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In March of 1933, Columbia studios released So This Is Africa, a forgettable B-movie spoof of recent "jungle" films. Were it not for its trouble with the censors, the film would have left almost no record beyond a couple of reviews. But precisely because it came in for extensive censorship from both Hollywood's in-house watchdogs and state and local censors its story is worth recovering. That story demonstrates that, in the 1920s and 1930s, treatments of racial and sexual boundary-crossing found a curious home in movies - fictional and nonfictional, dramatic and comic - about "primitive" life.
The film's fate at the hands of the censors also reinforces what film historians have made clear in the last several decades: that censorship demanded the continual efforts of a wide range of interested parties and was never fully successful.1 Those efforts, moreover, were part of the much longer Kulturkampf, reaching back to the arrival of Catholic immigrants and the emergence of the penny press and the cheap variety stage in mid-nineteenth-century America.2 Protestants versus Catholics and Jews, small towns versus cities, traditionalists versus modernists, evangelicals versus "sporting" men - in a variety of guises, conflict over popular culture was endemic to a society that was at once capitalist, pluralist, and, however imperfectly, democratic. Entertainments that depicted the crossing of sexual and racial boundaries evoked especially intense outrage.3 At stake was power: to assert one's class and ethnic interests over those of others, to take symbolic control over public space, to defend gender and family norms against the disruptive and relativizing force of the marketplace. This long history helps to explain why so trivial a text as So This Is Africa aroused so exaggerated a reaction from those who saw themselves as custodians of public morality.
Fashioned by competent professionals - director Edward Cline and writer Norman Krasna - So This Is Africa was intended to make the sort of small profit deemed acceptable for a B-film by a second-rate studio (which is what Columbia was before Capra made It Happened One Night the runaway hit of 1934). The movie starred Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, whom Columbia had borrowed from RKO. Vaudeville comedians who made...