| Clean Pastures | |
| Director: | I. Freleng |
| Animator: | Paul Smith Phil Monroe |
| Starring: | Ben Carter Lillian Randolph William Days Paul Taylor's Sportsmen Basin Street Boys Mel Blanc[1] |
| Music: | Carl W. Stalling The Four Blackbirds |
| Producer: | Leon Schlesinger |
| Distributor: | Warner Bros. Vitaphone |
| Color Process: | Technicolor |
| Runtime: | 7 min (one reel) |
| Language: | English |
Clean Pastures is a 1937 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Friz Freleng.[2] The short was released on May 22, 1937.[3]
The cartoon gets the title from the Warner Bros.' 1936 film The Green Pastures.
Clean Pastures opens in Harlem, New York City, where African American caricatures gamble, drink, and dance in a sea of bars, clubs, and dancing girls. In Heaven, known as "Pair-O-Dice", a black Saint Peter reads the headline, "Pair-O-Dice Preferred Hits New Low As Hades Inc. Soars". The angel rings an angelic Stepin Fetchit with enormous lips[4] [5] —probably a reference to Oscar Polk's performance as Gabriel in The Green Pastures—[6] and orders him to rectify the situation. Gabriel descends to Harlem and stands by a sign (modeled after James Montgomery Flagg's World War I Uncle Sam poster)[5] that reads, "Pair-O-Dice Needs You! Opportunity, Travel, Good Food, Water Melon, Clean Living, Music, Talkies". Nevertheless, the denizens of Harlem continue with their iniquity.
Angels, caricatures of jazz performers Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, The Mills Brothers, and Jimmie Lunceford, tell Saint Peter that to get people to paradise he will need "rhythm".[4] [7] (The short's credits list no voice actors, but a member of the all-black jazz group the Four Blackbirds —possibly Leroy Hurt—provides the cartoon's celebrity impressions.)[8] The musicians go to Harlem and break into a performance of "Swing for Sale", and the Harlemites flock to listen. The film's climax takes on the characteristics of "a revivalist camp meeting" as the band makes its way to Pair-O-Dice, and people follow them in droves.[9] The newcomers receive their halos, and in the cartoon's final gag, the Devil himself asks to be admitted.
Clean Pastures is a musical film, which means that it shifts between musical and non-musical sections, both of which are integral to the story.[10] Carl Stalling's musical score makes use of both public-domain music and songs owned by Warner Bros. Stalling's music "supplies both the foundation for the story and the driving force behind the animation." Music is of such importance that characters in Clean Pastures dance about even when no performers are pictured. The all-black jazz group the Four Blackbirds performs the backing vocals for these songs.[8]
A choir of a cappella, black male voices opens the cartoon with "Save Me, Sister, from Temptation", a song from the 1936 Warner Bros. film The Singing Kid featuring Al Jolson. Thus, Stalling establishes one of the cartoon's themes, that sinners may be redeemed, from the opening credits. As the scene shifts to Harlem, the jazz standard "Sweet Georgia Brown" accompanies the bevy of African American vices. Caricatures of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Al Jolson perform snippets of the blackface tunes "Old Folks at Home" and "I Love to Singa". However, the short's major number is "Swing for Sale", performed by caricatures of popular black jazz performers. The short ends with a jazzed-up version of James A. Bland's minstrel spiritual "Oh! Dem Golden Slippers".[4]
Black critics in the 1930s wrote about the play and film The Green Pastures, but they were silent on its animated parody. Weisenfeld speculates that this is because animated cartoons were not seen as significant at the time.[6] Modern critics of Clean Pastures fault the film for its stereotypical depictions of black culture. Cultural studies scholar William Anthony Nericcio sees the film as representative of a pattern in the works of Friz Freleng, who also produced such stereotype-ridden films as Jungle Jitters, Goldilocks and the Jivin' Bears, and the Speedy Gonzales cartoons.[11] Lindvall and Fraser are more forgiving and call the cartoon "playful", "light", and "mischievous".[12]
Daniel Goldmark alleges that the film is a burlesque of black religion and culture in its portrayal of Pair-O-Dice as "heavenly Harlem shops and singing choirs".[13] In his interpretation, the film's use of rhythm is a metaphor for faith. This demonstrates white Americans' placement of jazz alongside religion and "the unfettered expressions of emotion associated with it" as aspects of African American culture. The cartoon implies that jazz cannot be replaced in the black psyche, as the musicians in the film must appropriate jazz, not compete with it, to draw Harlemites to Pair-O-Dice.[14] The mortal characters are given no information about why Pair-O-Dice is better than Harlem, but the upbeat music is enough to lure them there. Even the Devil himself takes the bait.[13] In the end, the film reaffirms the vision of Paradise from The Green Pastures, with its "perpetual Negro holiday [and] everlasting weekend fish fry."[15]
On the other hand, Judith Weisenfeld sees Clean Pastures as an explicit rejection of Connelly's fish fry. Instead, she argues that the short is a metaphor for the replacement of one generation of African American performers and stereotypes for a new one as the result of African Americans moving to urban areas.[6] In contrast to The Green Pastures and its portrayal of rural black culture, the cartoon is set in a solidly urban framework. Clean Pastures replaces stereotypes of black watermelon eaters and chicken stealers with black dancers, drinkers, and gamblers.[5] Old-style black stereotypes are represented by the Stepin Fetchit angel and his recruitment sign, which promises delights that only appeal to rural black stereotypes. Yet even Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Al Jolson, who built their careers on blackface depictions of rural blacks, reject Fetchit's plea for souls and opt for the Kotton Klub nightclub.[16] The angelic jazz performers represent new, urban black culture. Through their rendition of "Swing for Sale", the souls of the Harlemites are saved, and the cartoon makes the point that the African American culture of the period was increasingly urban culture, and by extension, that the black Heaven is an urban, Northern place.[6] Lindvall and Fraser take a similar view, seeing the cartoon as part of the Warner directors' transition from stereotyping blacks as "rural bumpkins" to featuring them as "urban hepcat[s]".[12]
Goldmark and Weisenfeld agree that the film's portrayal of black culture is a negative one. Goldmark criticizes the film's implication that certain kinds of black music or black performers are better than others. He interprets the short's jazzy finale, which juxtaposes contemporary popular jazz with a traditional African American spiritual, as representative of this theme:
Furthermore, placing the creators of "good" hot jazz in heaven suggests that certain types of black music are better than others: "hot" music made in such places as Harlem would lead to debauchery and eventually to Hades, Inc. Only through the noble efforts of famous black musicians could souls be turned to a better direction.[13]
Contemporary black commentators argued that to white audiences, Connelly's The Green Pastures simply reinforced the notion that black people presented a danger that needed to be contained. Weisenfeld argues that this is also the case with Freleng's parody. To white viewers in the 1930s, the film's implication that blacks care for nothing but gambling, drinking, and dancing only reinforces notions of the dangers posed by urban blacks.[6] According to Goldmark, the choice of performers caricatured is telling; that Armstrong and Calloway are depicted as angels indicates that their crossover appeal was strong enough among whites that white audiences would not have felt threatened by the notion that they were angels in Heaven.[13] Weisenfeld notes that by focusing the narrative on Saint Peter and his Stepin Fetchit underling, the animators ducked the potential offense white audiences might have felt upon seeing a black God.[5]