Thursday, January 26, 2012 / 6:00 am

This Job Is a Solid Killer

African Americans in wartime, as depicted on stage and screen and in the funny papers.

by Gary Phillips

Tags: race | Red Tails | movies | stage | comics

This past weekend I was watching the big budget Captain America: The First Avenger on our newish flat screen TV. Set in World War II, I’d seen it in its 3D glory at the cineplex last year, but enjoyed the movie so much I rented it on DVD. For years we’d had this Sony Trinatronic. That much used machine finally gave up the ghost a few months ago, and a trip to the Best Buy in Culver City yielded the bad boy we got now, a Samsung LCD 40-incher. Not only does it deliver a bigger, crisper picture, it’s less than half the weight of the Sony, reminding me just how far we’ve advanced technology-wise.

This matter of advancement or lack thereof hit me again as I was digging on the Cap film. There’s a scene where he liberates a labor death camp the dastardly uber Nazi Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull, is running to build his super weapon to wipe out not only the allies but Germany too in his quest for world domination. Cause you know, super-villains like him, Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom are about having it all or it ain’t worth having. Cap kicks ass and frees a grouping of captured soldiers—soldiers who just happen to be the rainbow round-up representation of our fighting forces.

There’s the Irish-American Corporal Timothy Aloysius Cadwallader “Dum Dum” Dugan, African American Gabe Jones, Japanese-American Jim Morita, Cap’s childhood buddy Sergeant James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (in the comics, Bucky was his costumed teenage sidekick—though he is now the grown Winter Soldier, but I’ll stop there before I geek out and go into this history), an Italian Bruno Ricci and a British dude, James Montgomery Falsworth. These guys are a reconning of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, another comic book series, like Cap, from Marvel Comics. Premiering in the ’60s, created by WWII vets Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, two nice Jewish boys from the lower east side (and Captain America was created by Kirby and Joe Simon), the Commandos had Gabe, Dum Dum, Izzy Cohen, Dino Martelli, Rebel Ralston, and a couple of other dogfaces, commanded by the cigar chomping, unshaven, one-eyed Sergeant Nick Fury, an Irish lad from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. There was no Asian squad member. Yet not only were they PC before such a phrase had been coined, it was a fantasy representation of an Army, like all of the services then, that in reality adhered to the vagaries of Jim Crow.

A murder mystery steeped in racial dynamics and set during WWII at Fort Neal in Louisiana, there’s a telling scene in the film version of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, A Soldier Play. Filmed as A Soldier’s Story, no words are needed when African American lawyer Captain Richard Davenport, sent to investigate the killing of the abusive, self-hating black Master Sergeant Vernon Waters, is about to bed down for the night. He opens the door to an empty barracks and just stands there, stoically staring for a few seconds. He’s an officer, so he’s not supposed to bunk with the enlisted men, an all-black squad, but he can’t be in the whites only officers’ barracks either.

Because of the racist policies of the then War Department, condoned by FDR’s administration, the GIs in A Soldier’s Story don’t see combat. They play baseball with other teams from other camps and maintain smoke making machines. In Red Tails, a big screen treatment of the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen story out now, these fighter pilots also initially aren’t sent into combat.  They are stationed at a segregated portion of an air base in the coastal town of Ramitelli, Italy but maintain rear guard action. One of them even jokes about the several German convoy trucks and jeeps he’s blown up, strafing them from the sky. In some ways this film is an extension and retconning of the HBO cable offering, The Tuskegee Airmen from 1995. Cuba Gooding, Jr., who lately along with Van Damme has become the straight-to-DVD action hero, is in both flicks. In the TV version he helps his buddy Hannibal Lee (Lawrence Fishburn) sink a battleship and dies for his heroic efforts. In the new film, he’s the seasoned pipe smoking Major Emmanuel Stance who must stoically watch his men go up in the air and maybe not return. The sinking of the battleship in Red Tails is left to hotshot air ace Lt. Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo) whose buddy is the squad’s leader, Captain Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker)—a riff possibly on Captain Easy, a white soldier of fortune character created by cartoonist Roy Crane which ran for many years in the comic strips.

I admire the fact Red Tails executive producer George Lucas kept at making his passion project for some 23 years. As he prophesized to Jon Stewart a few weeks ago on The Daily Show, if this film doesn’t make money, he might well have set black filmmaking back years. He talked about how the studios didn’t want to gamble on an essentially all-black cast, their cover being there’s no foreign receipts to be had with those kind of films. If Red Tails tanks, then the suits in Hollywood can say, “See, I told you.”

To be sure Red Tails (the title comes from coloring the tails of their planes this color) suffers from who knows how many screenplays were written over the years and I imagine various elements from those various scripts were rolled into what became the shooting script. Lucas mentioned he’d written one, and over time I recall hearing about this or that writer or director attached to the project until we get to John Ridley and Boondocks creator-cartoonist Aaron McGruder getting the writing credit.

Various war film clichés are shoehorned into the film, including a tunnel escape from a stalag; the village girl in love with the brave reckless pilot; the ice water in his veins Luftwaffe nemesis; and a self-doubting, hard drinking, though oddly, never drunk, commanding officer. Matters aren’t helped by an overabundance of speechifying (cue soaring music) and ham-fisted, expository dialogue. But hey, Avatar was hobbled similarly yet it made big bucks and Red Tails does have some damn fine air combat scenes—like toward the end when their P-51 prop job Mustangs face down German 262 jets—and sure the characters are “types,” but types we know and love.

I have an affection for the Tuskegee airmen because my mother’s brother, Lt. Oscar D. Hutton, Jr, was one. I never knew him as he was killed in air combat over Memmingen, Germany on an escort bomber mission in July of 1944. I have the Purple Heart awarded him posthumously. There was also started during the war a comic strip written and drawn by the left-winger Ollie Harrington called Jive Gray.

Gray was a 333nder and after the war, this dusky Steve Canyon got involved in various adventures to right wrongs. Though Gray dealt with his share of invisible death rays, sultry female Russian colonels and Fifth Columnists plotting coups, being black afforded the air ace some distinctly different encounters than Canyon – like the time a mob of whites were out to lynch him. Jive Gray ran off and on from 1943 to 1951 in the black weekly Pittsburgh Courier (the paper during WWII was part of the Double V campaign, victory at home and victory overseas), and, apparently, also ran in other black newspapers at times.

In his The Big Picture column this past Monday in the L.A. Times, Patrick Goldstein lamented that Hollywood when it does take a chance on making black films, too often mines the past rather than tackle current material. But it’s not like there’s any lack of great stories for more black period pieces. Where’s the film or mini-series about the 761st all-black tank battalion, the Black Panthers, under General George Patton ? A man who initially wrote of that outfit, “…I have no faith in the inherent fighting ability of the race.” And what about the amazing story of Medal of Honor winner Sgt. Eddie Carter, half black and half-East Indian, son of missionaries who not only fought bravely with the anti-fascist Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain and the U.S. Army in WWII, but before he was 18, spoke Mandarin and fought with Chiang Kai-shek’s army? Or how many years has filmmaker Euzhan Palcy (A Dry White Season) been trying to get the Bessie Coleman story made, a biopic about one of the first black woman aviators? Let alone the reality that the men who flew with the 332nd, some with several confirmed kills, could not get hired as civilian pilots after the war.

Despite all its shortcomings, I hope Red Tails does decent box office.  The previous big screen WWII flick with a black cast, well, hell, only the second such film until Red Tails, 2008’s The Miracle at St. Anna (wherein Derek Luke who plays Gabe Jones in the Captain America film had a central role) from the book by James McBride and directed by Spike Lee, didn’t do boffo box office.  Critics blasted it for various reasons but I actually thought it was a pretty good flick, certainly better dialogue and the dynamics between the principals more compellingly defined than in the current movie in question.  How interesting too that Mr. Lee has managed to get folks wound up again on his latest, but certainly not for the first time, blast that Hollywood doesn’t know anything about black people when he screened his latest at Sundance.

Yet black or white, studio or indie, the cold reality is no one in the position to produce such fare is going to take a chance on exploring the past or doing a contemporary piece if there’s little chance of a return—that hopefully Lucas’ prediction doesn’t come true.  For as Jive Gray once opined in his strip about a new fangled jet he was flying, and apropos of the work it takes to get so-called non-mainstream stories made, “This job is a solid killer!”

Jive Gray

Red Tails - the last cigarette

Comments

Enter a Comment