Bette Davis Black and White

"From the 1930s to the 1960s, Bette Davis was not only Hollywood's brightest star but one of its most outspoken advocates on matters of race, promoting Black actors, joining Black political organizations, and taking on roles that highlighted the tragedy of American racism. In Bette Davis Black and White, Julia Stern explores this untold part of Davis's career. Stern also weaves into the book her own experience as a young viewer, telling the story of how she, a Jewish teenager in a white suburb, embraced Davis as her idol and learned from the Black performers in Davis's company. There was, for example, Ernest Anderson, whom Davis mentored and arranged to be cast opposite her in In This Our Life (1942), and who wrote a speech for his character that would become the signal expression of anti-racism in the movies of that decade. Stern discusses this and other Bette Davis films-notably The Little Foxes (1941), Jezebel (1938), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)-against the history of American race relations. In Stern's hands, Davis's egalitarian politics, and the original way in which she and her Black costars collaborated, offer a window into mid-century American racial fantasy and the efforts of Black performers to disrupt it. She incorporates testimony from Davis's Black fans, including James Baldwin and C.L.R. James, as well as the African Americans who wrote letters to Warner Brothers praising Davis's work. Stern also grapples with an episode-at once dismaying and illustrative of Davis's contradictions-in which the aging star donned blackface"--

About the author

Julia A. Stern is the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and professor of English at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel and Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Summary

Bette Davis’s career becomes a vehicle for a deep examination of American race relations.

Product details

• Authors: Professor Julia A Stern, Julia a Stern, Professor Julia A Stern
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2021
• EAN: 9780226813691
• ISBN: 978-0-226-81369-1
• No. of pages: 256
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; USA, Ethnic Studies, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, PERFORMING ARTS / Acting & Auditioning, Individual actors & performers, Biography: arts & entertainment, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Biography: arts and entertainment, Individual actors and performers, Black & Asian Studies, Film Theory & Criticism, HISTORY / African American & Black, Film history, theory or criticism, Relating to African American / Black American people