Bigotry on TV: The Stain Still Lingers

It’s early Sunday morning, and you’re planted in couch-potato heaven watching “Mark of the Whistler,” a 1944 entry in a series of movies based on a then-popular weekly radio mystery featuring a shadowy character who regularly whistled a hauntingly ominous tune.

As much a “B” moviegoer’s delight as its companion movies, this particular “Whistler” story is about a tramp who impersonates the owner of a long-dormant bank account to gain access to the money. Starring Richard Dix, the movie is magnificently corny, a rich mother lode of laughable cliches and lovably illogical plot twists.

Having shrewdly executed his hoax and gone on a lavish spending spree, Dix is now on the run from some unsavory types who want to kill him, with the action getting more hilarious by the moment. Trapped in a posh nightclub/restaurant (where all the tables naturally feature those tiny lamps with fluted shades), he flees to the men’s room, where he is greeted by the attendant.

Who is black.

And terrified.

And bug-eyed.

And shuffling.

And a close likeness of Stepin Fetchit.

And all of the fun pours out of “Mark of the Whistler.”

Television has gone a long way toward ridding itself of ugly stereotypes in entertainment programs and commercials. But some of these supposedly banished obscenities continue to linger in antique movies that television airs. They shouldn’t be there, but they are. It’s like going through a guy’s closet and finding some dresses.

The “Whistler” movies were made in a segregated age when the above stereotypical African-American attendant was not only as pat a comedy character as the funny drunk, but also a Sambo metaphor that nourished white America’s feelings of racial supremacy.

Just as offensive are the African stereotypes perpetuated by many of those old Tarzan movies that surface on television like corpses washing ashore. The other day it was “Tarzan and the Amazons,” circa 1944, whose mindless, drum-pounding, ooga-booga Africans make Alex Haley’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte, look like a refugee from another planet. Preceding them by only a few days were the earnest but hapless black savages of the 1958 film “Tarzan and the Trappers,” for whom basic coping appears to be nearly impossible without the services of a muscle-bound Great White Hope.

Compared with these powerful images, Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott’s alleged use of the repulsive “N” word for blacks appears almost benign.

Nor is it blacks alone who are degraded by these movies, or just “B” movies that do the degrading. There on TV recently was “Stagecoach,” John Ford’s celebrated 1939 Western whose centerpiece is a savage Apache attack on whites traveling through “Indian country.”

Typically, the American Indians are willing to accept enormous losses just to fry a few whites, the message being that the lives of these whites are more significant than those of their red-skinned tormentors.

And why are there enormous losses by the attackers? Because even with their vast experience at marauding, that era’s Hollywood-distorted American Indians still don’t have the smarts to pull off a successful ambush. Instead of cutting their victims off, they begin whooping and hollering from behind and, at one point in the Ford movie, get systematically picked off while mindlessly riding parallel to the stagecoach.

Of course, the Indians here are merely Ford’s props, cultural sacrifices on the altar of socially unenlightened filmmaking, and even the stagecoach’s outlaw traveler (played by swaggering John Wayne) is more heroic and lovable than the Apaches.

Yet if TV’s ethno-insults were confined to remnants of the past, perhaps they would be more bearable.

But they’re not. The cleanup of stereotypes has not been complete--witness, for example, the ridicule that African-Americans are relentlessly subjected to on Fox’s black-produced, increasingly unfunny satirical series “In Living Color.” The justification here appears to be that bashing one’s own is acceptable--a sort of family affair--even though in this case the TV audience laughing at the black bashing is substantially non-black. Of course, “In Living Color” also targets other minorities such as people with disabilities and gays, and on Sunday presented a particularly offensive, stereotype-feeding sketch about gays in the military showing mincing males in the barracks.

Meanwhile, NBC’s “L.A. Law” has a tradition of sensitively portraying blacks, Latinos, gays, Jews and other minorities. Nonetheless, it recently introduced a recurring Jewish character--an old-fashioned movie mogul named Ben Flicker--who is an obnoxious stereotype reeking of the kind of ethnic arrogance and superiority that encourages anti-Semitism, compared with the sympathetic, Yiddish-sounding characters on the CBS series “Brooklyn Bridge.” Played by Shelley Berman, the money-grubbing shyster Flicker oozes Yiddish dialect while regularly using the derogatory term “goy” for non-Jews and speaking of women as being “shtupable,” antiquated coarse Yiddish slang for the “F” word.

Even worse is the noxious stench of the so-called humor on “Uptown Comedy Club,” a New York-based syndicated series (aired here on KCAL-TV Channel 9), and “Dino & Rocco’s Back Alley,” a San Fernando Valley-produced program getting wide play nationally on local-access cable channels.

Not too long ago, an “Uptown Comedy Club” sketch about “the law firm of Judacy” featured three men dressed as Hasidic Jews making lewd dance movements with their bodies while chanting “Oy oy oy vey” and singing: “Come and pay your fee, come and pay your fee. I really want to sue you. I really want to overcharge you.”

Dave DiNateli and Todd Pliss, the cretinous Howard Stern wanna-bes behind “Dino & Rocco’s Back Alley,” did a like-minded sketch using similar gestures: “We’re here to say, we’re two Jewish lawyers who will make you pay.” These pathetically unfunny clods--who also clumsily ridicule African-Americans, females and gays--would probably stand on their heads and oink like pigs to get attention.

You searched their heads for lobotomy scars when they made an appearance on “The Jerry Springer Show” recently with two gay activists and Joan Downey, a Thousand Oaks woman crusading to drive them from the air.

When the gay activists joined the panel, the “Back Alley” fatheads put on rubber gloves--oh, how funny--as a comment on AIDS. And about gay men? “Their biggest choice to wear is what panties with what bra,” said “Dino,” who, hard as it is to believe, appears to be the brighter of the two.

Even more depressing--and also frightening--was the response of the Chicago-based Springer’s studio audience, most of whom appeared to enthusiastically back “Dino” and “Rocco.” They’re a couple of talentless slugs who, because they represent TV’s cutting edge of bigotry and opportunism, may one day whistle a happy tune all the way to the bank.