What a great read, thank you! This movie is specifically about passing, but I'm thinking about how most classic Hollywood POC actors were passing every time they were acting, either as white people or as other POC, because apparently all people of colour are interchangeable. It makes for a very jarring (if not infuriating) experience for non-white viewers, but I think it's always worth documenting it, so I really appreciated this post.
Thank you so much! I couldn't just leave the whole tangle of it, especially the interview with Mel Ferrer. Incidentally supporting your point, the first time I properly noticed him, he was playing the explicitly white third wheel to the interracial potential of Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens in The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959).
And I feel even more vindicated in considering "Oh look, x actor is playing his/her own ethnicity" as a valid, positive review of a movie!
Just because the first three times I saw Anthony Quinn he was Greek, Bedouin, and French . . .
no subject
Thank you so much! I couldn't just leave the whole tangle of it, especially the interview with Mel Ferrer. Incidentally supporting your point, the first time I properly noticed him, he was playing the explicitly white third wheel to the interracial potential of Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens in The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959).
And I feel even more vindicated in considering "Oh look, x actor is playing his/her own ethnicity" as a valid, positive review of a movie!
Just because the first three times I saw Anthony Quinn he was Greek, Bedouin, and French . . .