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Tainted Glory: Truth And Fiction In Contemporary Hollywood, Patricia A. Turner

Trotter Review

In the earliest days of cinema, the image of the African American on screen matched the off-screen image. When a 12-minute version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903) was filmed, "Tom" shows were the most popular stage shows, the Stowe novel was still a top-seller, and the notion that white southerners were the real victims of the peculiar institution was gaining increasing acceptance in academic circles. When D.W. Griffith's epic and revolutionary Birth of a Nation (1915) depicted a set of stock African-American movie characters — the subservient overweight domestic servant; the indifferent, coquettish mulatto; the savage, sexually driven buck; and …