Pinky

Pinky trained as a nurse in the north, where her light skin let her live as white. She comes back south to the grandmother who raised her. The white doctor she became engaged to in the north does not know who she is. In the town everybody does. When the elderly white woman her grandmother cares for dies and leaves Pinky her house, the relatives take the will to court. Elia Kazan directed. Jeanne Crain plays Pinky and Ethel Waters plays the grandmother. The most contested thing about it is the casting. The producer Darryl Zanuck never seriously considered a Black actress for the lead; fearing a boycott in the South he cast a white one, Jeanne Crain. Kazan was not the original director either. John Ford lasted a week on set; he clashed with Ethel Waters and his handling of the film's non-white characters became a problem, and he left. Kazan took over. The real legacy is legal. In Marshall, Texas, three censors pushed to have the film banned; their objections were a white man continuing to love a woman after learning she is Black, kissing and embracing her, and a scene in which Pinky is assaulted. The theatre owner showed it anyway and was convicted. The case reached the United States Supreme Court as Gelling v. Texas, which found that a board denying a licence because a film was judged prejudicial to local citizens violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Who it is for: anyone interested in Hollywood's first serious touches on race and in the history of censorship. Who it is not for: viewers who cannot set the casting aside. A white actress playing a Black woman is what the film is most argued about now.