.html).
Elspeth Kydd, “'The Ineffaceable Curse o f Cain': Racial Marking and Embodiment in Pinky,"
Camera Ohsciira 43 (2000): 98.
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.
J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 212.
“Cinema: The New Pictures,” Vme .54.15 (10 October 1949): 98.
it is of note that although Ethel Waters, as Dicey, placated whites on the screen, off the screen she
was quite feisty. Reports swirled that former director of the film, John Ford, who preceded Kazan,
declined to work on the film because o f his personal distaste for Waters. As the film's new director,
Kazan characterized her as “a unique combination of old-time religiosity ... and free-floating
hate, [she was] always ready to overHow” (Andre Deutsch, Flia Kazan: A Life, New York, Alfred
Knopf, 1988, 374). Waters, the person, was the exact opposite o f Dicey, the role. In the film, she
epitomized the quintessential matriarch through her unyielding subservience and placating attitude;
a direct contrast to Pinky’s unflinching defiance - exemplary on some level o f her whiteness and
the liberality infu.sed in whiteness.
Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: The
Free Press, 1980), 100.
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 103.
Jane Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Fra (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001), 156.
Susan Courtney, “Picturizing Race: Hollywood’s Censorship of Miscegenation and Production
o f Racial Visibility through Imitation of Life," Genders 27 (1998). (On-line journal - http://
www.genders.org/g27/g27_pr.html).
Ibid.
Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: The
Free Press, 1980), 108.
Elspeth Kydd, “’The Ineffaceable Curse of Cain’: Racial Marking and Embodiment in Pinky,''
Camera Obscura 43 (2000): 112.