I copied out the part of yesterday's blog that dealt with "The Emperor Jones" and posted it to the silent movie list this morning. I know it's not a silent movie, but the list does also deal with early talkies, Paul Robeson was actor in silents (including the lead role in Oscar Micheaux' notorious 1925 feature "Body and Soul") and the alt.movies.silent group are among the most avid consumers of TCM. Anyway, I got an interesting response - permission was not given to repreduce it here, so the respondant will remain anonymous:
I had written:
> although if made today they couldn't get away with using the
> "n-word" as often as it is heard
the respondant wrote:
>Yikes! My ears were burning by the end of the film last night and I'm
>not easily off by stuff like that. Small wonder Robeson asked to be
>excused from using the "n-word" three years later in the Universal
>SHOW BOAT when he apparently had little problem with the 1928 London
>and 1932 NY stage productions.
>Liked KING SOLOMON'S MINE as well and look forward to running my tapes
>of JERICHO and, especially SONG OF FREEDOM (Elisabeth Welch!)
Er, um - yeah. They showed those too, but I didn't get 'em. (Sound of Uncle Dave kicking himself for missing Elisabeth Welch.)
However I'm not likely to miss Alfred Hitchcock's "Blackmail" (1929) which starts on TCM at 2am this morning ET. I'll be in bed at that time, but that's what VHS tape is for (or "was" for. I still got some though.)
This morning I was amazingly productive. Before 8:10am I wrote my blog, got the little one on her school bus, folded all the laundry, made myself a lunch and cleaned out the trunk of the car! Remember in a past blog I mentioned that I had gone to Radio Shack for a project that hadn't panned out? That was to find a 12-volt adapter for the RF modulator that goes with my DVD player. (BTW that's stupid - why do you need the extra component just to hook a TV to a DVD?) At Radio Shack they sold Mrs. Lewis a generic adaptor with a lot of miscellaneous clip on ends - none of which were the right stuff. Typical. I returned that and got the cassette player instead. However, I did find the original adaptor today - in the trunk of the car! Along with a box of small musical instruments I own, a recorder, a sampler taken out of a toy bear, etc. they had been in the trunk since our last move - that was the third week of January! For goodness sake!
Uncle Dave Lewis