Racism on Silver Screen

By Thomas Doherty

Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood, two of Hollywood's most original and irascible directors, have gotten into a very public fracas over film, history, and race.

Leaving aside the odd parallelism in the spectacle of a flinty white septuagenarian facing off against a younger, charismatic black man, the stakes in this particular celebrity grudge match are, for once, measured not in box office grosses but cultural capital. Their point-counterpoint speaks to the injection of identity politics into Hollywood cinema and the obligations of a filmmaker to the historical record.

Lee threw the first punch by lashing out at Eastwood for ignoring black marines in his widely praised double bill from 2006, ``Flags of Our Fathers" and ``Letters from Iwo Jima."

``Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee declared at the Cannes Film Festival, while hyping his own WWII combat film, ``Miracle at St. Anna," a tribute to the members of all-black 92nd Buffalo Division.

Presumably adopting his best do-you-feel-lucky-punk rasp, Eastwood fired back. ``The story is `Flags of Our Fathers,' the famous flag-raising picture, and black marines didn't do that." To inject an African American into the mix would have been historically inaccurate, a concession to the worst kind of PC revisionism. For Lee, he had a clipped piece of advice. ``A guy like him should shut his face."

Lee then rolled out the heavy artillery. ``First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either," he replied, playing the inevitable card. ``… A comment like 'A guy like that should shut his face' ― come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there." If he wasn't then, he is now.

Given Eastwood's record ― his biopic of jazz great Charlie Parker, ``Bird" (1988); his Afro-centric run through the jungle, ``White Hunter, Black Heart" (1990); and his initially resentful but ultimately tolerant attitude towards minority group partners in the ``Dirty Harry" series ― the angry old man deserves to be cut some slack. After all, 141 of the combined running time of 273 minutes for his two Iwo Jima films is devoted to the Imperial Japanese Army, an outfit more monochromic than the U.S. Marine Corps. Also, as Eastwood pointed out, the American half of the program focuses on the men who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi, not the black marines who landed on Iwo as part of munitions and depot companies.

For his part, Lee can be a major pain in the neck about alleged racism on either side of the Hollywood screen, which is not to say he doesn't have a point. Looking back over the ever-proliferating genre that makes up Hollywood's favorite war story, black troops have seldom been granted roles as starring, or even supporting, players.

The omission is explained by the discomforting truth about service in the ranks. Just as the Red Cross segregated blood by race as well as type, the U.S. military enforced the Jim Crow codes imported from civilian law and custom. The War Department's official oxymoronical designation was ``segregation without discrimination."

Though the later war years saw some experimentation with integrated units, and the crucible of combat tended to break down the notion of separate but equal foxholes, the African American troops who served during WWII experienced a khaki colored version of home front segregation.

Up against that racist reality, the cinematic integration of black GIs fighting shoulder to shoulder with white GIs requires dexterity or duplicity. Wartime combat films such as Sahara (1943) and Bataan (1943) managed to recruit an African or African American soldier for combat duty, but any celebration of black troops on screen called for a strategic silence about the off-screen restrictions. In ``The Negro Soldier" (1944), an entry in Frank Capra's ``Why We Fight" series, a montage reviewing the pageant of American history is obliged to bypass the Civil War.

Likewise, since none of the Army Air Force bomber crews or U.S. Navy submarine crews was integrated, a melting pot that includes Irish, Italians, and Jews in ``Air Force" (1943) and ``Destination Tokyo" (1945) must omit one ingredient. For Hollywood, the battlefields in Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq provide a more credible landscape for the celebration of the African American warrior.

To demand that a filmmaker parachute black GIs into a WWII combat zone they were forbidden to enter is a rank rewriting of history, but it is equally ahistorical to consign to invisibility soldiers whose boots were on the ground. Veterans of the 761st Tank Battalion, an all black unit that fought in the Third Army under Gen. George S. Patton, still seethe about being deleted from ``Patton" (1970).

Where it is historically verifiable and narratively convenient, a due recognition of service rendered, even a quick close up or the camera panning a sea of faces, seems a proper way to salute ― which, Lee to the contrary, is precisely what Eastwood did in ``Flags of Our Fathers."

The writer is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and an adjunct professor in the International Summer Campus at Korea University. He can be reached at doherty@brandeis.edu.