In which I admit to liking Stepin Fetchit

At the NWFF again, to see Hara Kiri. As I mentioned earlier, the samurai festival back in 1980 was where I saw a good number of these films for the first time. Hara Kiri was another one I'd first seen on PBS, when they ran a Thursday night series of Janus films for a couple of years in the 70s. The following day I told the entire plot to The Chicken Farmer on the schoolbus--complete with sound effects. I'd seen it for a third time when the art museum brought Toru Takamitsu to town--I wish I could remember something about that--he spoke for quite a while afterwards about his work on the film. Smallish audience at the NWFF, and the presenter almost apologized for the anti-samurai nature of the film. I love the way Kobayashi handles flashbacks--sudden cuts as someone starts to relate a story, but with no voiceover following the cut.
Final shot: repetition of opening shot--as a kid, it was that opening shot that grabbed me, the suit of armor that looks like a monster. I guess it is a monster.

Just finished reading Stepin Fetchit: the Life and Times of Lincoln Perry by Mel Watkins. I've always thought he was some kind of comic genius, but of course it's not really easy to see his work, and because of its nature, it's hard to feel good about laughing. Watkins makes the case that the character ("the laziest man alive") meant one thing to white audiences and another to black audiences, but also that the movies consistantly left out the part of Perry's vaudeville act that would have made it clear that his "laziness" had a subversive purpose. I was walking down the street, reading this book, and someone stopped me to ask directions to a place I didn't know. My first reaction was to reach up, and full-palm rub my bald head to get my thinking muscles working: one of Stepin Fetchit's signature moves...Unfortunately, there's a lot of Perry's life that just isn't documented, so there are several places where the author goes, "we don't really know what Perry was doing during this period, but here's an excerpt from Bessie Smith's autobiography that describes the part of the circuit we think he was on." It still makes good reading. The Wikipedia entry says that he converted to Islam in the 60s, but that isn't true. He was a lifelong Catholic.