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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
We're in the last reels of a claustrophobically black-and-white world. The film: "Alice Adams," the director George Stevens's 1935 adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel. Determined to marry up, Alice (Katharine Hepburn) has invited a potential beau, the well-heeled Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), to her modest home for supper. Also present are Alice's parents, who appear to be as dingy as the worn paper that covers the walls of the Adamses' furniture-stuffed rooms.
Desperate to disguise--but how?--her straitened circumstances, Alice tries to dress everything up for Arthur's delectation. Perfuming her banal chatter with French phrases, Alice makes catty reference to the family's "domestique," Malena Burns (Hattie McDaniel), who performs her duties with a kind of narcotized deliberateness. Short and rotund, Malena has dark-black skin that gleams with Vaseline and malice. When Alice's father--whose starched shirtfront keeps popping open--disgraces himself by dropping a Brussels sprout on the dining-room table, Malena scoops it up with a big spoon and carts it away in an even larger pan.
Before her death, in 1952, at the age of fifty-nine, McDaniel played a hundred or so saucy maids, slaves, and cooks, but her Malena stands apart--even from the role of Mammy, in "Gone with the Wind" (1939), for which she won a best-supporting-actress Oscar. (McDaniel was the first black actress to be so recognized; Whoopi Goldberg, half a century later, was the next.) Malena, with no more than two lines of speech (unlike most blacks in the movies of the era, she says "the" instead of "de"), chewing gum, her maid's cap drooping, could just as well be one of the peasants at the start of Brecht's "The Caucasian Chalk Circle": a little caustic, if not downright sour, dreaming of the land. Malena warns Mrs. Adams that serving a hot meal on such a hot night won't do; when she announces dinner, it is in a rough, booming voice; she opens the rusty French doors separating the kitchen from the dining room with the force of a graceless military assault. And when, in the middle of the meal, Alice "rings" for Malena, she removes the plates while Mr. Adams is in mid-slurp.
Still, McDaniel wouldn't have taken kindly to the Brechtian comparison. A...
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