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Why most films of Hollywood's golden age chose to brush race issues under the carpet

I have to wonder what the motivation is for re-releasing Gone With The Wind just a couple months before 12 Years A Slave, its polar opposite among films dealing with the peculiar institution of American slavery. Are they looking to generate coattail ticket receipts from the controversy attending Steve McQueen's harrowing and violent epic? Do they think some retirement-home demographic of faded southern belles and elderly white racists will emerge, stooped and wrinkled, to reclaim it one last time?

Who knows? But it's interesting, now that a movie is on the market that lingers in detail on the pain, violence, sexual abuse, squalor and pure evil of slavery, to remind ourselves how they dealt with it in the Golden Age of Hollywood (also the Golden Age of Jim Crow). Of course, they typically dealt with...

Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane), Cheeta, Johnny Weismuller (Tarzan): MGM in the '30s Cheeta, Tarzan's chimp in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan and His Mate (1934), died of kidney failure during the week of December 19 according to Florida's Suncoast Primate Sanctuary. Sad news — and curious news as well. The Associated Press reports that chimps in captivity live between 40 and 60 years. Cheeta, oftentimes spelled as Cheetah, would have been 80. Also, more than one chimp played Cheeta in the various Tarzan movies. One of those, known as either Jiggs or Mr. Jiggs, is supposed to have died of pneumonia at a very young age in 1938, the year he co-starred with Dorothy Lamour in Her Jungle Love. (Actually, Ray Milland, not Jiggs, was Lamour's paramour in that movie.) And finally, according to Suncoast's outreach director Debbie Cobb, MGM's Tarzan Johnny Weismuller donated Cheeta to the sanctuary back in 1960. But did olympic swimmer Weismuller...

"My mom,Tarzan's Jane, referred to Cheetah-the-chimp as 'that bastard' - saying he bit her at every opportunity. Cheetah lived to be 80." Mia Farrow remembers the cheeky chimpanzee which starred alongside her actress mother Maureen O'Sullivan in 1942's Tarzan's New York Adventure. The animal died in a Florida animal sanctuary on Christmas Eve.

Child actor who played Boy, the foundling son of Tarzan and Jane, in eight Hollywood films

After three hit Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller in the title role and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane, MGM decided to give a son to the apeman and his mate in Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939). However, he had to be a foundling because, according to the Legion of Decency, the scantily clad jungle couple were not married, and presumably never had sex. "Boy", as he was named, was played by Johnny Sheffield, who has died aged 79 of a heart attack at his California home after falling off a ladder while pruning a tree.

In the Tarzan films, the fact that the orphaned offspring of a British couple killed in a plane crash in the jungle had an American accent was never explained. Neither Tarzan, whose dialogue was limited to grunts and monosyllables, nor Boy bore...

Director Paul Verhoeven.

This is the first of two conversations I've had with director Paul Verhoeven, the second being for his Ww II drama "Black Book." When I met Verhoeven in the Sony Pictures commissary for lunch in October of 1997, I had been a fan of his work since seeing the classic "Soldier of Orange" in 1979. The manic energy that Verhoeven is renowned for was evident throughout our chat, and was infectious. By the time our all-too-brief lunch was over, I found myself waving my hands while I spoke in rapid clips, and using more bounce than usual in my stride, to the point where a few friends suggested I switch to decaf.

The other memory that remains vivid is the passion and high hopes that Verhoeven had for "Starship Troopers." Like the director himself, I thought this would be a groundbreaking movie event and that the world would embrace...