Classic Films in Context: “Pinky” 1949

In 1947, producer Darryl F. Zanuck tackled the subject of anti-semitism with Gentlemen’s Agreement. The movie, directed by Elia Kazan, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year. In 1949, Zanuck produced the first Hollywood film to address racial prejudice. The movie was Pinky. When viewed today, it seems dated and filled with stereotypes, but for its time, it was groundbreaking cinema.

Made when Jim Crow laws ruled the South, Pinky tells the tale of a young, light-skinned black women who passes for white. Patricia “Pinky” Johnson (Jeanne Crain) leaves her home in Mississippi to be educated as a nurse up North. On the train ride to college, the ticket-taker assumes she is white and she doesn’t correct him. So begins her deception. While in nursing school, she meets a young doctor (William Lundigan) who falls in love with her. Fearing her secret will be discovered, she returns home to the grandmother who raised her. Up North she was treated with dignity and respect. Down South, she’s treated with cruelty and suspicion. Dicey Johnson (Ethel Waters), Pinky’s illiterate grandmother, worked as a laundress to send Pinky to nursing school. She hoped her granddaughter would return home and help her own people. But Pinky wants no part of this. She’s had a taste of a better life.

Jeanne Crain and Ethel Waters

Reportedly Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge campaigned for the lead. It’s hard to know if Zanuck seriously considered either of these actresses (Linda Darnell also wanted the role). One can only imagine how the audience would have reacted to seeing a black actress holding hands with a white man, let alone kissing him. There is a telling scene towards the end of the film. Pinky is in the midst of a court battle. She’s trying to hold onto property willed to her by Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore), an elderly white woman who became fond of Pinky, while in her care. In the packed courtroom, Pinky’s white boyfriend touches her. As he does this, she stops in her tracks, a look of terror on her face. Viewers today might not understand that in the deep South of the 1940s, that slight physical contact was enough to get the two of them lynched.

Zanuck was criticized for casting Crain, a white actress as Pinky, but he was convinced that audiences would identify with Crain. Zanuck hypothesized that they would experience racial prejudice through Crain’s characterization. Apparently, Zanuck was correct. In Bosley Crowther’s September 30, 1949 review of the film in The New York Times, the sometimes-acerbic critic said, “By giving a winning personality to the much-abused girl Jeanne Crain successfully channels resentment against these bitter experiences to you.”

A pivotal scene between Crain and Ethel Barrymore

Besides the film’s focus on the evils of racism, it has a universal appeal. There is an underlying theme that you need to be true to yourself, something that Pinky’s character struggles with throughout the film. She could have had an easier life if she married her doctor boyfriend, moved up North, and never revealed her background (which was his plan for the two of them). When she finally embraces the fact that she is black, she is truly free. She establishes “Miss Em’s Clinic and Nursery School,” on the property the old woman left her, thus fulfilling the dreams of her grandmother.

Pinky was a huge box office success, one of the biggest of the year in fact. All three actresses received Academy Award nominations. Crain was nominated in the Best Actress in a Leading Role category, while Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters competed against each other in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category. All three were shutout. Crain lost to Olivia de Haviland (The Heiress), Ethels Barrymore and Waters lost to Mercedes McCambridge (All The King’s Men).

Pinky, not that well remembered, even by classic movie fans, proved that a movie tackling a subject like racism could be a commercial success. The 1950s would produce a flood of “message” pictures like No Way Out (1950) and The Defiant Ones (1958), but if it weren’t for Pinky, those films might never have been made.

Becoming Grace Kelly

Everyone knows the name Grace Kelly (1929-1982). But do they know the person behind that name? Is she the glamorous movie star who took the mid-1950s by storm and then gave it all up to marry a prince? Or is she the shy girl, who did not quite fit in with the athletic and outgoing Kelly clan?

Quiet Grace

Grace Patricia Kelly is all of the above. The third of four children, Grace was quiet and solitary in contrast to her older sister, Peggy, older brother John, and younger sister Lizanne. How she became a movie icon is a Hollywood story if ever there was one, but it’s also about timing. If there weren’t a Grace Kelly in the mid-1950s, we would have had to invent her.

New girl in town

Kelly was part of a new crop of female movie stars, a crop that also included Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, groomed during the waning days of the old studio system. She signed a seven-year contract with MGM, but they didn’t seem to know what to do with her. Her best movie roles came by way of other studios on loan outs.

Mogambo (1953), was her biggest role at this point in her career. She played opposite two undisputed superstars: Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. But she almost didn’t get that role. Gene Tierney (who starred with Gable in Never Let Me Go that same year) was director John Ford’s (and MGM’s) first choice. Due to her developing mental illness, Tierney had to drop out. It was then that Kelly was given the role of the unfaithful wife who falls for Gable’s character, but loses him in the end. For this role, Kelly received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. But even with the nomination, Kelly’s stardom wasn’t a sure thing.

The New York Times’s movie critic, Bosley Crowther gave a rather lukewarm review of Mogambo, waiting until the very last paragraph (first sentence of a two-sentence paragraph at that) to even mention Kelly. That was all about to change; the public and Crowther would soon take notice.

Kelly gets noticed

In 1953, Alfred Hitchcock was searching for a female lead for a film he was directing at Warner Bros., Dial M for Murder. While looking for an actress to cast, he reviewed an old screen test Kelly had done at Twentieth Century Fox and watched Mogambo. While Hitchcock thought Kelly was stiff, if not a bit wooden, he saw that she had potential. Almost immediately, the master of suspense started to mold Kelly into the prototypical cool Hitchcock blond. When Dial M for Murder was released, the reviews were good, some even thinking it better than the stage play upon which it was based. This time, Crowther mentioned Kelly in the sixth paragraph (out of seven) of his review saying, “Grace Kelly does a nice job of acting the wife's bewilderment, terror and grief.” From the likes of Crowther, that was absolutely glowing praise.

Edie Doyle or Lisa Fremont?

Almost on the back of filming Dial M for Murder, Hitchcock requested Kelly’s services again for Rear Window. At the time the role of Lisa Carol Fremont was offered to her, Kelly was considering the role of Edie Doyle for On the Waterfront,the role that eventually went to Eva Marie Saint. Kelly loved the Rear Window script and decided she'd rather portray a model from Manhattan than a middle-class girl from New Jersey. She could not have imagined how fortuitous a choice that would be.

Careful collaborations
Once again, Hitchcock took complete control of Kelly’s image and introduced her to screenwriter, John Michael Hayes. As Hayes would state in an interview before his death in 2008, Hitchcock asked him to get to know Kelly and study her speech patterns. Hayes was instructed to write dialogue that would seem natural coming out of Kelly’s mouth. Hitchcock thought (and rightly so) that if Kelly collaborated with Hayes on some of her dialogue, her characterization would avoid the stiffness of some of her earlier roles. The fact that Hayes’s wife was a former model made him the perfect person to write for Kelly.

Another person Hitchcock introduced to Kelly was renowned costume designer Edith Head. Under Hitchcock’s direction, Head went to work on creating a wardrobe that would be true to Kelly’s character as well as showcase her incredible beauty. With Kelly, Head had a clean canvas upon which she could create a look that was stylish, chic, and deceptively simple in design.

When Rear Window opened at the Rivoli in August of 1954, 2,000 people attended the premier, a benefit for the American-Korean Foundation. It was an immediate commercial and critical success and people took notice of Grace Kelly in what would become an iconic role for the then 25-year-old actress.

Five movies in one year!

In 1954, moviegoers couldn’t avoid Grace Kelly. That year, she had no fewer than five films in release: Dial M for Murder (May), Rear Window (August), The Country Girl, The Bridges at Toko-ri, and Green Fire (December). For her performance in The Country Girl, she was awarded the Best Actress Academy Award for 1955. The competition was unusually stiff that year, with Kelly besting Dorothy Dandridge (Carmen Jones), Jane Wyman (Magnificent Obsession), Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina), and Judy Garland (A Star is Born). Garland was the sentimental and the odds-on favorite, so Kelly’s win was a bit of a shock to many. Supposedly, six votes separated the two stars.

A star is born and then she's gone

As quickly as Kelly’s star rose, so did her departure from Hollywood. She would have one film released in 1955, To Catch a Thief, again working with Hitchcock and Edith Head. In 1956, she would have two films in release, The Swan and High Society, which would be her last. On April 19, 1956, Kelly wed Prince Rainier of Monaco. Rumors of a comeback never materialized. Grace Kelly remained Princess Grace of Monaco until her traffic death in a car accident on September 14, 1982. She was 52 years old.