MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Etta McDaniel

Meet Etta McDaniel, sister of renowned character actress Hattie.  She was in 61 movies from 1933 to 1946, mostly in maid or mammy roles.  Her first film role was as a native in King Kong, and she appeared in such films as Stella Dallas and Son of Dracula, but never anything really top of the line, where I assume her better known sibling would take precedence.  Here she is in False Faces (1943), a run of the mill Republic Studios murder mystery, with a few extra twists to the script courtesy of writer Curt Siodmak.  Paired with slow and querulous Nick (Nicodemus) Stewart as an apartment building maid, her main function is to discover the body.  She also answers the phone and is interrogated by police.

 She adds a jarring note of what I must assume was intended as comedy relief when, upon finding the body, she runs around shrieking and waving her hands in the air for what seems like a very long time.  I am somewhat inured to the depiction of The Negro in American film, but this distressed even me.  I feel it was very unfortunate that she had to do that to get a paycheck, because that sort of thing doesn't help anyone.

I hesitated for a couple of weeks before writing this, just because it made me feel so bad, but I could not in good conscience leave this example out, because the whole point of this series is to show the type of social constraints which are created for people solely because of their appearance.