GROSS/37 1946 - both racist and lame
The war has ended. Walt Disney is exhausted and the golden age is over.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
SONG OF THE SOUTH, HARVE FOSTER, WILFRED JACKSON, RUTH WARWICK, LUCILLE WATSON, HATTIE MCDANIEL, JAMES BASKETT, WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS, 1946, 94 MINUTES.
Before I wrote this I tried to avoid the issue by writing about how the Hollywood golden age came to an end - and about periods in film history in general.
By all accounts, at this point, Walt Disney is losing interest. The theme parks are forming in his imagination and in his notebooks. The animators he personally recruited and constantly inspired are perplexed and heartbroken that they’ve lost their leader to some run-of-the-mill live action pictures and to a model railway that he was obsessively building in his studio’s workshops. And above all to the war effort. He’s devoted huge resources to making information and propaganda films like Four Methods of Flush Riveting:
and Der Fuehrer's Face:
This enormously successful business has to borrow money to fund the epic overspend on Fantasia, a strike in 1941 forces Disney to raise wages for his animators (he’s shocked to learn they’re not there for the sheer joy of it). The war work isn’t popular but it’s crucial to the survival of the business. In fact it’s dark and alienating - what people want is to forget the war. It’s a tough time for Disney and his studio.
Cinema’s first creative peak may have passed but its economic peak is about to arrive. Ticket sales are vast - in the year this film was released, 65% of Americans were going to the cinema once a week. In 1945, 4.7 billion cinema tickets were sold in the USA (there were similar peaks across the cinema-going world). And cinema will change too. The forties brings new forms: the evolution of the movie melodrama produces the first films noirs and the ‘woman’s pictures’, the Western becomes the primary mode of expression for American individualism and self-reliance.
Racist and lame
And then there’s 1946’s top-grossing movie. So awkward, so compromised. Let’s whizz through the Song of the South situation.
We’re in Gone with the Wind territory, except we’re meant to understand the civil war is over. All these happy black people are free. Walt Disney felt it necessary to make a statement clarifying this after the picture came out. It seems remarkable that The Hays Office, literally the engine of Hollywood conservatism in this period, demanded changes to the script and asked Disney to put some language in the opening credits that would make it impossible for the audience to unwittingly place the events in the era of slavery (he didn’t do this).
There’s nothing woke about objections to Song of the South. The movie’s full of inexplicably dark, even distressing references and cues. In an animated sequence Br’er Fox sets a trap and it’s a literal noose strung from a tree. The tar-baby sequence is inexplicably awful. Some superficial effort was made to place the film after emancipation but it makes no difference - Disney’s movie is an inescapably antebellum artefact.
The film was controversial before it even came out - the NAACP objected to it while in production, the Rockefeller-funded American Council on Race Relations asked to see a treatment before shooting began (Disney refused). On release there was a sophisticated national campaign of protest and there were picket lines outside big-city cinemas all over the country. Protesters carried placards reading: “We want films on democracy not slavery”, which seems, if you ask me, like a pretty good mission statement for all of cinema. The cast defended it, though. Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Oscar, said “If I had for one moment considered any part of the picture degrading or harmful to my people I would not have appeared therein.”
Walt’s dysfunction
Walt Disney was a brilliant man - spontaneous and creative, often humane but also childlike, petulant and stubborn - with the prejudices of a fourteen year-old boy. I don’t want to dwell on this - it’s a boring truism - but Disney is what happens when you build a corporation around a single, brilliant, eccentric person and then give it a stock market listing. You’d think we’d understand this by now, of course, but we continue to revel in the ghastly, dysfunctional machines that these child-men make. It’s a social pathology of some kind. They can’t help it. We can’t help it. And now the future of humanity is in their hands, apparently.
Walt Disney’s charm, though, his redeeming feature, is that he wasn’t an entrepreneur or a money guy. He didn’t think in terms of business models or disruption or competition. He didn’t create an investment vehicle or an IP warehouse; he created a studio in which an army of artists and engineers created and refined a new form, essentially from scratch. But Song of the South was certainly Walt’s greatest misjudgement and a revealing glimpse of the real Walt. From the date of its release until the present day, the film’s been nothing but trouble. A public relations disaster and the only Disney artefact that’s not been preserved forever, updated and enhanced and extended for the digital catalogue.
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And get this: this disastrous project was a massive money-spinner - on release and in later decades. There’s something impressive about the sheer brass neck, the ‘fuck you’ way a joint-stock corporation will mechanically continue to squeeze a profit from even the most problematic products: Oxycontin, Volkswagen diesels, Sunny Delight. Song of the South is not on the Disney+ streaming service and can’t be found on a DVD or a Blu-Ray. It’s been stripped out of the theme parks and you’ll never see it in a cinema again (even its massive hit song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah has been removed from Disneyland parades and compilations). The masters are in a vault somewhere. But somehow Disney managed to release it three times after its first run - most recently in 1986, when it grossed almost $18M in cinemas. It’s an untouchable, pariah product, finally definitively cancelled by its owner - and it’s made tens of millions in profit for Disney since its release.
Song of the South’s combination of live action and animation turns out to have had an economic motivation. Disney had convinced himself that he could make his fabulously expensive animated artworks cheaper to produce by including some live action. For his brother Roy the money guy, though, adding animation was just a way to make a live action film more expensive. The end result has some genuinely beautiful moments of communion between the real and the imaginary. This isn’t the first hybrid live action-animation but we’re aware that the production logic of causing human actors to interact realistically with things that aren’t there is being invented before our eyes. The history of industrial-scale green-screen, motion capture and the rest begins here. Song of the South is another creative and production landmark for Walt Disney.
But the whole package is so compromised, so weirdly fragile and vulnerable to criticism and disdain, so thoughtlessly, stupidly lodged in the historical moment of slavery and racism and domination, it’s almost incomprehensible how it came to be made.
Read this post’s companion, about periodising the movies.
You won’t have to hunt down a pirate copy of Song of the South. It’s in the Internet Archive, in a version that claims to be a 4K restoration. I downloaded it and played it back on the Mighty LG.
I got the ‘racist and lame’ quote from Mark Greif’s terrific review of some Disney books in the LRB
Karina Longworth covered Song of the South on her podcast You Must Remember This.
There are hundeds of films that figure the American South as the wronged party, the flawed sibling or the awkward back-story. I’ve written here about the mother and father of Confederate revisionism The Birth of a Nation and the complicated apologia Gone With the Wind.
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's and here’s another top-grossing list. All the reviews are also on my Letterboxd.