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This article investigates the reasons behind Atlanta film censor Christine Smith's 1949 banning of Lost Boundaries (Alfred Werker) and her approval, with cuts, of Pinky (Elia Kazan), examining in particular the representations of segregation and integration in each film, the studio support behind the films, and the characterization of Pinky as a "woman's picture."
In 1949 a group of films explicitly addressing issues of race relations in the United States emerged from major and minor Hollywood studios. These films-Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, United Artists), Lost Boundaries (Film Classics, Inc.), Pinky (Twentieth Century-Fox), and Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, MGM)-made manifest the racial climate immediately following World War II, particularly the persistence of the legal codes and spatial practices of segregation. At the same time, the emergence of such films and their subsequent popularity signaled a growing opposition to the Jim Crow system on the part of many whites across the country, including those in charge at the Hollywood studios. The films, in hindsight, foreshadowed the rhetoric of the debates surrounding desegregation and race relations that would begin to explode in the 1950s. They also ultimately served to challenge the state and local systems of film censorship in place at the time.
This article focuses on two films from the 1949 group, Lost Boundaries and Pinky. More specifically, it investigates the reasons behind Atlanta film censor Christine Smith s banning of Lost Boundaries (a low budget, independently produced "semidocumentary") and her approval, with cuts, of Pinky (a costly, high profile studio production).1 Relying upon extensive primary materials, including Smith's reports to the supervisory Atlanta Library Board and accounts in newspapers, popular magazines, and trade publications from 1949 to 1952,1 examine how representations of segregation and integration within each picture, studio support (or lack thereof) behind each film, and the characterization of Pinky as a "woman's picture" and as the story of an individual (as opposed to a picture about an entire race) may have factored into Smiths rulings.
Through an examination of one censors decisions I seek to provide a textured analysis of the cultural work that these films and the conversations, debates, and court cases surrounding them performed within postwar American society. Americanist Margaret T. McGehee is a doctoral candidate...