“Song of the South”: A Suppressed Masterpiece (Walt Disney Pictures, RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday night, my husband Charles and I capped an all too rare day off together by watching a couple of movies I’d got on DVD from a grey-label source, including one I’d been mildly curious about for years but hadn’t worked that hard to find until it was literally suppressed for political reasons by the company that had made it. The film was Song of the South, an adaptation of white 19th century Southern writer Joel Chandler Harris’s Br’er Rabbit stories. It turned out to be one of the most remarkable movies ever made, a quiet, slow-moving pastoral about an agrarian community in rural Georgia and the role of culture – particularly African-American culture – in shaping the experiences of its children as they cope with dysfunctional families, bullying and the usual problems of growing up.

Even before I actually watched Song of the South, my curiosity about it had been piqued by the sheer venom of the campaign against it and the success it had in getting the current management of the Walt Disney Studios, which originally made the film and still holds the copyright, to withdraw it from circulation permanently. Much of the criticism of the Br’er Rabbit stories has centered around the appropriation of Black folk tales – particularly the narratives Joel Chandler Harris collected from stories he heard working on a Southern plantation as a teenager and interacting with its slaves – by a white author, and the romanticized, paternalistic gloss the film’s portrayal of Uncle Remus (James Baskett), narrator of the tales in both Harris’s book and Disney’s film, gives towards the relations between white and Black Southerners both during and after slavery.

The criticisms are not new. H. L. Mencken, neither a Black author nor a particularly liberal white one, savaged Harris thusly: “Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local Blacks — that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of Black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank.” More recently, Black writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have also criticized Harris in equally vehement terms; Walker accused Harris of “stealing a good part of my heritage” and Morrison wrote a book of her own called Tar Baby, after one of the most famous Br’er Rabbit stories (which is dramatized in Song of the South), but claimed she had heard it from her relatives and not from a white author.

Other Black authors have been kinder to Harris and his work. Black novelist Ralph Ellison said, “Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations.” Julius Lester, Black writer, literary critic and folksinger, rewrote several of Harris’s tales to heighten the subversive, anti-authoritarian elements of them. He wrote, “There are no inaccuracies in Harris’s characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930’s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold.”

I’m not sure what I expected to see when Charles and I sat down together to watch Song of the South. But about 20 minutes into the movie, as I was drawn in by its spell – by the sureness of its writing and direction, the glowing photography, the seamless mixture of live action and animation (something Walt Disney had been trying for since the 1920’s) and the surprisingly respectful, if somewhat paternalistic, treatment of African-American folkways and culture, I found myself wondering, “What’s wrong with this movie that has made so many people whose politics I otherwise agree with want to consign it to oblivion?” Though Song of the South has its problematic aspects – and not all of them have to do with race – it is on the whole a marvelous film, and its suppression is quite literally a crime against culture.

Song of the South begins on a plantation in rural Georgia. John (Erik Rolf) and Sally (Ruth Warrick, who played the first Mrs. Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane) bring their son Johnny (Bobby Driscoll) to stay on the plantation with Sally’s mother (Lucile Watson). John wants to seek his fortune in Atlanta while Sally wants to stay in the country and live with her mom and her son. Johnny hates the staid, excessively formal life of the plantation and threatens to run away from home. But he’s talked out of doing so by Uncle Remus (James Baskett), who spins his Br’er Rabbit folktales with the moral lesson of keeping Johnny at home. The tales, dramatized by Disney animation at close to its virtuosic peak, tell how Br’er Rabbit outwitted the ceaseless attempts of the villain, Br’er Fox, to capture and eat him, while the simple-minded Br’er Bear is sometimes on Br’er Rabbit’s side and sometimes against him.

Counterpointed to the cartoon tales of Br’er Rabbit and Harris’s other characters is a real-life intrigue in which Johnny befriends Ginny (Luana Patten), the third child (and only daughter) of a local poor-white farm family. Johnny gives Ginny an elaborate lace collar his grandmother gave him, saying his aunt had made it especially for him as part of his formal Little Lord Fauntleroy-style short-pantsed black outfit. In return Ginny gives Johnny a puppy, which he turns over to Uncle Remus because mom doesn’t want him to have a dog. Johnny is bullied by Ginny’s brothers, who demand he give back the dog even though they just intend to drown it.

There are a lot of ambiguities in Song of the South. For one thing, it’s not at all clear just when it takes place – though my guess is the 1880’s, after the so-called “Redeemer” Southern state governments had taken power, ended the relative freedom and equality of African-Americans during Reconstruction, and proclaimed a “New South” based on white supremacy and a docile work force of white proletarians and Black domestics suitable for exploitation by Northern capitalists. When he wasn’t writing fiction, Joel Chandler Harris – under the name “Joe Harris” – was an associate editor of the Atlanta Constitution and protégé of its editor, Henry W. Grady, who used both his paper and his lectures to proclaim the gospel of the “New South.”

It’s also unclear just who Uncle Remus is and how he makes his living. My guess was that he was a former slave on the plantation who had been allowed to retire, stay on after Emancipation, do whatever odd jobs he could but otherwise live a quiet, dignified life. The only character in the movie who accuses him of loafing is the Black domestic Aunt Tempy (Hattie McDaniel, playing the same “Mammy” role she had in Gone With the Wind and innumerable other films), who challenges him to pull his own weight instead of loafing around and telling stories.

What is clear is that the film depicts Black culture as rich, detailed and just plain more fun than white culture. In an early scene Johnny is drawn to a group of Blacks holding a picnic outdoors and singing the song “Uncle Remus Said” (a song I’ve known for years from the cover by the white swing bandleader Woody Herman, with a light-hearted vocal by Herman himself). The sound of the music draws Johnny and presents Uncle Remus as a sort of benign version of the Pied Piper, about to give Johnny a far richer emotional and cultural life than anything he could get from his family or the other white characters. Later in the movie Johnny is shown missing the birthday party his mom and grandma throw for him to hang out with his Black friends, and while the filmmakers missed an opportunity by not showing the party he bails on, it’s clear that the Black characters give Johnny a rich emotional sustenance he doesn’t get from the white ones.

My husband criticized Song of the South for not giving any of the Black characters “agency.” He’s right if he means that none of them are allowed to pursue agendas of their own – they seem to exist more to make the whites in the movie comfortable and happy than to do anything in their own right – but that’s not uncommon in the way movies portray white servants, too. What the film does do is give James Baskett the chance to deliver one of the most emotionally varied performances any African-American had given in a movie to that point. His essential dignity and sureness of purpose, the joie de vivre he shows when he tells his Br’er Rabbit tales, his pride in the way he’s become an intellectual and emotional guardian to a boy bereft of positive influences from his actual family, and the hurt when he’s told that he may no longer see Johnny or be part of his life, are all brilliantly realized and portrayed by Baskett’s performance even in a committee-written script. Almost no African-American in previous Hollywood films had been able to depict such a range of emotions on screen.

True, Paul Robeson had portrayed the title role in Dudley Murphy’s film of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones in 1933 – but that was an independent production filmed in New York and it still cast Robeson as a villain, albeit a multidimensional and fascinating one. The only other examples I can think of in which a film prior to Song of the South has emotionally complex portrayals of African-Americans are the performances from Hattie McDaniel and Ernest Anderson as a mother and son in the 1942 film In This Our Life. Anderson is working in a law office and trying to work himself up from America’s racial caste system – when he’s picked as a fall guy for a murder actually committed by the character played by the film’s star, Bette Davis. It’s a terrible movie and reflects the disinterest of its director, John Huston, in making a “women’s picture” – but Huston, who was anti-racist long before anti-racism was cool, grabbed hold of this aspect of the story and did justice to the oppression of the Black characters and the sense they had they would never be allowed to rise above the servant class no matter how hard they worked.

Song of the South is certainly a film of its time, not only due to the racial aspects of the story but also the rich bath of sentimentality in which its makers submerge it. This was part of the Walt Disney style and reflected in just about everything the studio produced when Disney himself was alive – and even for decades after that, when according to various accounts studio executives were still making decisions based on “WWWD” – “What Would Walt Do?” And I suspect Disney’s decision to film the Br’er Rabbit stories was based partly on his desire to keep up with the competition. In the 1940’s Warner Bros.’ animation department had developed a sensationally popular rabbit character named Bugs Bunny, who was streetwise and cunning whereas Mickey Mouse had been innocent and naïve. Through some of the animated scenes in Song of the South it seems like Walt Disney was trying to keep up by remodeling Br’er Rabbit into his studio’s own Bugs Bunny.

Certainly Walt Disney was the auteur of Song of the South, as he was of all the films his studio produced. The committee-made nature of this film and the extent to which its creative personnel were merely executors of Disney’s vision comes through in the separate credits for the live-action and animated sequences (director Harve Foster and writers Dalton S. Raymond, Morton Grant and Maurice Rapf for the live action, director Wilfred Jackson and writers Bill Peed, Ralph Wright and Vernon Stallings for the animation). But the legendary Gregg Toland receives sole credit as cinematographer, in what I believe was one of only three times he worked in color (the others were the Danny Kaye vehicles The Kid from Brooklyn and A Song Is Born), and Toland’s talents are shown by the sheer glow he gives the live-action scenes and the film’s rich rendition of the Black characters’ skin tones.

It’s possible to read Song of the South as a paternalistic patronization and appropriation of Black culture by white artists. But it’s also possible to read it the way I do: as a loving tribute to the power and beauty of indigenous Black culture and the way it frees white people from the inhibitions of their own formalities. Its stories – both the Br’er Rabbit tales themselves and the framing story Disney’s writers created around them – are told with a refreshing directness and honesty that even the usual overlay of Disney sentimentality can’t compromise. Song of the South is a hauntingly lovely film, and unless you’re such a thoroughgoing Black nationalist you think only Black people can tell Black stories, you should be able to respond to its integrity and beauty as a work of art. Films with far less nuanced and more patronizing depictions of African-American characters are still being shown today; why, one wonders, is something as moving and heartwarming as Song of the South to be denied to current and future moviegoers?