By David in TN
Friday, February 19, 2021 at 5:31:00 P.M. EST
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning is worth skipping. For black history month, Eddie Muller is showing Native Son (1951). The author Richard Wright plays his own creation, even though the character is supposed to be a “teen” (what else), and Wright was in his forties.
It’s the Bigger Thomas myth—black-on-White murder is caused by White racism. This film was never considered part of the noir canon, or even a particularly good film.
N.S.: According to Communists, all blacks lived in rat-infested slums, and were in constant danger of being killed by rabid rats. As far as I know, it was Communist Richard Wright who introduced rat stories to Red agitprop. In Arnold Perl’s 1963 story for the TV series, East Side, West Side, the black parents immediately take their toddler to the emergency room, but she still dies in a couple of days (for some inexplicable reason, the scenes of her getting bit and taken to the hospital were cut from the posting). In the real world, a child would only die from the bite of a rabid rat, if the wound were left untreated, and it would not happen quickly. Thus, this was one of the usual, Communist lies.
East Side, West Side is a favorite show of old Reds.
2 comments:
A long time ago I read a hilarious rat story--it was claimed that a rat had grabbed a baby (black, I'm sure) and was trying to stuff the baby through its rat hole for later eating. If I remember correctly, the claim was that the rat wrapped his tail around the baby's neck and was dragging it along--of course in reality rats do not have prehensile tails--unlike a monkey, a rat cannot grab things with its tail. Then there was the story of the rat which came up through the sewer and castrated a man sitting on the toilet! Rats are not tiny things. I have moved into apartments with cockroaches and got rid of them using boric acid. But rats cannot squeeze through tiny cracks like roaches--they have skulls which limit where they can go. If someone is living in an apartment with rats, they need to get a hammer and some supplies and patch up the large holes which the rats need to get in. But I suppose there is systemic ratism which prevents the suppressed blacks from patching the rat holes.
"According to Communists, all blacks lived in rat-infested slums"
The solution of course was to build high-rise projects that then became infested with human rats.
Post a Comment