“What happens to a man who is regarded by his own community as a star and who enjoys playing the part, who looks like a star, dresses like a star, lives like a star–yet knows, in essence, that no one is beating down a door to give him work, that each time he goes to the office of a producer or a director for a interview, it is like starting out all over again?”
I’ve been a movie buff for a long time. Which means I’ve watched a lot of old movies. Some of them are great, while others are just…old. You know what you see a lot of in old movies? White people. Sometimes if there are roles for people of color, they’re just actually white people in extremely cringeworthy makeup. Actual people of color are pretty few and far between.
When people think of Old Hollywood, the stars they think about are almost certainly the white ones. They got the image-making, the publicity pushes. But actors of color did exist, and they had a rich social world of their own. Donald Bogle’s Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams explores the largely-unexamined world of Black Hollywood, from the very first movies until about the 1950s. Nellie Crawford rechristened herself Madame Sul-Te-Wan after landing roles in D.W. Griffiths movies and acted consistently for decades. Ernest “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison became a child star, but left the industry for the stage. Lena Horne got the glamour-girl treatment, but was unable to find major roles because of racism. Sammy Davis, Jr scandalized the town by marrying a white woman.
If you’re looking for a book that will be mostly about movies themselves, this will disappoint you. It does, of course, deal with the roles that were offered to Black actors, and the tension within the community about taking maid/servant roles just to have a chance to be onscreen. But that’s really not the focus here. In this book, Bogle is really trying to look at the entirety of the world of vintage Black Hollywood, and while that does encompass work, it’s mostly the neighborhoods where Black actors and their families lived, the clubs they patronized, the connections they made to each other through marriage and friendship. And it wasn’t just actors…Black singers, dancers, musicians, and businesspeople were all in and around Los Angeles, keeping things chugging along while getting barely any credit.
I found this book really compelling! The way Bogle introduces people and doesn’t feel the need to tell their whole story right away, lets them wind in and out of the larger whole depending on which part of the milieu he’s looking at in any given moment, really creates a sense of momentum. A history of this kind, with a lot of people involved and looking broadly at a place in time, could get bogged down in too much description, but it really strikes the right note on level of detail: enough to create a well-developed picture, but not so much that the whole thing gets dragged down. I really enjoyed learning more about the Nicholas brothers, Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, and actors who I’d known nothing about at all before I picked this up. If you have any interest at all in vintage Hollywood or the history of people of color in the entertainment industry, definitely check this out!
