HI-HAT HATTIE!
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Of course, that place wasn’t at the big table. Blacks were relegated almost exclusively to servile roles onscreen as well as off in the 1920s and ’30s, and McDaniel was no exception. She had an impressive career in terms of the quantity of films she was featured in, and some of those films were quite notable: I’m No Angel (“Beulah,” Mae West said to McDaniel, “peel me a grape”), Show Boat, Alice Adams, Nothing Sacred, The Male Animal, and of course Gone With the Wind, for which she won an Oscar. But for the most part her roles in those films were nothing to brag about–at least not as written. McDaniel’s accomplishment was to take the menial characters given her and make them rich, sometimes profoundly moving, and generally very funny.
To do that she used her obvious endowments–her lush, resonant voice and her unforgettably expansive girth. But she also drew on an inner fire and an emotionally complex temperament. It wasn’t just the timing of her lines or the marvelously focused way she pitched her voice and rolled her eyes that made McDaniel’s screen performances so enduring; it was the deeply rooted core of turbulent feeling permeating her characterizations that lifted her above the ranks of plump black movie maids.
Of course, there’s an added element here–the history and legacy of racial injustice and prejudice in America. Hi-Hat Hattie! has plenty of educational merit as a theatrical textbook on racism and how McDaniel dealt with its expression in acts of overt hatred (a cross is burned on the lawn of the nice new home she buys to celebrate her success) and in instances of covert inaction (she refuses to attend the premiere of Gone With the Wind in segregated Atlanta and is stung when her fellow actors don’t do likewise).
