Hollywood and race--again

Well, the world managed to survive the 88^th Annual Oscars.  Some white people won awards, and there was no looting in Watts, Harlem, or even Beverly Hills.  Congratulations.

I thought host Chris Rock, who I didn’t think much of after his first stint as host, did a masterful job of acknowledging the unfairness of the situation, while pointing out the hypocrisy of some of the attackers (yeah, Will Smith didn’t deserve what they paid him for Wild Wild West).  My favorite argument by the OscarSoWhite crowd was that a Black actor hasn’t won an Oscar in TWO YEARS!  My God, how long must this suffering go on?

But I want to talk about another aspect of the whole Hollywood and race issue raised by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight.  The show presented a piece on the many times Hollywood cast a White actor in a non-Caucasian role.  Of course, many of the examples given are ridiculous, egregious examples of ludicrously bad casting.  Mickey Rooney as a Japanese in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is possibly the low point in stereotypical characterization of a race.  Bad Hollywood!  Bad, bad boy!

But while I can see where in this day and age it is irresponsible to cast a White person as anything other than a Caucasian, I’m not sure all the examples given in the piece linked to are valid.  I can’t get worked up over Lawrence Olivier, then the world’s greatest actor, doing Othello in blackface.  It’s not like Shakespeare intended the role to be played by Black actors, any more than he intended that Juliet or Ophelia be played by women.  Othello wasn’t played by a Black actor in the Old Vic until David Harewood did it in the 1990’s.

I also can’t get upset by German Peter Lorre playing Japanese Mr. Moto, with the result being as good as it is.  Or Alec Guinness playing an Arab leader in Lawrence of Arabia, or Peter Sellers as an Indian, or Anthony Quinn playing a Mexican, a Greek, an Arab, or whatever.  These are examples of great actors showing range. They are giving a performance that fully evokes a character, not displaying a stereotype.

For many years in Hollywood ethnic actors simply weren’t available.  Were there any actors in 1930’s Hollywood of Japanese heritage to play Mr. Moto?  Or Chinese ancestry to play Charlie Chan?  When the BBC was producing all of Shakespeare’s work in the 1980’s, they hired Welshman Anthony Hopkins to play Othello as a light skinned Egyptian.  Their justification was that in the British Isles at the time there was not a Black actor with the reputation or gravitas to play the role.  How hard did they look?  I don’t know, but maybe they had a point.

This leads to a slippery slope.  There were some protests when John Cho was cast as Sulu in the Star Trek movie; Cho is Korean, Sulu is Japanese.  Luckily the original actor, George Takai, gave the casting his blessing.  I read that a project to film a Tony Hillerman novel with Graham Greene as Leaphorn and Lou Diamond Phillips as Chee (as a fan of the novel, let me say that is perfect casting) was scuttled because of protests that Greene and Phillips were Native Americans, but from the wrong tribes.

Also, how do you deal with characters that are half this but half that?  There was a controversy when Miss Saigon came to Broadway from London as the union insisted that the role of The Engineer, described as half Vietnamese and half White, be played by an Asian actor and not Jonathan Pryce.  Pryce argued that since the character was half White, why couldn’t a White actor play it?  Pryce was allowed to play the role and won a Tony for Best Actor in a Musical.

Let me point out one silly thing about the video I linked to above; they condemn Caucasian Linda Hunt for playing Asian Billy Kwan; they completely overlook the fact that FEMALE Linda Hunt was playing a MAN!  It’s okay for a woman to play a man, but not for a Caucasian to play an Asian?  I’m a little confused.

The practice of “Whitewashing” ethnic roles has been reduced in recent years.  One film that was largely undone by race issues was Cloud Atlas, which had actors or all races playing other races in different time periods.  While Halle Berry made a lovely Jewess, the Asian actress being passed off as a Southern belle was less convincing, and neither were the White actors playing Asians.  The Usual Suspects got away with casting Pete Postlethwaite as an Asian, but only because (Spoiler!) it was a figment of someone’s imagination.

Yes, if the TV series Kung Fu were revived today, I doubt if they would cast a 6-foot-tall Caucasian in the lead role (I always loved how characters always immediately identified Kwai Chang Caine as Chinese when he didn’t look the least bit Asian, with apologies to the make-up department).  But looking back in history, we should cut Hollywood some slack.  Cubby-holing actors into only playing the race they were born into is limiting.  As long as the actor was good and they approached the role with respect, let’s evaluate each performance on its own merits.