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Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) - Gone With The Wind. The film has come under some pretty harsh criticism in recent years for its racial stereotypes, and has all but fallen off the radar of scholarly film criticism. But for all of its progressive shortcomings (and there are a number of them), I feel the film to be generally more defensible than it is perceived as being, and a lot of that has to do with Hattie McDaniels’s portrayal of Mammy. If you get beyond some of the initial shock of the role itself (the maid, which McDaniels was relegated to for nearly her entire career, including in the notorious Song of the South), she manages to transcend most of the negative qualities typically attributed to blacks and other minority characters in films made before 1970 (or even more recently than that, if we’re honest with ourselves).

If there’s one thing that Mammy is if nothing else, it’s assertive, which is a quality denied to even most of the film’s white stars. Even when placed next to stars like Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, she completely holds her own,  putting Scarlett O’Hara into her place when she steps out of line, which she does more than once. Moreover, and this is important, she has the quality of just being right pretty much all of the time. She’s smarter than her white overseers, and she knows it, even if she is never able to fully express it. But it’s clear to us that she is, at least in hindsight, and for that to come across at all is not insignificant for a film that did not allow blacks at its premiere (save for a promotional chorus that performed there, which featured a young Martin Luther King Jr.)

This must seem like faint praise for a film which has proclaimed itself the greatest film ever made during every theatrical and home video release since its debut in 1939. But its important to keep all of this in perspective, and important to recognize the contributions of individuals who were not necessarily given their due in their own time. Hattie McDaniel worked in Hollywood for a long time, and was never quite able to break out of the mold of typical roles allowed to blacks, even after winning an Oscar for this film (the first Oscar ever given to a person of color). But there are moments in her career when she was allowed to flew her talents, and Gone With The Wind is one of those moments. It’s possible that many of the qualities that make this so notable really only seem so when placed in a historical context, but I still don’t think she’s been given her due.