Pinkydoes not require them to stretch themselves to imagine what it is like to be black, but actually gives them a vehicle to imagine their own white appearances as fallible, as no guarantee of continued enjoyment all of the rights and privileges of whiteness. Variety 5 October 1949. To put it another way, Pinky may be afraid of the place that she is in, but the film will maintain that Pinky is indeed “in her place”—in it, and of it. A teenager tries to cope with the loss of her twin sister by running away to boarding school. [28]      Pinky’s racial transgression is made clearer still when Mrs. Wooley, the late Miss Em’s cousin and Pinky’s emerging nemesis at this point in the film, enters the scene. The tropes that accompany the overtly monstrous body, that is, the disruptive appearance of the body, the scrutiny of the body, and with these the notion of the body as hybrid and thereby grotesque, are nevertheless evident in Pinky, as well as in its contemporary Lost Boundaries, and the later Douglas Sirk version of Imitation of Life. Delete. These women cannot love a man, because in an embrace, they will transform into their cat form and attack and kill their lover. “The Shadow and the Act.” In Shadow and Act, 264-71. As Jones observes, this year saw the release of films likeLost Boundaries (also a cinematic account of a “black-as-white” passing story), Stanley Kramer’s post-war drama Home of the Brave, and the film adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust.Pinky’s place as the most popular and critically acclaimed of these films dealing substantially with “blacks at home in the United States, enduring the problems of civilian life” (Jones 110-111) suggests the significance of examining the currents of fear and repression underlying its presentation of racial realities. “Image and Ideology in Kazan’s Pinky.”Literature Film Quarterly 9.2 (1981): 110-120. The car starts to pass Pinky, but the driver sees her, stops and then slows and rolls slowly alongside and just behind her on the road. New York: Continuum Books, 1996. [4]        Throughout this essay, I use the word “mulatto” or the phrase “mulatto figure” to reflect the functionthat such characters perform—one which disrupts the boundaries of traditional racial stratifications between blacks and whites. Rogin’s assessment is clearly most applicable to social problem films likePinky, which cast white actors in its primary black role(s). When Tyler has a problem - like when he can't find one of his shoes - Pinky dances her way to the storytelling box where she'll make up a really crazy story about pirates or aliens or having to wear salami for shoes! Now just let me alone.”. A genius mouse and his stupid sidekick try to conquer the world each night. Donate at least US$10 and you'll become a member of the OTW! Pinky K Montok is on Facebook. [5]        In reading the way that horror informs Pinky, I employ two well-known and canonical horror films of the 1940s and 50s, namelyCat People (1942) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), both of which arguably carry anti-miscegenation themes in their own right. Videocassette. [8]        Even read superficially, Pinky manifests elements of the Gothic genre in literature. Moreover, the inversion loses a good deal of its integrity in that it both visually and in fact (re)places a white woman in jeopardy, in that the attack is not successful, and ultimately in that despite Pinky’s attempts to show that African Americans, these social monsters, are “like us,” the film resolves the problem “they” pose by sequestering “Pinky and them” off amongst themselves. White. As Pinky comes through the door of the store, the shot’s lighting “telegraphs” to us in advance that she is going to “pass” for white in this scene; as she walks into the store, she stands in the doorway, first in shadow. The two soon fall in love and are married. The extra-filmic narrative ofPinky, in which “white actress Jeanne Crain has been cast as a mulatto,” asserts that white passing for black is acceptable, while Pinky’s main text simultaneously maintains that black passing for white is not (Rogin, 185). Barry Keith Grant, Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984 38-52. Pinky, Bobby, and Daffinee are contestants on a game show called Pop the Corn; Pinky and Nicholas are on Great Big Desserty Island. [24]      In Cat People, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a Serbian immigrant, comes to America as a fashion designer. Pinky. The show is about two neighbors, Elias Mabasa and James Marhanele,in Malamulele township and it tackles everyday issues that affect all of society. Jones, Christopher John. As the distant train whistle intimates, Pinky is being haunted, so to speak, by the memory of her recent past—the past in which she has passed for white in the North and taken a white lover—and the conflict it raises with her ancestral (black) past and her current (black) circumstances. What is also creepy about Pinky for Mrs. Wooley is that if Pinky is indeed whiter than she is, as she claims, then the system of race that structures and shapes her own understanding of the world cannot be relied on, a state of affairs she clearly finds unsettling. Nishime, LeiLani. Ed. “Zanuck Made Movie Despite Criticism of Racial Theme.” Ebony. Clearly, she is even more outraged that Pinky has the audacity toallow the salesgirl to wait on her ahead of a white person, when the salesgirl obviously believes Pinky is white. [41]      The scene thus invokes a common trope of ambiguity that so often makes monsters of the screen complex, an ambiguity that pushes the viewer to ponder who the “real” monster is. 16. Likewise, I believe that the notion of “hidden essences” could be very profitably applied to the 1959 Imitation of Life’s mulatto figure Sarah Jane. If we can yet further conceive of Pinkyas part horror film, then its generic ancestry is indeed complex, drawing upon the working-class-male oriented white supremacist ideology of the minstrel show, the white middle class female orientation of the melodrama and “woman’s film,” the liberal political tradition of the social problem picture, and the largely young white male-oriented strategies of the horror movie. She takes a step forward into the light and stops, presenting her white skin, her white features, and then proceeds into the store. However, when she returns to the South, her grandmother Dicey Johnson (Ethel Waters), and others attempt to influence her to remain there and to identify herself as black. Everyone gasps, and when it's done, Pinky had no eyes, blood was coming out of them, his blood was boiled into bloody blood, and his teeth were broken. [3]        In his noted essay “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Robin Wood posits that “in the classical Hollywood cinema motifs cross repeatedly from genre to genre,” and continues by asserting that genres “represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions” (671). In this way, his hybridity is itself depicted as the source of his monstrosity. [16]      Significantly, blackness is neither invoked by the looks of the character Pinky, nor by Jeanne Crain as the actress that plays her. If a black Pinky could “pass” for white, why could a white viewer not be “mistaken” for black? In this critical juncture as Pinky concerns itself with educating the protagonist (and the viewer) about “black experiences,” and in associating its white lead actress with a black identity, the film makes use of horror conventions to conjure a psychological and atmospheric “blackness.”. In Pinky, as in many horror films, as Bruce Kawin observes, “the negative projection is not re-owned but rejected and repressed…. They probably live there for a good reason. Though Tom has maintained that he still loves her and wants to marry her, she refuses him, insisting that her place is with her people. When one steps away from her to fetch the pint bottle of liquor for her to drink, Pinky kicks and pushes the other one away, and then lights out off the road into the forest, and escapes successfully. Sirk, Douglas, dir. During her c… Wes D. Gehring. In publicity and promotional materials for the film, the creature is often referred to as the “Gill-man,” a name that highlights his genetic duality. 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