“Bella Donna”—Bah!
The presentation of “Bella Donna,” the photoplay picture featuring Pola Negri, the Polish vamp, now appearing in American theaters, causes one to wonder what Will Hays has done with the Hooser blood that used to percolate thru his veins. If Bill cared half as much for American decency as he does for movie ducats, he’d put a bella dona plaster on this Pola Negri carbuncle and draw some of the damnable rottenness out of the festering mess. Just now the papers are slopping over with notices telling a gasping world that Pola Negri has the distinction of being one of the most famous and yet at the same time one of the least known of motin picture stars. It is terrible to contemplate what the world would have done had this Polish “star never “twinkled” in the movie firmaments. These notices recall the days when “Quo Vodis,” another Police product, occupied the boards. If a book or a play is only bad enough it is sure to become popular as “Quo Vodis” did and as “Bella Donna,” Pola Negri’s “Colored Supremacy” photoplay deals with the mad infatuations of a white woman for a dark skinned North African Egyptian. The revolting spectacle of a white woman clinging in the arms of a colored man simply is beyond words to express and “Bella Donna” is the story of a white woman who falls in love with an Egyptian black man, is despoiled by him in his tent, and then in return gives him her love only in the end to be spurned by him while swooning and pleading at his feet. It is a species of propaganda as damnable as that presented several years ago in Peck’s restaurant in New York by one Hamilton Holt, when he advocated intermarriage of the whites and blacks as a solution of the race problem in the South.
Besides being an insult to the white man and the white man’s country, “Bella Donna” is an insult to the whole human race from the advent of Adam to the Day of Judgment. The picture “Bella Donna” was banned by the censors in Houston, Texas, recently and the Mayor of Houston over-rode the board of censors and permitted the picture to run under the following electric bulletin, placed in front of the leading theatre of Houston: “White-skinned ladies will flirt with black-skinned men when their husbands are away.—Pola Negri.”
At this time the colored race, not as a whole, but those of the radical minority, are chafing under the lash of incendiary whites goading them on to impossible dreams of social equality and Pola Negri’s “Bella Donna” will lure them on to extremes that lead but to an inevitable and disastrous ending, just such as was witnessed a few days ago in Columbus, Mo., when a furious mob of men and boys tore their way into the cell of a negro brute who had assaulted a white girl, dragged him out and hanged him to a railroad bridge near by.
The progress of the world is truly appalling. A few years ago Julian Hawthorne was shocking decency by advocating the improvement of the white breed by injecting it into a little Ethiopian blood and now has arising a “star” in Poland declaring that “White-skinned ladies will flirt with black-skinned men when their husbands are away,” and white-skinned Caucasians will flock to the theaters like wood lice to see and hear these damnable insults thrown into their faces.
From the front page of The Yellow Jacket, Moravian Falls, N.C., May 1923
POLI NEGRI, Polish Star of Silent Screen
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