"Pinky" stars Jeanne Crain as a young black woman who has been passing for white but who returns to her hometown out of a sense of conflict about abandoning her heritage and her loving grandmother (played by Ethel Waters). If you're concerned about how cringe-inducing a movie from 1949 trying to tackle subject matter this prickly might be, don't worry. We're in the hands of Elia Kazan, so even if the treatment might feel dated today, it's still nowhere nearly as maudlin as it might have been in the hands of a director with less confidence.
I'm not generally a big Jeanne Crain fan, but she's pretty good in this. It requires a herculean suspension of disbelief to accept her as a black woman, even as one who's supposed to strongly resemble a white woman. But if you can get past that, the story itself, and the way the film decides to handle the situations a woman stuck between two cultures might face, is presented well. Ethel Barrymore plays a Southern dowager living in a decaying plantation, and much of the film's conflict arises from Pinky's relationship with her. She associates Barrymore's character, and what she represents, with slavery and oppression of black people, while Pinky's grandmother tries to make her see the old lady as a person who's done a lot of good and should be considered separately from the institution she's a part of and has largely helped to build. This is a conundrum that still exists when discussing the issue of racism today -- racism as it's exercised by individuals and racism as it exists as an institution many times feel like two different things altogether, and it's hard for someone who wants to try hard not to be part of the problem to know how and when to draw a line between the two. So while "Pinky" perhaps lets its white characters off the hook a little to easily by modern day standards, it still deserves credit for being pretty ahead of its time.
Crain received the only Oscar nomination of her career as Best Actress, while both Ethels were nominated in the Supporting Actress category. Waters is good, but it's Barrymore who commands the screen. No one did irascible battle axe better than her, and it's a tribute to her that in not much screen time she turns this grand dame into a complex character with several facets rather than a caricature inserted only to service the plot of the film.
Grade: A-
I'm not generally a big Jeanne Crain fan, but she's pretty good in this. It requires a herculean suspension of disbelief to accept her as a black woman, even as one who's supposed to strongly resemble a white woman. But if you can get past that, the story itself, and the way the film decides to handle the situations a woman stuck between two cultures might face, is presented well. Ethel Barrymore plays a Southern dowager living in a decaying plantation, and much of the film's conflict arises from Pinky's relationship with her. She associates Barrymore's character, and what she represents, with slavery and oppression of black people, while Pinky's grandmother tries to make her see the old lady as a person who's done a lot of good and should be considered separately from the institution she's a part of and has largely helped to build. This is a conundrum that still exists when discussing the issue of racism today -- racism as it's exercised by individuals and racism as it exists as an institution many times feel like two different things altogether, and it's hard for someone who wants to try hard not to be part of the problem to know how and when to draw a line between the two. So while "Pinky" perhaps lets its white characters off the hook a little to easily by modern day standards, it still deserves credit for being pretty ahead of its time.
Crain received the only Oscar nomination of her career as Best Actress, while both Ethels were nominated in the Supporting Actress category. Waters is good, but it's Barrymore who commands the screen. No one did irascible battle axe better than her, and it's a tribute to her that in not much screen time she turns this grand dame into a complex character with several facets rather than a caricature inserted only to service the plot of the film.
Grade: A-