Song of the South (1947)

 

Good luck finding a copy of Song of the South to watch these days. It’s been unavailable in the United States for decades due to its patronizing and racist representations of African Americans, so your only choices are DVDs (or, worse, VHS tapes) from foreign countries. Thank heavens for that purchase a few years ago of a region-free Blu-Ray player. The film is an interesting mix of live action and animation, with the character of Uncle Remus (James Baskett, more on him later) telling some children the tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Brer Bear. Most of the original Uncle Remus stories were collected and published by Joel Chandler Harris, and they typically are interpreted as coded messages about how African Americans were at times able to subvert the white power structure of the late 19^th Century. Brer Rabbit, who is the real star of the movie, is a trickster figure, and you can’t help but admire his ingenuity and cleverness in getting out of some of the scrapes he finds himself in. Actually, the three animated sequences featuring Brer Rabbit are really the best part of the film. The rest of the movie is about a young white boy whose father leaves the boy and his mother with the maternal grandmother in Georgia during the Reconstruction Era. I mean, I believe it’s supposed to be the Reconstruction Era, but a lot of what happens seems like Georgia is still behaving like African Americans are enslaved. Johnny (played by Bobby Driscoll) tries to run away from his grandmother’s home after his father’s abandonment, but he meets Uncle Remus and gets to hear “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” while hearing the first tale about Brer Rabbit easily outwitting Brer Bear to escape a trap, so Johnny decides to stick around. The part of this sequence that includes Baskett’s rendition of the Oscar-winning song is quite charming by itself; it’s just couched inside a film that treats Uncle Remus and the other black characters as people without any agency on their own. Johnny does manage to have quite a few adventures while in Georgia. He befriends a young black boy, Toby (played by Glenn Leedy), and a poor white girl, Ginny (Luana Patten). He also makes enemies of Ginny’s two older brothers, who could charitably be described as white trash, particularly since their entire existence seems to involve trying to bully and harm other children and animals. When we first meet them onscreen, they’re planning to drown a dog because it’s the runt of the litter! However, Uncle Remus always manages to find just the right story to tell, such as the one about Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, so that Johnny can use what he learns from the tale in his own life. That means that Johnny is spending a lot of time away from the house and, of course, this doesn’t sit well with Johnny’s mother, who is played by the formidable Ruth Warrick from Citizen Kane and (much later) All My Children. She tells Remus that he cannot share any more stories, which prompts the old man to pack his stuff and leave for Atlanta. Then the most astonishing series of events happen: Johnny is hit by a bull while running after the wagon carrying Remus, and he’s only able to revive after Uncle Remus returns. It’s not his mother’s care or his father’s return or the doctor’s ministrations that do the trick; it’s the promise of more stories. Baskett became the first African American man ever to receive an Oscar, allegedly (although it’s a pretty well-accepted story now) after Walt Disney personally campaigned hard for Baskett to be honored. It’s just a shame that someone as talented as Baskett couldn’t have won for a better role in a better movie. Maybe it’s okay that the movie is difficult to watch in America nowadays and that the Disney organization is changing the old Splash Mountain ride that was inspired by Song of the South to something more, um, contemporary and not as steeped in historically racist narratives.

Oscar Wins: Best Original Song and Honorary Award to James Baskett “for his able and heart-warming characterization of Uncle Remus, friend and storyteller to the children of the world”

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Scoring of a Musical Picture