Clarence Muse
He acted for Frank Capra, William Wellman, Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Curtiz, James Whale and Alfred Hitchcock, yet his name is barely known. True, sometimes his roles were little more than walk-ons, and often they were conceived as crude stereotypes, but even when he played rounded characters with numerous scenes and lines of dialogue (as in Heaven Can Wait, 1943), he often went uncredited.
There are at least two essays one could write about Clarence Muse: in one, the subject of race might not come up at all—looking at his deft comic and dramatic performances, we can appreciate his ability to steal a scene, or rather enhance it with an eye-catching contribution, just as we enjoy the nimble overplaying of a Eugene Pallette or a Franklin Pangborn. To talk about Muse as a black performer is, however, not only to acknowledge the obvious, but to give him additional credit for so often making something out of nothing, turning nameless manservants and train stewards into human beings.
Muse seems to have approached his work with optimism and confidence: sow’s ears might be mainly what was offered, but it was up to him to improve on the material. And he had an actor’s voracious eye for quality: if a part did offer a clue as to character or at least a vacant spot where some might be inserted by a dexterous performer, he would miss no opportunity.
The roles on offer to non-white actors in Hollywood in the 20s, 30s and 40s were generally unpromising: to have a chance at a decent role, you had to be willing to play a depressing number of bad ones. Anna May Wong was driven to drink by the endless run of dragon lady parts, and Mexican actors who were not Latin lovers were usually confined to comedy relief or barbaric bandit roles, the mightly Thomas Gomez being about the sole exception. So Muse did what he could with what he had, but such was his skill to humanize the products of lazy writing, he rarely produced anything embarrassing. We tend to cringe at the antics of “Snowflake,” despite his comedic skill, but Buster “Snowflake” Hayes embodied several offensive stereotypes in one. Eddie “Rochester”Anderson sometimes got roles with a bit more humanity, not to mention screen time, and was too strikingly unusual a figure to really conform to a type. The most notorious black actor of all, Stepin Fetchit, is sometimes credited with subverting the slow-witted parts he played, exaggerating the monkey-man characteristics until they became absurd. Black audiences loved him because they saw through the play-acting, and felt the joke was on the white man. Playing stupid could be one way to get your own back.
Muse is unlike all these actors because of his ambition. Nothing in his role in Safe in Hell (1931), where he plays a hotelier on a fetid tropical island swarming with corruption, required that the part be played with an English accent. The character being called Birmingham was probably a hint that he should be from Alabama, but Muse went for a more interesting choice, and he had the skill to pull it off.
In Invisible Ghost (1941), a demented poverty row chiller with Bela Lugosi, he plays a servant, but he has plenty of screen time, so he does everything he can with it. A line about some fresh horror turning him “white as a sheet,” is delivered with a peculiar gravity, successfully defying us to laugh. It’s one thing to say the line as if unaware of its implications, as a comic like Mantan Moreland might have done: to somehow squash any hint of comedic potential out of it would require either a very bad comedian (which Muse was not) or an amazing actor (which he was).
Returning to Heaven Can Wait. A servant again, Muse flits between his two employers, surly beef magnate Eugene Pallette, and his wife, Marjorie Main. Since the couple disagree about everything and refuse to speak to one another, they communicate through messages delivered verbally by Muse, who gets snapped at from both sides. But he never loses his preternatural good humor. He seems to love his job. His toothsome grin places him close to a familiar stereotype, but a later scene where he conspires to help his employers’ daughter elope for the second time proves he’s no docile Uncle Tom. He’s happy because his every utterance makes one or other of his employers furious. He gets to annoy and torment them all day long, on behalf of each of them, and he is thus immune from any punishment. Furthermore, since without his help they would be forced to deal with each other directly, he can do this with a clean conscience. There’s no malice in him, just innocent pleasure.
This kind of sophistication was Muse’s stock-in-trade, and he needed it. There might be nothing much you could do when the script just called for someone to manhandle baggage onto a train, but you never knew when a moment of interaction, a humanizing bit of behavior, or a glint of rebellion might be possible. And with a really substantial role like in Night World (1932) or Apache Drums (1951), all that exercise could pay off.
by David Cairns