CHAPTER TWO

Slavery

In 1997, following the great critical and commercial success of Schindler’s

List (1993), Steven Spielberg released Amistad, a film dealing with a
historical episode in 1839 in which a case dealing with the legal position
of blacks enslaved by the Spanish reached the US Supreme Court, which
freed the men and women concerned. For a range of reasons that will
be discussed later, Spielberg’s film about the t r e a t m e n t of slaves was
considerably less successful than his film about the Holocaust. But
that he attempted to deal with the issue of black slavery at all was
unusual in American cinema. For a variety of reasons connected with
guilt, embarrassment, ignorance, apathy, and an a c c u r a t e assessment
of what m o s t moviegoers would actually pay to see, white American
filmmakers‐that is to say the great majorityof filmmakers in the United
States‐have traditionally fought shy of representing slavery on film in
any meaningful sense.
During the first t w o decades of American film, there were a small
number of early films that attempted to convey the brutality of
slavery. The Slave Hunt, a Vitagraph production from 1907, showed
a planter cruelly beating a slave w o m a n with a whip. A young man,
presumably her son, rescued her by killing the planter. He fled, pursued
by bloodhounds, but was eventually caught and killed. According to
the Variety critic, the film was “not at all refined or agreeable and
leaves a bad taste.” The following year, The Slave’s Vengeance had
a slave whipped at the stake on the orders of his m a s t e r. In revenge,
he kidnapped his owner’s young daughter and r a n away. When he
was caught, the little girl pleaded for his life. Areviewer praised this
“pathetic finish” to what had otherwise been “a stirring if n o t happily
chosen subject.”!
38 AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH HOLLYWOOD F I L M

Slave stereotypes
On the whole, however, filmmakers were far more likely to portrait slaves
who conformed to traditional stereotypes derived from literature and/or the
theater. One of the first of these was the noble, loyal, ultimately victimized
“Uncle Tom” figure based on the novel first published by Harriet Beecher
Stowe in 1852. Not only did this book enjoy extremely long-lived popularity
as a literary work‐as late as 1899, it was still the book m o s t borrowed
from the New York Public Library2‐but it had also been turned into a
play that, by the end of the nineteenth century, was being performed across
America by nearly 500 specialist bands of “Tommer” companies. One
1902 reviewer estimated that, in that year alone, the play would be seen by
one in every 35 Americans.’ Given the importance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in American popular culture, it is hardly surprising that it was quickly
transferred to the screen. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter released a 14-shot film
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin‘ and this was followed by six further versions before
the First World War. “Uncle Tom” in these films was usually played by a
white man wearing minstrel make-up: the first black Uncle Tom was Sam
Lucas in 1914.5
Before the First World War, other slave stereotypes‐again borrowed
from literature and the theater‐had found their way into American
films. Donald Bogle has typified these together as the faithful “tom,” the
happy-go-lucky “coon,” the light-skinned tragic mulatto, and the loyal
“mammy.”® All fitted with the notion that slavery itself was a benign
system of labor. In 1915, in The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith took
this argument a stage further. The main sequence involving slavery itself
occurs when Phil, the eldest son of the Northern Stoneman family, and
Ben Cameron, the eldest Cameron son, together with his sisters Margaret
and Flora, set off to visit the slave quarters. Black workers are shown
picking c o t t o n in the background and respectfully doffing their caps to the
Camerons and their guests. This pastoral idyll is followed by a shot of the
space in front of the slaves’ cabins. An intertitle emphasizes that the slaves
are well-treated, speaking of “the two-hour interval given for dinner, o u t
of their working day from six till six.” The (male) slaves are so little tired
by their work in the fields, indeed, that they put on an impromptu dance
show to entertain the Camerons and their Northern visitors. Finally, as
the group of whites begin to leave, t w o old slaves approach Ben Cameron:
he shakes hands with one and rests his other hand on the second man’s
shoulder. Obviously, slaves are well-treated by white “massa” and his son,
and respond with affection to such benign care. Once slavery has been
abolished, however, these amicable relationships endure only between the
whites and some blacks (the “faithful souls”). Another black stereotype
emerges o n t o the screen: the once-contented slave (represented by Gus)
whom freedom and the doctrine of social equality have transformed
 SLAVERY 39

into an aggressive pursuer of white women. With the emergence of what

Donald Bogle calls the “black buck,” the full range of African American
stereotypes had now finally appeared on screen.’
In the first four decades of the twentieth century, there were very few
attempts by Hollywood to suggest that slavery itself was n o t a benign
and benevolent institution.® This fitted well with the dominant school of
historical writing associated in particular with Georgia-born and educated
Ulrich B. Phillips? and the popular kind of Southern literature represented
by the “plantation school” of novelists, especially Thomas Nelson Page.’°
These writers created a nostalgic picture of the “Old South” of slavery
and great plantations. Gracious and cultivated, the white society of the
antebellum South had been served (willingly) by black slaves who, asBruce
Chadwick notes, “were typically shown as helpful mammies, obliging
butlers, smiling carriage-drivers, joyful cotton-pickers and tap-dancing
entertainers.”"!
This heavily romanticized view of slavery inscribed in literature and
buttressed by history was destined to be spread even further by Hollywood
during the late 1920s and 1930s. There were t w o main reasons for this.
The first was the introduction of sound from 1927. This made it possible,
for the first time, to incorporate some features of what was constructed‑
rightly or wrongly‐as “black” music into film. Movies such as Hearts
in Dixie and Hallelujah! (both released in 1929), although themselves
actually set after the Civil War, seemed to suggest that blacks had carried
on living freely on plantations even after emancipation. “Ringing with
banjos and brimming with high-kicking, happy darky stereotypes,”
remarks Jack T. Kirby, “the[se] films conveyed an interpretation of slavery
basically the same as Thomas Nelson Page’s.”!? Other films in what
might be called a “plantation musical” genre included Dixiana (1930),
Mississippi (1935), Swanee River (1939), Way D o w n South (1939), Dixie
(1943), and Song of the South (1946). Perhaps the m o s t popular of all
these motion pictures were the Shirley Temple “southerns,” such as The
Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel (both 1935).
The second reason for the salience of films dealing with great
plantations was the impact of the economic depression beginning in
1929. Hard times and high levels of industrial unemployment made the
stability and seemingly timeless rural way of life of the antebellum South
seem especially appealing. “Audiences could marvel,” observed Edward
D. C. Campbell, Jr., “ a t a culture so reliant on the land and the seasons
rather than on the city and business trends.”"? As the 1930s w e n t on, the
plantations themselves became grander: Hollywood’s representation of the
way of the life of the “Old South” became a complex negotiation between
filmmakers’ desires and ambitions, previous productions, and what
spectators n o w had been led to expect. The relatively small and intimate
plantations in Carolina (1934) and So Red the Rose (1935) gave way to
the far more impressive Halcyon of Jezebel (1938) and Tara/Twelve Oaks
40 A M E R I C A N HISTORY THROUGH HOLLYWOOD FILM

in Gone With the Wind (1939). Consistently, however, whether plantation

musicals or plantation melodramas, these films depicted happy slaves
loyally supporting their masters and mistresses. The one film of this kind
that, at first glance, might seem to contradict this portrayal was So Red
the Rose. Unusually, this showed plantation blacks‐told that freedom is
about to be achieved‐stopping working for their master and his family
and, encouraged by their leader, Cato (Clarence Muse), starting to seize the
livestock of their owners. But this “slave revolt” is easily p u t down by the
daughter of the plantation family (Margaret Sullavan) who confronts Cato
and reduces him to silence by evoking memories of the strong interracial
bonds that had (supposedly) existed under slavery. In the end, therefore,
this brief m o m e n t of black agency fails to undermine the perception of
slavery asintrinsically benign.

Films on slavery after the Second World War

A few of these plantation films had a long after-life. Disney’s Song of the
South‐described by Jack Kirby as “the ultimate expression of plantation
harmony”‐carried on being shown in some movie theaters until the
mid-1970s.'* Gone With the Wind has periodically been rereleased and,
after its first showing on US network television in 1976, becamea staple
of mass television entertainment.'!’ The Hollywood view of slavery as a
benign system consequently continued to be the dominant one for a very
long time. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, t w o
mainstream American movies displayed considerably more ambivalence
over the institution of slavery. The Foxes of Harrow (1947), loosely based
on the best-selling novel by black writer Frank Yerby (1946), undercut the
perception of slavery as benign by showing a slave woman (an uncredited
Suzette Harbin) who would prefer to die rather than have her child brought
up in slavery. The Variety critic shrewdly observed that this sequence “is
likely to r u n into difficulties in many Southern states.”'¢
Band of Angels (1957), the film version of Robert Penn Warren’s 1955
novel, had Hamish Bond (Clark Gable) as a former slave trader ashamed
of his earlier occupation. The movie also included a beautiful, apparently
white girl, Amantha Starr (Yvonne De Carlo), who r e t u r n s from finishing
school in Cincinnati, Ohio, to attend her father’s funeral. She quickly
discovers both that he died heavily in debt and her mother wasa slave.
Sold off herself on the auction-block, she is bought by Bond. Hating her
new master at first, she eventually escapes with him from approaching
Union soldiers in the Civil War, and the film ends on a n o t e of what Jack
Kirby describes as “prospective miscegenation.”!” The movie also made it
clear that Bond’s black overseer Rau-Ru (Sidney Poitier) deeply resented
his o w n status as a slave, although he would later‐having fought in
 SLAVERY 41

the Union Army to free his o w n people‐reach the conclusion that his
sometime master had been relatively liberal and unprejudiced. As several
reviewers noted, the film was reminiscent of Gable’s role as Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind, yet the institution of slavery in Band of Angels was
perceptibly much harsher than in the earlier film. Band of Angels, noted
the New York Times critic, featured “brutal slave-traders, . . . the heroine
cowers on the slave-block piteously . . . and bloodhounds chase slaves
across fields.”'8
After 1957, however, as the civil rights m o v e m e n t gained momentum,
few n e w films on the “Old South” and the institutionof slavery with which
it was associated were made. One that was, Slaves (1969), was written
and directed by Herbert J. Biberman, a member of the “Hollywood Ten,”
the group of Hollywood employees who had unsuccessfully confronted
the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 and eventually
gone to jail. In a radical rewrite of the “benign” view of slavery, this
film showed it as a system of exploitation that eventually drove slaves
themselves to revolt. The film focused on the story of a black Christian
slave, Luke (Ossie Davis), who is sold by his Kentucky m a s t e r to save
his few remaining slaves. He passes into the hands of MacKay (Stephen
Boyd), a brutal Mississippi planter. MacKay’s mistress is a black woman,
Cassy (Dionne Warwick). Luke and Cassy plan to escape together, but
the plan fails and Luke‐rather than accept MacKay’s offer of freedom
in exchange for betraying other blacks‐dies fighting. The film was
curiously balanced in places: the reviewer for Variety observed that
“sympathetic slave owners are shown as well as hard driving profiteers
. some white men cared for keeping [black] families together while
others‐usually because of economic gain‐chose to break the family
unit and actually breed slaves.”!? Yet it ultimately showed the dark side
of slavery, including the exploitation of black women by white masters,
and seems to have had little appeal beyond big-city African American
audiences.”°

Miscegenation
A small number of other films later developed much further the highly
sensational theme hinted at in Band of Angels: miscegenation.”! After
The Birth of a Nation in 1915, and the controversy that greeted Griffith’s
film, sexual relationships across race lines seemed, quite simply, t o o hot
to handle. In 1927, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America adopteda set of guidelines for filmmakers known as the “Don’ts
and Be Carefuls.” One of the themes that could n o t be exploited in films
was miscegenation, specifically defined as “sex relationships between the
white and black races.” The Production Code of 1930, commonly known
42 A M E R I C A N HISTORY THROUGH H O L LY W O O D F I L M

as the Hays Code, repeated the ban in exactly the same terms and this
remained “official” Hollywood policy until 1956. When the Production
Code was revised in that year, the prohibition on miscegenation was
finally dropped.”? Yet filmmakers did n o t rush to make films about a highly
controversial type of relationship that was still illegal in some American
states.23 (The restrained t r e a t m e n t of the subject in Band of Angels may
have reflected this). 1967, however, saw the USSupreme C o u r t ‐ i n Loving
v. Virginia‐finally ruling such laws unconstitutional. That same year saw
the first black and white kiss in amainstream Hollywood film for over half
a century: Sidney Poitier and Katherine Houghton are seen embracing in
the back seat of a taxi in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.** This movie
was set in contemporary times: it took several years for a number of
filmmakers to exploit the salacious possibilities of interracial relationships
against a backcloth of slavery.
In 1957, Kyle Onstott, a 70-year-old bachelor living in California,
published a novel called Mandingo about a slave-breeding plantation in
Alabama. Bizarrely, although Onstott was an experienced writer, all his
work before this had been dedicated to the subject of dog-breeding. Five
years later, hepublished a second novel, Drum, which was a sequel to the
first.25 In the early 1970s, Onstott’s novels came to interest Italian film
producer Dino de Laurentiis, then attempting with some success (Death
Wish, 1974) to break into the American movie market. In 1975, Mandingo
was released as a film. With its portrait of a sexually hyperactive black
man (Mede, played by boxer Ken Norton), it blended with the popular
“blaxploitation” genre of the time.** New York Times critic Vincent
Canby commented that the film had been “handsomely photographed in
a number of impressively decaying old Southern houses.” The ads for the
film, indeed, were reminiscent of those for Gone With the Wind “with the
old plantation house in the background, the suggestion of crowds caught
up in great events, flames, lovers pictured in tempestuous embrace.” The
difference was that the Mandingo ads showed t w o pairs of interracial
lovers. According to Canby it offered “steamily melodramatic nonsense”
that conveyed no impression of “what life on the old plantation was really
like” because of its “erotic interest in the techniques of humiliation, mostly
with sex and violence.” Other reviewers were equally caustic: according
to one, Mandingo was an “embarrassing and crude film” that wallowed
“ i n every cliché” associated with “the slave-based . . . pre-Civil War
South.”?7
Clearly designed as an “exploitation” film (and given an “ R ” for
restricted rating), Mandingo reached a large audience mainly for its
prurience in dealing with the theme of miscegenation.** Hammond
Maxwell (Percy King), son of plantation owner Warren Maxwell (James
Mason), prefers slave Ellen (Brenda Sykes) to his wife Blanche (Susan
George). Blanche takes revenge by blackmailing slave Mede into an
affair. When she gives birth to a mulatto baby, Hammond kills both his
 SLAVERY 43

wife and Mede. In spite of its many faults, Mandingo did foreground
the sexual politics of slavery, undercutting earlier perceptions of it asa
benign institution. RobinWood, indeed, would later (and controversially)
describe Mandingo as “the greatest Hollywood film on race” for its
highly critical view of white Southern patriarchy.’
A year later, the same t e a m produced Drum, a sequel set on the
same Louisiana plantation. The reviewer for Variety described it as
“a grubby followup” to Mandingo, and speculated that p a r t of the
financial success of the latter had been due to “the fact that audiences
considered it a comedy.”*° D r u m had its baffling aspects as a sequel.
Brenda Sykes reappeared in a different role and Ken Norton was
mysteriously reincarnated as the character Drum. The film was just as
brutal in representing slavery as its predecessor. “ N o t since Mandingo,”
observed Vincent Canby, “have I seen a film so concerned with such
methods of humiliation as beating, shooting and castration.” In the end,
Canby dismissed it as “exploitation junk.” “Life on the old plantation
was horrendous,” he frankly admitted, “. . . but movies like this are
less interested in information than titillation, which, in t u r n , reflects
contemporary obsessions rather more than historical truths.”*!

Roots
For a m o r e serious look at the history and reality of slavery, it was
necessary in the 1970s to look to television more than the cinema. In
January 1977, American Broadcasting Company (ABC) broadcast an
adaptation of Alex Haley’s epic novel Roots, an a c c o u n t of a black family’s
struggle to survive over several generations. Shown over eight nights, it
attracted a total audience of 130 million.*? The mini-series recounted
the fictionalized history of Haley’s o w n family from their African r o o t s
to freedom in America. It incorporated some “traditional” Hollywood
elements: the slave-ship captain (Ed Asner), overcome with guilt, in some
ways resembled Hamish Bond and the sexual abuse of black women under
slavery was shown in a “downright salacious” manner that to a degree
echoed Mandingo and Drum. On the other hand, it also showed in some
detail the experience of the middle passage (the transport of countless
Africans by sea to the Americas) and, for the first time, a shipboard slave
rebellion. It broke with the clichéd image of the “Old South” of great
plantations by viewing slavery against the backcloth of an ordinary North
Carolina farm.»? Indeed, asBruce Chadwick points o u t , it fatally undercut
many of the myths that had previously surrounded slavery: slaves in
Roots did nothing “ t o help their owners keep them enslaved. They did
n o t cakewalk and tap-dance to ‘Dixie.’ They were n o t all Mammies and
Sambos.”*4
44 A M E R I C A N HISTORY THROUGH HOLLYWOOD F I L M

Executives for the ABC network were highly aware that they were
making a program about blacks for what was predominantly a white
television audience. Initially, they took refuge in “whitening” Haley’s
narrative: the script by William Blinn introduced many new, albeit often
minor, Caucasian characters “ t o give the miniseries a whiter look.” In
advertising and promoting the series, ABC foregrounded as many whites
as possible. It also distributed many study guides to teachers and students
across the United States emphasizing that Haley’s story was essentially
“history.”25 No doubt these tactics succeeded‐to a point. What accounted
for the astonishing success of Roots in attracting a huge audience, however,
probably in the end had more to do with its intrinsic optimism (family
members do love each other and believe that they will one day be free), the
underlying theme of racial integration (the redneck white and the black
m a n in the end become partners), and‐rather paradoxically‐the idea that
it was a universal human story of survival and liberation rather than simply
a study in black-white relations.
Coverage of slavery in mainstream Hollywood films, at least until the
end of the Second World War, had treated it as a benign and benevolent
institution. The idea that slaves were happy with their status was conveyed
by many films, including the t w o great Civil War epics, The Birth of a
Nation and Gone With the Wind. Hollywood formulas encouraged this
traditional view of slavery: the plantation musicals and melodramas of the
late 1920s and 1930s focused on happy-go-lucky “faithful souls.” After
1945, however, there began to be hints‐as in The Foxes of Harrow and
Band of Angels‐that slavery itself had been a much darker and more
oppressive system than Hollywood had previously recognized. By the
1960s and 1970s, the modern civil rights movement and growing black
consciousness made it impossible to t r e a t slavery in traditional ways on
screen. It could either be shown as brutal (as in Slaves) or asa background
for steamy tales of interracial lust (as in Mandingo and Drum). But for m o s t
white mainstream Hollywood filmmakers, slavery had by this time‐as
limits on the representation of sex and violence tumbled‐become one of
the last remaining taboos. It was much easier, as suggested by French film
scholar Anne Crémieux, to c o m m e n t indirectly on slavery in such science
fiction films as Planet of the Apes (1968).*° Yet the success of Roots seemed
to suggest that there might perhaps bea mass audience waiting for the right
film to deal with the subject.

Spielberg’s Amistad
In the closing months of 1997, it appeared that that film was at last about
to be released. Material started to arrive in the mail-boxes of educators
across the United States that was expressly intended to “sell” a film by
 SLAVERY 45

the new DreamWorks SKG studio. The publicity material was ostensibly
directed toward high school and college students. It included suggested
activities for such students that were supposed‐as the blurb stated‐to
“encourage critical thinking about the value of history in light of the
long-faded chapter restored to American history in the film Amistad.”3”
On the one hand, therefore, there was a clear claim by the makers of
Amistad that their film represented “history’‐though a history that
had up to this point been largely unknown. But the new movie was also
subjected to an alternative and (from its makers’ point of view) infinitely
less desirable form of prerelease publicity. In mid-October 1997, Barbara
Chase-Riboud filed a $10 million claim against DreamWorks claiming
that major parts of her 1989 novel Echo of Lions‐itself loosely based on
the Amistad incident‐had been plagiarized by the studio. Her lawyer,
Pierce O’Donnell, listed 13 distinct parallels between Chase-Riboud’s
fiction and the script of Amistad. In response, lawyers acting on behalf of
DreamWorks argued that the film itself was “entirely based on history”
and that no one individual could copyright “mere fact.”°’ Even before
the film’s release in December 1997, therefore, Amistad was the focus
of public and legal debate. Was it history or was it fiction? And if it was
history, what kind of history was it?
The story of the making of the film effectively began in 1978, when
African American dancer and choreographer Debbie Allen came across
a book on the Amistad mutiny at the Howard University Bookstore.
Although that book itself, William Owen’s Black Mutiny (1953), was a
novel, it dealt with a real historical incident: the revolt of black Africans
being carried into slavery on a Spanish boat, the Amistad, in 1839. Having
slaughtered all but t w o of the crew, they tried to sail the boat back to Africa
but were outwitted by the t w o surviving crew sailors and ended up off the
c o a s t of Connecticut where they were stopped and taken into harbor by
an American naval vessel. There then followed three separate trials, in
each of which the final verdict was that the blacks involved were n o t slaves
but free Africans who had been illegally seized. The man who argued the
last case, which resulted in their being freed and offered the chance of
returning to Africa by the US Supreme Court, was former President John
Quincy Adams. By all accounts, Debbie Allen responded to the book in
an intensely emotional way. She decided that it was “a t r u e story that the
world needed to hear” and in 1984 optioned the rights to the Owen novel.
Thereafter, for a decade, Allen became absorbed in a fruitless quest to
have her idea produced asa movie.*”
There were numerous reasons for her failure. Allen herself starred as
Lydia Grant in the successful television series Fame (1982-7), but she lacked
experience and credentials as a producer. Despite the runaway success
of the mini-series Roots on television,*® it was n o t obvious that a movie
dealing with the black experience was a commercially viable proposition.
Even African American directors fought shy of the project. “Look at
46 A M E R I C A N HISTORY THROUGH HOLLYWOOD F I L M

Glory,” observed Keenen Ivory Wyatts of the 1989 film about blacks in
the Union army. “ I t barely made its money back. As a black director, you
can’t afford that.”*! Although Allen’s initial attempts to make the film
would parallel the early films directed by Spike Lee with the specific
intention of packaging black experience to appeal to crossover audiences,
Lee’s movies were set either in the contemporary period or, like Malcolm X
(1992), in the recent American experience. And Malcolm X, whatever its
faults as amovie, was at least dealing with a major character in American
history rather than with an almost unknown episode in the distant past.
Allen’s luck apparently changed, however, in 1994 when she saw
Schindler’s List and concluded that Steven Spielberg was the m a n to make
the film. Finally, after pursuing various DreamWorks executives, she
had a long meeting with Spielberg and seems to have persuaded him of
the viability of the whole project. (African American reviewer Thomas
Pinnock, who attacked the eventual film as a “Hollywood enterprise”
putting “Black people in the background of their o w n history,” dismissed
Allen’s original fervent pitch to Spielberg as “a modern day parody of
‘chucking and dancing for the massa boss.’”)*? Both Allen and Spielberg,
however, had clear reasons for wanting to make the film. The black
instigator of the mutiny, Cinque, seemed to encapsulate for Allen the
history of African Americans. “When I look at him,” she explained, “I
think about my grandfather, the m e n of my family‐Five generations back,
my family disappears into the plantation. Cinque embodies the spirit of
millions of Africans who were stolen . . .”*° While Allen may n o t have been
aware of it, moreover, her take on Cinque followed trends in the historical
interpretation of slavery in the last quarter of the twentieth century, with
scholars such as Ira Berlin emphasizing the fact that slaves played an
active p a r t in molding their world and that they resisted slavery itself in
a large variety of ways.** For Allen, depicting Cinque as a defiant and
ultimately successful leader of a black refusal to accept slave status was a
powerful means of destroying the older view of blacks as sambo figures
who acquiesced in their o w n enslavement.* Spielberg, too, had personal
reasons for his interest in the Amistad story. He had already made one
commercially successful film set in the past (Schindler’s List) and was
planning to make another (Saving Private Ryan) when he approved the
notion of a film about the Amistad mutiny. He and his wife, moreover,
had recently adopted t w o African American children‐his decision to give
the green light to Allen’s project almost certainly had personal as well as
commercial implications. Spielberg himself would later claim that, while
listening to Allen’s initial pitch, he had been struck by the thought “that
this would besomething I would be pretty proud to make, simply to say to
my son, ‘Look this is about you.’”*6
Both Allen and Spielberg, therefore, set off making their m o v i e ‑
Spielberg as director and Allen as co-producer‐with high ambitions.
Spielberg, indeed, stated that he wanted his Amistad film to accomplish
 SLAVERY 47

“for the American experience of slavery what Schindler’s List did for
the Holocaust.”*” As a result, African American expectations of the film
were initially high. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who served asa consultant on
the project, declared enthusiastically that “It’s rare when you see black
people participate in violence to defend themselves, be vindicated by the
American legal system, and berecognized asthe t r u e patriots they are, like
Patrick Henry.”** Certainly, by presenting the story predominantly from
the African perspective, Amistad involved a major shift in Hollywood
moviemaking.“ It also featured African a c t o r s ‐ m o s t notably, of course,
Djimon Hounsou from Benin asCinque‐in major roles*° and had them
speak an accurate version of the Mende language in what is n o w Sierra
Leone (the area from which the Amistad captives came).*! The film as
a whole can be seen as an attempt to revise the codes surrounding the
notion of black armed revolt as represented in American cinema. With
the creation of a fictional, native-born American black Theodore Joadson
(Morgan Freeman), it also attracted attention to the role played by free
blacks in the abolitionist movement.*?
The Joadson role, however, also demonstrated from the beginning the
weaknesses of the film. There are, at times, good reasons for introducing
fictional characters into broadly historical films. Representations of this
kind can be used, as Robert A. Rosenstone has argued, to present a
metaphoric or symbolic historical truth.*? Indeed, it is necessary almost
always to engage in a good deal of invention‐of scenes, dialogue, and
characters‐when bringing “history” to the screen.** But Joadson is an
anachronism‐indeed, almost as glaring an anachronism as the bicycle
the Africans from the Amistad see being ridden after they first land in
Connecticut looking for w a t e r. He promotes the illusion that there were
many rich blacks in the United States in 1839.°°He also seems to move with
complete freedom in white society, including a highly unlikely meeting
with ex-President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) at the Adams
family home in Massachusetts.
When the film was released, it rapidly became clear that Amistad
was n o t going to become the African American Schindler’s List. Black
audiences themselves appear to have reacted in a negative way to it. They
seem to have disliked the attempt to make them confront their o w n past.
“Only a masochist,” observed Warrington Hudlin, president of the Black
Filmmakers foundation, “would w a n t to spend t w o hours watching
themselves be degraded and dehumanized.”** In an early showing of the
film, an African American woman became hysterical during the middle
passage sequence and rushed o u t of the theater. “I felt like I was on
the ship,” she later explained, “and it was t o o much.I just really couldn’t
take it anymore.”°*”
The middle passage sequence in Amistad is actually, in filmic terms,
a flashback showing how Cinque came to be captured and turned into a
slave. Tecora, the boat shown, is the one that first carried him from Africa
48 AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH HOLLYWOOD FILM

to Havana, Cuba, where he was sold and placed aboard the Amistad.
It is probably the m o s t honest‐and the m o s t brutal‐treatment of the
experience of Africans on a slave ship in the middle passage in American
cinema. Far more even than Roots, it shows.the terrible conditions on
the slave-ships, the chaining and poor food, the vicious punishments of
the slaves themselves, hints at the high mortality rate, and also at the
exploitation of slave women by Spanish sailors (the shot of dancing to
music). Most graphically of all, it shows the disposal of 50 slaves when
the Spanish realize that they have insufficient provisions to feed everyone
aboard.*®
If African Americans disliked the film, what of the white response?
The white characters in the film fall into one of three categories. They
are simply ridiculous (like the Christians shown praying and singing)
or unscrupulous and ineffective (like abolitionist Lewis Tappan
(Stellan Skarsgard) and, ultimately, President Martin van Buren (Nigel
Hawthorne)) or they have their character molded and elevated through
contact with Cinque. When we first m e e t Roger Baldwin (Matthew
McConaughey), who defends the Amistad mutineers in the first trials,
he is little more than an ambulance-chaser offering his services to make
a profit o u t of others’ misfortune. John Quincy Adams, their eventual
counsel before the Supreme Court, is first shown as sleeping during a
debate in the House of Representatives.It is suggested that heis a frustrated
and bitter old man, jealous of the reputation of his father, John Adams,
second president of the United States. But both Baldwin and Adams are
ennobled by the end of the film through Cinque’s influence.*
Amistad also seemed to be p a r t of an effort on Spielberg’s p a r t to
extend the frontier of acceptable violence in the movies. One month
after Amistad was completed, the director and much of the same t e a m
began shooting Saving Private Ryan. But the violence of Amistad had the
potential to be even more controversial than the later film since it was in
essence racial violence. In fact, the release of the film marked the r e t u r n
of an image largely abandoned since The Birth of a Nation: that of the
black male beast. The violence with which the Africans kill all but t w o
of the Spanish crew right at the s t a r t of the film is shockingly bloody.
Then Cinque kills the ship’s captain with a sword, spearing him through
the deck, and standing over him with obvious pleasure as he writhes in
agony. The actual justification for the mutiny and its violence (the middle
passage sequence) does n o t actually come until almost half-way through
the film.
The straightforward binary position the film offers‐blacks are good,
whites are bad‐may well have reduced the appeal of Spielberg’s movie to
a predominantly white audience. But it was n o t the only problem the film
faced in attracting a large audience. The film was biased in gender (as well
as racial) terms. Although women appear in the film, it is n o t in any of
the major roles. Moreover, as a writer for film magazine Sight and Sound
 SLAVERY 49

pointed o u t , the film has no happy resolution: “the hard facts of history”
preclude Spielberg’s “trademark scenes of reunion and reconciliation.”®
While the American legal system is vindicated by finally declaring the
Amistad rebels free, they sail back to Africa and the slave fort from which
they have sailed to the Americas is destroyed by the British navy, Cinque
r e t u r n s home to find that his wife and family have disappeared, and his
homeland is being t o r n apart by civil war. Unlike the television series
Roots, therefore, Amistad is n o t a hopeful tale, does n o t foreshadow the
eventual integration of blacks with whites in American society, and makes
no attempt to elevate the story into auniversal one revolving around human
liberation.
Amistad was nota great commercial success“ and, eventually, Spielberg
convinced himself that this had been because it was t o o didactic and “ t o o
much of a history lesson.”*? This may have been the case. On the other
hand, there are very specific reasons why audiences disliked the film
and‐no doubt‐passed on their word-of-mouth opinion to others. With
Cinque, Spielberg and Allen offered moviegoers a kind of hero/villain.
He is plainly a man with acommanding presence and forceful character.
But he also represents the r e t u r n of the dark, bestial other, haunting
the imagination of whites with the c o n s t a n t specter of violence.® “As
slave epics go,” commented Christopher Hemblade in Empire, “and, let’s
be honest, there ain’t much demand for them, this is about the m o s t
visceral and unclichéd version you could hope for.”** Hemblade clearly
missed the duality of the Cinque character, with the black beast as a
cliché at least since The Birth of a Nation. But he also underlined the fact
that, albeit for different reasons, black and white Americans responded
negatively to the film. “Race screws up Americans,” observed Armond
White, and‐with Amistad‐Allen and Spielberg tried to tell a story that
m o s t Americans‐whether black or white‐had no real desire to hear.**
Without Spielberg, indeed, Amistad would probably never have been
made. Allen’s project had been “stonewalled” for more than a decade,*
reflecting Hollywood’s ambivalence over its theme. In the aftermath
of the civil rights movement, it appeared that the traditional ways of
handling slavery on screen had outlived their usefulness. The noble,
victimized “Uncle Tom,” the simple-minded coon, the tragic mulatto,
and the mammy were no longer acceptable as racial stereotypes. With
the brief exception of the blaxploitation dramas of the 1970s revolving
around miscegenation, the Southern plantation had fallen o u t of favor as
a background and theme for filmmakers. Roots succeeded on television in
1977 because it subsumed the slavery experiences of African Americans
in what Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper t e r m “the context of the
ubiquitous rags-to-riches immigrant ‘success’ story.”°’ N o t only is Amistad
different from earlier films about slavery (it is set geographically in the
North), but‐far from becoming p a r t of American society‐at the end of
the film, the former captives r e t u r n to face an uncertain future in Africa.
50 AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH HOLLYWOOD F I L M

In many ways, indeed, it is an African rather than an African American

story. It had almost nothing to say that was of relevance to Americans,
whether white or black, other than seemingly demonstrating that the
judicial system designed by the Founding Fathers ultimately worked. Yet
American slavery survived legally for 26 years after the Amistad decision,
and it was destroyed in the end n o t in the c o u r t s but through civil war. In
1839, the Supreme Court freed‐on a technicality‐the African Amistad
captives; 18 years later, the same c o u r t determined in the Dred Scott case
that African American slaves were merely property, with no civil rights.

Tarantino’s Django Unchained

The commercial failure of Amistad helped discourage further attempts to
represent slavery on the big screen. If Steven Spielberg could n o t succeed,
then who could?’ In December 2012, Quentin Tarantino released
Django Unchained, the story of Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who first
secures his freedom with the help of German bounty hunter Dr. King
Schultz (Christoph Waltz) before the t w o set off on a long mission to free
Django’s wife Broomhilda v o n Shaft (Kerry Washington), who has been
sold to Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a charming but highly
unscrupulous plantation owner in Mississippi.
From the opening sequence of Tarantino’s film, showing a small group
of shackled African Americans walking grimly to the accompaniment of
jaunty, jangly, Western-style music, it is instantly clear that this is n o t
going to be a serious analysis of slavery. The title of the film and the name
of the main black character come n o t from black history or the history of
the American South, but from Sergio Corbucci’s violent spaghetti Western
Django (1966). Franco Nero, the star of Corbucci’s film, makes a cameo
appearance in Django Unchained (Tarantino, in the opening credits,
pays tribute to “the friendly participation of Franco Nero”). The original
Django inspired a series of spaghetti Westerns with similar titles (Django
Spara per Primol/He Who Shoots First, 1966; Sei Sei Vivo, Spara!/Django,
Kill!, 1967; Django Sfida Sartana/Django against Sartana, 1970).
In addition to the original Django, t w o other films‐both released in
1975‐appear to have had a major influence on Django Unchained. One
was the blaxploitation movie Boss Nigger (1975), with Fred Williamson
as one of a pair of black bounty hunters who essentially take over for a
time and r u n a white town. The second was Mandingo. Tarantino had
been interested in Richard Fleischer’s film for years, commenting in an
interview during the 1990s that it was one of only t w o instances “ i n the last
twenty years [that] a major studio [Paramount] madea full-on, gigantic,
big-budget exploitation film.””° Mandingo launched the notion of bare‑
knuckled blacks fighting each other to the death for whites’ profit (with
 SLAVERY 51

Ken Norton as Mede killing his opponent by biting through his jugular).
Django Unchained’s “mandingo fighting” and the killing of one fighter by
another are clearly taken from the earlier film.
Django Unchained is a p a r t spaghetti Western, p a r t blaxploitation
film, and p a r t exploitation movie. Yet it incorporates elements from
many other genres, making it a t r u e pastiche. It is ablack Western, in the
tradition of Posse (1993), which also had blacks fighting an anachronistic
Ku Klux Klan. It is a“Southern” or plantation film with a lineage going
back at least as far as The Birth of a Nation. It is a revenge/rescue drama
that echoes certain aspects of The Searchers (1956). It is a buddy movie
(the sequence in which Schultz and Django are in a saloon with virtually
the whole population of the t o w n surrounding and aiming guns at them
is reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance K i d (1969)). It is also
the story o f a quest, modeled i n some r e s p e c t s ‐ a s Schultz makes plain
to Django‐on Siegfried, the third opera of Richard Wagner’s Ring
cycle, itself the result of a blending of Norse mythology and old German
legend.
The fact that nearly all the later sequences of the film take place on
plantations is a tribute to the enduring cinematic power of the plantation
myth. Familiar cultural stereotypes appear: the Southern lady, Calvin
Candie’s sister Lara (Laura Cayouette), stands up for (white) Southern
manners in the way Ellen O’Hara had once done (and while Ellen died
of typhoid, Lara is literally blown away). Plantation owners “Big Daddy”
and Candie himself are recognizable types, although they owe more to
Warren and Hammond Maxwell than Dr. Cameron and Gerald O’Hara.
Similarly, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) has evolved from the “faithful
souls” of Griffith into an “Uncle Tom” figure of surpassing malevolence
and power. In the real antebellum South, only 12 percent of slave-owners
in 1860 owned 20 or more slaves, although more than half of all slaves
lived on the plantations of such owners.”! Plantation life, the c o m m o n e s t
experience for slaves, was proportionally much less common among white
slave-owners. But the beauty of the plantation setting (part of the film
was shot at the Evergreen Plantation in Louisiana) still seduces filmmakers
like Tarantino. The brutal manner in which Tarantino depicts plantation
slavery, however, is much closer to how it was conceived in the lurid
fantasies of many abolitionists (few of whom had visited the South) than it
may have been to antebellum reality.
Brutality was itself a frequent but unquantifiable aspect of plantation
life. The plantation was an economic unit and owners developed their o w n
techniques for managing their slave workforce asefficiently and profitably
as possible. In m o s t cases, observes Russell R. Menard, these involved
a mixture “of incentives and physical punishments,” although there is
no way of knowing in what proportion. Whipping was comparatively
common. Of former slaves interviewed in the 1930s, half of those from
the upper South and three-quarters of those from the lower South
52 AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH HOLLYWOOD F I L M

reported that they had been whipped.” Yet, sadistic as some masters and
overseers undoubtedly were, and with few laws to constrain them, to kill
or injure a slave meant damaging one’s o w n property and “many planters
preferred nonviolent over violent means to attain their ends.”’? Those
planters do n o t include Big Daddy (Don Johnson) or Calvin Candie. On
Big Daddy’s plantation in Tennessee, one of the Brittle brothers is about
to use a bullwhip ona slave for breaking eggs. Django and his wife,
Broomhilda, have been punished for running away from their original
owner by flogging and branding. They have then been separated by being
sold to different owners. On Candie’s Gothic plantation in Mississippi,
with its sweetly deceptive name of “Candyland,” the brutalities include
attack dogs killing a runaway slave, “mandingo” fighters wrestling with
each other to the death, and the hot, airless box on the lawn in which a
thirsty, naked Broomhilda is being punished for her latest escape attempt.
Castration is obviously acommon punishment: Stephen, Candie’s shrewd
and loyal African American major-domo, knows exactly how long‐seven
minutes‐it takes a castrated black m a n to bleed to death. But he prefers
more imaginative punishments, such as condemning Django to work for
the rest of his life down a mine.
The one major difference between Django Unchained and earlier
exploitation films set on plantations is that sex is n o t an issue. Django is
loyally uxorious and, throughout the film, is determined to find and rescue
Broomhilda. Unlike Fred Washington in Boss Nigger, he does n o t chase
white women. And unlike Ken Norton in Mandingo, he is n o t chased by
a white woman. Miscegenation is present in the film‐Candie hasa light‑
skinned mulatto mistress, Sheba (Nichole Galicia) and, when Schultz and
Django arrive at Candyland, seems to be offering Broomhilda to Schultz‑
but is n o t a major theme. Broomhilda herself, while flogged, branded, sold,
and imprisoned in a punishment box, does n o t appear to have been sexually
exploited.
In comparison to Amistad, which principally dealt with enslaved Africans
in the North of the United States, Django Unchained focuses on African
American slaves in the South. For a white director to do this has itself been
a source of controversy, with black director Spike Lee (who refused to see
it) describing Tarantino’s film as“disrespectful to my ancestors.””* Django
himself appears to progress “from beaten slave to cool gun-toting cowboy
in fancy duds . . . He’s John Shaft ona horse, Superfly with a sixgun.”” He
is also coolly ironic (“Kill white folks and get paid for it, what’s n o t to like?”
is his response to Schultz’s suggestion that he become a bounty hunter). Yet
his instincts are n o t always hip: his blue “Little Lord Fauntleroy” valet
outfit provokes incredulity from a female slave. Far more seriously, he
plays second fiddle for much of the movie to Schultz. It is Schultz who
liberates him from the Speck brothers, proposes that the t w o spend the
winter bounty hunting together, and promises after this to help find and
free Django’s wife. It is Schultz who teaches him how to use weapons and
 SLAVERY 53

plans the strategy they hope to use in buying Broomhilda back from Calvin
Candie. Finally, it is Schultz who kills Candie, triggering his o w n death
after which Django finally becomes a lead character. In what up to this
point has been (among many other things) a buddy movie, Django for the
first t w o hours has been very much the junior partner.
Candie, speaking as a member of the minority of whites on large
plantations,at one point asks a deceptively simple question: “why don’t they
[the black slaves] kill us?” He uses pseudo-science (phrenology) to answer
his o w n question: because the skulls of African Americans show them to
be fundamentally passive.” The film, at some moments, seems to justify
Candie’s insane argument. Schultz, for example, having freed Django,
has to explain to the other members of the black chain-gang just what the
options facing them are with respect to the sole surviving Speck brother:
they can either save him and carry him to the nearest t o w n or kill him,
bury the t w o brothers and escape. (Once a white man has spelt o u t their
choices, they o p t for the second alternative.) The film’s main attempts to
undercut the notion of black passivity come from the characters of Stephen
and Django. In the movie’s final stages, Stephen is revealed asthe real power
on Candie’s plantation and Django, by virtue of three massacres, secures
freedom for himself and Broomhilda (though how will they subsequently
escape Mississippi slave patrols?). The violence used by Django offers a kind
of redemption from the evils of slavery: it is afantasy of what might have
happened rather than what did. With its traditional clichés and stereotypes
of plantation life, and its cathartic if imaginary vengeance, Tarantino’s
movie has little to do with the former realities of slavery.

Filmography
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (dir. Edwin S. Porter; Edison, 1903) (many subsequent
versions).
The Slave H u n t (Vitagraph, 1907).
The Slave’s Vengeance (Pathé, 1908).
The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith; Epoch, 1915).
The Slaver (dir. Harry Revier; Morris R. Schlank Productions, 1927).
Hearts in Dixie (dir. Paul Sloane; Fox, 1929).
Hallelujah! (dir. King Vidor; M G M , 1929).
Dixiana (dir. Luther Reed; RKO, 1930).
Carolina (dir. Henry King; Fox, 1934).
So Redthe Rose (dir. King Vidor; Paramount, 1935).
Mississippi (dir. A. Edward Sutherland; Paramount, 1935).
The Little Colonel (dir. David Butler; Fox, 1935).
The Littlest Rebel (dir. David Butler; Twentieth-Century Fox, 1935).
Slave Ship (dir. Tay Garnett; Twentieth-Century Fox, 1937).
Jezebel (dir. William Wyler; Warner Bros., 1938).
Swanee River (dir. Sidney Lanfield; Twentieth-Century Fox, 1939).
54 A M E R I C A N HISTORY T H R O U G H H O L LY W O O D F I L M

Way Down South (dir. Leslie Goodwins/Bernard Vorhaus; Sol Lesser

Productions, 1939).
Gone With the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming; Selznick International/MGM, 1939).
Dixie (dir. A. Edward Sutherland; Paramount, 1943).
Song of the South (dir. Harve Foster/Wilfred Jackson, Disney, 1946).
The Foxes of Harrow (dir. John M. Stahl; Twentieth-Century Fox, 1947).
Band ofAngels (dir. Raoul! Walsh; Warner Bros., 1957).
Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner; APJAC/Twentieth-Century Fox,
1968).
Slaves (dir. Herbert J. Biberman; Slaves Company/Theatre Guild, 1969).
Mandingo (dir. Richard Fleischer; Dino de Laurentiis/Paramount, 1975).
Drum (dir. Steve Carver; Dino deLaurentiis/United Artists, 1976).
Amistad (dir. Steven Spielberg; DreamWorks SKG, 1997).
Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino; Weinstein Company/Columbia,
2012).