Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood Review

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(More customer reviews)I feel like I had never really seen a Hollywood picture before, now that I have read Donald Bogle's marvelous study of black life in Hollywood on and off screen. The other day for example I saw a inconsequential Fox comedy of the 1950s written by Nunnally Johnson, Oh Men, Oh Women, and in it a spoiled white heiress played by Barbara Rush refuses to exit a New York cab until the driver finds her the correct change. For the moment,the focus of the film is on the hassled driver, who has to contend with Miss Rush's airs, and also with the honks and screams of a dzoen other cabs jammed up behind him. Finally he lets her out for free and he absorbs the cost of his mistake. I didn't recognize the actor who played (briefly) the cabbie, then I waited for the credits. It was Joel Fluellen. A name which would have meant nothing to me, if I hadn't just finished reading Bogle. Joel Fluellen! The forgotten man of the movies dead, alas, too soon, and way before he could reveal his true sexuality.
This performance, brief as it was, is totally calibrated and brings an energy into a movie which sadly needs some! In a way this scene might be an allegory for Bogle's thesis, which is that, even if they were given insulting little to do, African American actors did it stunningly well and the shame of it is how very few of them managed to catch a break all the way to stardom. A few of them did: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier. Because the book basically breaks off circa 1960, we don't get to hear later success stories such as Will Smith or Denzel Washington. This book is all about forebears.
A few nights later I watched a picture of an earlier vintage, CRASH DIVE with Tyrone Power. Oddly for its time, the movie gives a fair amount of screen time to a black actor calkled Ben Carter. If you read BBBD, you will find out Carter's whole story, the way he parlayed his limited experience as a theatrical agent into representing some of Hollywood's biggest black names--and often enough stealing their parts from them, because he'd nab the script and secure the part first if he thought it worth his time!
If you've got one film book to read this year make it Donald Bogle. You'll find it an amazing intervention into a quickly disappearing history.

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