And what a hangover
2025-02-11 18:03I admire the caliber of the performance given by Mel Ferrer in Lost Boundaries (1949) almost as much as his assessment that he shouldn't have done it.
It's not an insult, or a riddle. As originally documented by William L. White for Reader's Digest in 1947 and more fully in a short best-seller the following year, the source material for Lost Boundaries was the real lives of a light-skinned mixed-race family who had passed so successfully for white in legally integrated, not aboundingly multicultural northern New England that their children had reached adolescence without knowing it for themselves. Dramatizing this potentially exploitative material with a shoestring sincerity that simultaneously grounded and amped its challenge to the color line, the low-budget, independent production was in the vanguard of the cycle of race-relations pictures that flourished in mid-century Hollywood, the first announced and second released of four in its year alone. Such was its commercial as well as critical appeal that while it ran into high-profile censorship in Atlanta and Memphis, it did solid box office elsewhere in the American South as well as the more expected Northern receipts. It was screened in competition for the Grand Prix at Cannes and won for Best Screenplay. It is left as an exercise for the viewer whether the film would have enjoyed the same success of its moment had it more scrupulously avoided some of the period-typical compromises of its fictionalization of the Johnstons of Keene, New Hampshire, most absurdly and inevitably that none of the actors portraying the family was Black. Lest the modern audience imagine it passed without comment in the days of Jim Crow, the casting raised more than a flash of controversy, defended in some quarters as a tricky concession and called out as retrograde whitewash in others, a transparently cautious artifice which regardless of the reasons behind it risked reassuring the very anxieties it was intended to unsettle with the implicit claim that only whiteness could be credible as itself. Either way, it packed much more than the intended irony into its hero's optimistically innocent estimate of his future: "For one year of my life, I'm going to be a white man."
The casting of Ferrer feels itself like a testament to the national brain freeze in the face of multivalent identities. At the time when he was approached for the leading role of Dr. Scott Mason Carter, the restlessly extracurricular actor was an unknown screen quantity, chiefly employed within the studio system as an assistant director available for loan-outs, dialogue direction, and screen tests. His Broadway successes had been modest, his most prestigious work on the production sides of NBC and the La Jolla Playhouse. His own familial mix was Cuban-Irish and the deep-eyed, long-boned, lightly olive results got him effectively cast from a headshot. Even for the mix-and-match ethnicities of classical Hollywood, it feels a little outrageously on the nose to circumvent the vexed representation of passing with the non-Black non-whiteness of a Latino actor, but the unequivocal anti-racism of the part attracted him and he could communicate its ambiguities without recourse to panstick—as if to prove his third-alternative bona fides, he had last featured prominently as the white half of an interracial affair in the stage version of Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit (1945). It was not predictable, but it isn't a joke that his commitment to Lost Boundaries produced more than a tactful curiosity. Whatever melodrama adheres to the film around him, Scott himself never plays like a white image of mixed-race tragedy, sociologically problematized or sentimentally excused, as opposed to a specifically humorous, ambitious, stubborn and sometimes startlingly naive man who as we meet him on his graduation from the Chase Medical School of Chicago in 1922 has never let his good hair or his grade on the paper bag test affect his sense of self as culturally, ideologically Black. His affirmations of racial pride can sound a little pompous to colleagues who never had a choice about identifying as "Negro," but they stand in refreshing contrast to the repression of his in-laws whose assimilation into suburban whiteness—a house in Brookline before it was historically Jewish—allows them to treat their daughter's marriage to a fractionally darker-skinned man with almost as much disapproval as actual miscegenation. Collecting rejections from hospitals under no legal obligation to grant residencies to Black interns, he jokes with the cynical resilience of his fraternity brothers in Kappa Alpha Psi, "There are five railroad stations in Boston. It's a good place for a redcap. And if a passenger faints, my medical training will be invaluable." The accessibility of whiteness makes it a last-ditch reluctant fallback rather than an aspiration, a safety net that could strangle even as it teases the expediency of simply not saying anything, of letting the white gaze which imagines that it can tell Blackness at sight do the heavy lifting of lying for a man who has adamantly preferred to be recognized in his own skin. The accidentally sunk cost of the next two decades in fact becomes believable in part because Scott so clearly never thinks of himself as even conditionally white, crossing without code-switching between his country white practice in Keenham and the comfortable diversity of the Charles Howard Clinic in Boston. It is a plausible-deniable existence, possible because it's not supposed to be: "They don't have Negro doctors in New Hampshire." And yet the strength of his self-identification doubles as its own form of self-deception, an insulation from the realities of just how white his life has become, borne in on him in the film's nastiest, cleverest shock of his teenaged daughter unselfconsciously hollering through the house a racial slur that shudders the western union gentility of the script like a sonic boom. Not thinking of himself as the parent of white children, he has failed to ward them against the casual, radioactive absorption of normal American racism, especially in the super-Caucasian Granite State where their family may represent the total Black population of their white-steepled, tradition-proud community. It shames him as his non-disclosure conduct toward the town explicitly never does: he owes the white world no apologies, but his children deserved the truth. "I guess you might call it a twenty-year binge," he sighs to the old classmate on whose office couch he has fetched up as if coming off a bender instead of an interrogation, officially outed by his refusal to deny his race point-blank—"and what a hangover."
Recognition from Cannes notwithstanding, Lost Boundaries generally does not live up to its protagonist. Some of it is the rough edges of the homebrew production—the bare-bones budget was partly financed by the home mortgage of producer Louis de Rochemont and costumes and props are supposed to have been sourced from an appeal to the Seacoast public on WHEB—but more of it is script-level hackiness, notably whenever the treatment of race wanders from Scott and his complicated integrity. It is perceptive of the narrative to touch on colorism as well as racism, Beatrice Pearson's Marcia Mitchell Carter leafing through pictures of variously complected relatives in the last stages of her pregnancy, her anxieties about the cocktail of the next generation allayed by her husband's teasing of their pinkly crumpled firstborn, "He's all right, but he kind of looks like anybody's baby, though, doesn't he?" It is critical that it not confine its sympathies to its light-skinned actors, foregrounding in turn the dark, dignified contributions of Emory Richardson as Dr. Charles Frederick Howard, Rai Sanders as Dr. Jesse Pridham, and future acclaimed documentarian William Greaves with soul and charisma to burn as supporting MVP Arthur Cooper, in which context it does not feel like routine marginalization that the janitor at the clinic is played by Leigh Whipper. Particularly since the production consulted with both Ralph Ellison and Walter White, it is inexcusable for it to stick the Carter children with all the tragic mulattohood their father dodged. Like his real-life model, Richard Hylton's Charles Howard Carter hits the road to sort out his suddenly mixed self, but where Albert Johnston Jr. hitch-hiked cross-country through a kaleidoscope of personally rooted Black America, Howie bombs into a sensationalized, racialized lost weekend in Harlem whose sole silver lining is the disbelief with which the legendary Canada Lee's Lieutenant Thompson takes in the goal of his panicked slumming: "And you think that you can find that out in five days?" Susan Douglas as Shelly Carter gets one good line disenchanting her sweet gawk of a steady when he brings her "an awful rumor going around town about you folks," but even though it should be realistically ambivalent that she walks out of the reconciliatory finale of the Sunday service wherein the liberal authority of the Episcopal minister catechizes the rest of white Keenham into reopening their hearts to the Carters, especially since she has just dumped her white boyfriend it more reinscribes her as the latest imitation of life. Under the present world-historical conditions, it may carry an extra sting that Scott is stripped of his lieutenant commander's commission for no more disgrace than membership in a historically Black fraternity, but the notion that he could have been refused a placement at a segregated hospital because he too easily read as white smacks unconvincingly of bothsidesism. Even more so in a production committed to the documentary realism of location shooting and non-professional acting than in a slice of studio gloss, the casting of the Carters scratches like a wink to the censors, a fourth-wall warrant of boundaries that have not been so much as mislaid. One of the first-act walk-ons is Maurice Ellis of the 1936 Federal Theatre Project Macbeth. "You know what they used to say down South. If you white, you all right. If you brown, you can hang around. If you black, stand back," indeed.
In 1951, Ferrer gave an interview for the October issue of Negro Digest in which he discussed his role in Lost Boundaries: the responsibility that came with the part, the degree to which he had been identified with it, the importance of its reception among Black audiences, the caveat of his pride in the production. "I have always been self-conscious about having played this part . . . I have always felt that, ideally, a Negro should have had it, and not an actor playing a role." That he considered and could articulate as meaningful the distinction between representation and a role fascinates me as much as his willingness to state it on the record of a year in which it was manifestly not a Hollywood concern, discussing a production which had stalled on the casting of a textually Black part until a suitable hedge came across its director's desk; it doesn't sound like a humblebrag, either. Whatever Ferrer could channel through his own analogous sense of difference and the acknowledged assistance of what we would now call the sensitivity reading of his castmates, he understood it did not give him access to the Black lived experience. He played his role sincerely, not as a parody or a travelogue, and his trolling of white viewers who assumed from it that they had caught him out in an imposture of his own makes a supportive postscript. It is impossible not to wonder what Lost Boundaries would have looked like as a race film, or at least an independent production with more Black talent behind as well as before the camera. It exists in the hell of a good video store next door, the ghost-reflection of the Johnstons in a universe of different choices. Ferrer could have said nothing about the controversy either way and gone unremarked by the mores of his industry, but it feels frankly in character that he couldn't stay under the radar. I would love to know and have been able to find no information on how his performance was read by Latine viewers of the time.
The director who cast Ferrer was Alfred L. Werker, whose rather impressively racist comments during the casting imbroglio suggest a source for some of the Harlem hell-ride, although the divers hands of the screenwriters led by Virginia Shaler and Eugene Ling must take their share of anti-credit. The photography by William Miller, on the other hand, is a spindrift-and-picket-fences document of the Seacoast from the Nubble to the White Island Light, Keenham itself—compositely named after Gorham and Keene, where Dr. Albert Johnston Sr. practiced from 1929 to 1966—played by locations in Kennebunkport, Kittery, and the producer's home town of Portsmouth, all bound together by the march-of-time narrator pointing out "our old rambling mansions . . . our first citizens . . . our doctor." If it's true that Boston partly subbed for Harlem, it would be instructive to know which parts. The extras from the University of New Hampshire, from which Albert Johnston Jr. graduated in the same year as the film's release, were an apposite touch. Carleton Carpenter wrote and performed the jauntier of the film's two original songs, but the torchy number put over by Greaves was one of Johnston's own compositions, sneaking back into his own story. Somewhere in history a film is still waiting about him and his real-life road trip of self-discovery, which gave him no easy answers and got a Hollywood movie made. As for Lost Boundaries as it exists with all its heartfelt and uneven intentions, I caught it when it came around last month on TCM, but it plays with an endurable degree of blur on YouTube and the Internet Archive. It is not in several ways quite as much of an artifact of its time as it might be. This role brought to you by my invaluable backers at Patreon.
It's not an insult, or a riddle. As originally documented by William L. White for Reader's Digest in 1947 and more fully in a short best-seller the following year, the source material for Lost Boundaries was the real lives of a light-skinned mixed-race family who had passed so successfully for white in legally integrated, not aboundingly multicultural northern New England that their children had reached adolescence without knowing it for themselves. Dramatizing this potentially exploitative material with a shoestring sincerity that simultaneously grounded and amped its challenge to the color line, the low-budget, independent production was in the vanguard of the cycle of race-relations pictures that flourished in mid-century Hollywood, the first announced and second released of four in its year alone. Such was its commercial as well as critical appeal that while it ran into high-profile censorship in Atlanta and Memphis, it did solid box office elsewhere in the American South as well as the more expected Northern receipts. It was screened in competition for the Grand Prix at Cannes and won for Best Screenplay. It is left as an exercise for the viewer whether the film would have enjoyed the same success of its moment had it more scrupulously avoided some of the period-typical compromises of its fictionalization of the Johnstons of Keene, New Hampshire, most absurdly and inevitably that none of the actors portraying the family was Black. Lest the modern audience imagine it passed without comment in the days of Jim Crow, the casting raised more than a flash of controversy, defended in some quarters as a tricky concession and called out as retrograde whitewash in others, a transparently cautious artifice which regardless of the reasons behind it risked reassuring the very anxieties it was intended to unsettle with the implicit claim that only whiteness could be credible as itself. Either way, it packed much more than the intended irony into its hero's optimistically innocent estimate of his future: "For one year of my life, I'm going to be a white man."
The casting of Ferrer feels itself like a testament to the national brain freeze in the face of multivalent identities. At the time when he was approached for the leading role of Dr. Scott Mason Carter, the restlessly extracurricular actor was an unknown screen quantity, chiefly employed within the studio system as an assistant director available for loan-outs, dialogue direction, and screen tests. His Broadway successes had been modest, his most prestigious work on the production sides of NBC and the La Jolla Playhouse. His own familial mix was Cuban-Irish and the deep-eyed, long-boned, lightly olive results got him effectively cast from a headshot. Even for the mix-and-match ethnicities of classical Hollywood, it feels a little outrageously on the nose to circumvent the vexed representation of passing with the non-Black non-whiteness of a Latino actor, but the unequivocal anti-racism of the part attracted him and he could communicate its ambiguities without recourse to panstick—as if to prove his third-alternative bona fides, he had last featured prominently as the white half of an interracial affair in the stage version of Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit (1945). It was not predictable, but it isn't a joke that his commitment to Lost Boundaries produced more than a tactful curiosity. Whatever melodrama adheres to the film around him, Scott himself never plays like a white image of mixed-race tragedy, sociologically problematized or sentimentally excused, as opposed to a specifically humorous, ambitious, stubborn and sometimes startlingly naive man who as we meet him on his graduation from the Chase Medical School of Chicago in 1922 has never let his good hair or his grade on the paper bag test affect his sense of self as culturally, ideologically Black. His affirmations of racial pride can sound a little pompous to colleagues who never had a choice about identifying as "Negro," but they stand in refreshing contrast to the repression of his in-laws whose assimilation into suburban whiteness—a house in Brookline before it was historically Jewish—allows them to treat their daughter's marriage to a fractionally darker-skinned man with almost as much disapproval as actual miscegenation. Collecting rejections from hospitals under no legal obligation to grant residencies to Black interns, he jokes with the cynical resilience of his fraternity brothers in Kappa Alpha Psi, "There are five railroad stations in Boston. It's a good place for a redcap. And if a passenger faints, my medical training will be invaluable." The accessibility of whiteness makes it a last-ditch reluctant fallback rather than an aspiration, a safety net that could strangle even as it teases the expediency of simply not saying anything, of letting the white gaze which imagines that it can tell Blackness at sight do the heavy lifting of lying for a man who has adamantly preferred to be recognized in his own skin. The accidentally sunk cost of the next two decades in fact becomes believable in part because Scott so clearly never thinks of himself as even conditionally white, crossing without code-switching between his country white practice in Keenham and the comfortable diversity of the Charles Howard Clinic in Boston. It is a plausible-deniable existence, possible because it's not supposed to be: "They don't have Negro doctors in New Hampshire." And yet the strength of his self-identification doubles as its own form of self-deception, an insulation from the realities of just how white his life has become, borne in on him in the film's nastiest, cleverest shock of his teenaged daughter unselfconsciously hollering through the house a racial slur that shudders the western union gentility of the script like a sonic boom. Not thinking of himself as the parent of white children, he has failed to ward them against the casual, radioactive absorption of normal American racism, especially in the super-Caucasian Granite State where their family may represent the total Black population of their white-steepled, tradition-proud community. It shames him as his non-disclosure conduct toward the town explicitly never does: he owes the white world no apologies, but his children deserved the truth. "I guess you might call it a twenty-year binge," he sighs to the old classmate on whose office couch he has fetched up as if coming off a bender instead of an interrogation, officially outed by his refusal to deny his race point-blank—"and what a hangover."
Recognition from Cannes notwithstanding, Lost Boundaries generally does not live up to its protagonist. Some of it is the rough edges of the homebrew production—the bare-bones budget was partly financed by the home mortgage of producer Louis de Rochemont and costumes and props are supposed to have been sourced from an appeal to the Seacoast public on WHEB—but more of it is script-level hackiness, notably whenever the treatment of race wanders from Scott and his complicated integrity. It is perceptive of the narrative to touch on colorism as well as racism, Beatrice Pearson's Marcia Mitchell Carter leafing through pictures of variously complected relatives in the last stages of her pregnancy, her anxieties about the cocktail of the next generation allayed by her husband's teasing of their pinkly crumpled firstborn, "He's all right, but he kind of looks like anybody's baby, though, doesn't he?" It is critical that it not confine its sympathies to its light-skinned actors, foregrounding in turn the dark, dignified contributions of Emory Richardson as Dr. Charles Frederick Howard, Rai Sanders as Dr. Jesse Pridham, and future acclaimed documentarian William Greaves with soul and charisma to burn as supporting MVP Arthur Cooper, in which context it does not feel like routine marginalization that the janitor at the clinic is played by Leigh Whipper. Particularly since the production consulted with both Ralph Ellison and Walter White, it is inexcusable for it to stick the Carter children with all the tragic mulattohood their father dodged. Like his real-life model, Richard Hylton's Charles Howard Carter hits the road to sort out his suddenly mixed self, but where Albert Johnston Jr. hitch-hiked cross-country through a kaleidoscope of personally rooted Black America, Howie bombs into a sensationalized, racialized lost weekend in Harlem whose sole silver lining is the disbelief with which the legendary Canada Lee's Lieutenant Thompson takes in the goal of his panicked slumming: "And you think that you can find that out in five days?" Susan Douglas as Shelly Carter gets one good line disenchanting her sweet gawk of a steady when he brings her "an awful rumor going around town about you folks," but even though it should be realistically ambivalent that she walks out of the reconciliatory finale of the Sunday service wherein the liberal authority of the Episcopal minister catechizes the rest of white Keenham into reopening their hearts to the Carters, especially since she has just dumped her white boyfriend it more reinscribes her as the latest imitation of life. Under the present world-historical conditions, it may carry an extra sting that Scott is stripped of his lieutenant commander's commission for no more disgrace than membership in a historically Black fraternity, but the notion that he could have been refused a placement at a segregated hospital because he too easily read as white smacks unconvincingly of bothsidesism. Even more so in a production committed to the documentary realism of location shooting and non-professional acting than in a slice of studio gloss, the casting of the Carters scratches like a wink to the censors, a fourth-wall warrant of boundaries that have not been so much as mislaid. One of the first-act walk-ons is Maurice Ellis of the 1936 Federal Theatre Project Macbeth. "You know what they used to say down South. If you white, you all right. If you brown, you can hang around. If you black, stand back," indeed.
In 1951, Ferrer gave an interview for the October issue of Negro Digest in which he discussed his role in Lost Boundaries: the responsibility that came with the part, the degree to which he had been identified with it, the importance of its reception among Black audiences, the caveat of his pride in the production. "I have always been self-conscious about having played this part . . . I have always felt that, ideally, a Negro should have had it, and not an actor playing a role." That he considered and could articulate as meaningful the distinction between representation and a role fascinates me as much as his willingness to state it on the record of a year in which it was manifestly not a Hollywood concern, discussing a production which had stalled on the casting of a textually Black part until a suitable hedge came across its director's desk; it doesn't sound like a humblebrag, either. Whatever Ferrer could channel through his own analogous sense of difference and the acknowledged assistance of what we would now call the sensitivity reading of his castmates, he understood it did not give him access to the Black lived experience. He played his role sincerely, not as a parody or a travelogue, and his trolling of white viewers who assumed from it that they had caught him out in an imposture of his own makes a supportive postscript. It is impossible not to wonder what Lost Boundaries would have looked like as a race film, or at least an independent production with more Black talent behind as well as before the camera. It exists in the hell of a good video store next door, the ghost-reflection of the Johnstons in a universe of different choices. Ferrer could have said nothing about the controversy either way and gone unremarked by the mores of his industry, but it feels frankly in character that he couldn't stay under the radar. I would love to know and have been able to find no information on how his performance was read by Latine viewers of the time.
The director who cast Ferrer was Alfred L. Werker, whose rather impressively racist comments during the casting imbroglio suggest a source for some of the Harlem hell-ride, although the divers hands of the screenwriters led by Virginia Shaler and Eugene Ling must take their share of anti-credit. The photography by William Miller, on the other hand, is a spindrift-and-picket-fences document of the Seacoast from the Nubble to the White Island Light, Keenham itself—compositely named after Gorham and Keene, where Dr. Albert Johnston Sr. practiced from 1929 to 1966—played by locations in Kennebunkport, Kittery, and the producer's home town of Portsmouth, all bound together by the march-of-time narrator pointing out "our old rambling mansions . . . our first citizens . . . our doctor." If it's true that Boston partly subbed for Harlem, it would be instructive to know which parts. The extras from the University of New Hampshire, from which Albert Johnston Jr. graduated in the same year as the film's release, were an apposite touch. Carleton Carpenter wrote and performed the jauntier of the film's two original songs, but the torchy number put over by Greaves was one of Johnston's own compositions, sneaking back into his own story. Somewhere in history a film is still waiting about him and his real-life road trip of self-discovery, which gave him no easy answers and got a Hollywood movie made. As for Lost Boundaries as it exists with all its heartfelt and uneven intentions, I caught it when it came around last month on TCM, but it plays with an endurable degree of blur on YouTube and the Internet Archive. It is not in several ways quite as much of an artifact of its time as it might be. This role brought to you by my invaluable backers at Patreon.
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