October 28 1954. On this day the movie, Carmen Jones, was released. And Dorothy Dandridge was launched on her course as the world’s first African-American female film star, some say ‘the black Marilyn Monroe. This mixed-race singer and performer became the first African-American to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, was featured in Ebony and photographed for the cover of Life. 

She matters because she is so controversial in race debates. Some black people see her as traitor because she had relationships with white men. It’s often forgotten that she integrated many previously ‘White only’ night spots when she refused to sing in clubs that wouldn’t permit a stage-side special table to be allocated to members of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

In the history of movies about women and the sea, Dorothy Dandridge has an entirely overlooked significance. She starred in two forgotten 1968 sea features: Tamango and The Decks Ran Red. Women in maritime feature films are classically the romantic interest, the distraction, the anomaly on board. They are passengers in every sense, minor characters – and almost always white. By contrast, men are the ones who work the ship as vehicle. The sea is the ‘frontier’ where these ‘cowboys’ display their technical competence, good judgement and courage. If they’re black – and it’s rare – they’re lowly.

So how come a black woman is the star – well, co-star – in these two films? What does it tell us about the difference race makes to the history of mobile women, on celluloid?

Tamango (CEI Incom) was a highly controversial film, initially banned in the US for breaking the Hays Code by showing an inter-racial love scenes between Dorothy Dandridge and Curt Jürgens.  Her manager claims two versions were made of the love scenes – a non-sexual one for US audiences. [1]

The movie is about a captured slave (Alex Cressan) who leads a rebellion on board. Director John Berry, a black-listed socialist director, heavily rewrote a Bizet story. Central to it was Aiché’s (Dandridge) progress towards becoming principled and proud of her black identity, no matter what the cost.

Aiché is the captain’s mistress. Initially she’s shown as someone who colludes with whites. On a windy deck, she urges the enchained Tamango to act obedient – and survive. He rejects her advice.  ‘White man’s trash’ he yells and spits. In the rebellion, Tamango takes Aiché hostage. Captain Reinker (Jurgens) threatens to fire into the ship’s hold and kill all the slaves unless they submit. Tamango offers Aiché the opportunity to go – and live. She chooses to stay. Reinker shoots the cannon, killing them all, and realising how much he loves her.

Thus Dandridge plays probably the most significant and inspiring role of any black women in maritime film history. She’s a Joan of Arc of the high seas. Her race and gender are crucial; her role couldn’t be played by a white person, or a man. Crucial too are her beauty and light skin. With such looks she could have got by as a white man’s compromised plaything, says the message. Instead she heroically chose loyalty to ‘her own’ people. And the movie did not do well.

A few months later Dandridge co-starred in MGM’s suspense thriller The Decks Ran Red, [2] which has since been hailed as one of her cult classics. Again it was initially banned in the US on racial grounds, because it shows Mahia, a black woman, (Dandridge) shooting and killing a white man (rebel leader Stuart Whitman). The movie features also what some claim is the first inter-racial on-screen kiss, when Whitman forces his lips on hers.

This time it’s the 1950s. The film is set on a freighter not a slave ship. Again she’s aboard because she’s attached to a man – this time the (white) cook. Again there’s a revolt. She’s part of it, but on the goodies’ side, with the captain. 

The opening credits bill her as a ‘dangerously beautiful native woman’ who is ‘menaced by a love-starved crew.’  From the very start, it’s not just her gender that’s the problem. It’s that she’s so alluring that she should be locked away. When she first gets on board, the soundtrack’s Honolulu-style lazy guitars twang the message that she’s all the more sexy because she’s black (but light-skinned and ‘beautiful’). When she serves food in the cramped mess in a low-cut white dress, the captain (James Mason) suggests she ‘wears something less revealing’ on duty. Later he commands her to stay in her cabin and read.  At this she protests she might as well be a prisoner. Indeed she might. And in this she’s typical of many women on ships – an object of desire that so upsets the whole crew that it would be better if she was absent. But… tension makes good movies.

Danger increases when she’s widowed. The tagline is ‘They murdered her man… and now she was at the mercy of the love-starved crew of the Berwind!’ This is reasonably plausible. Women without men’s protection could have a tough time on ships. But the point is that in this film Mahia is there just as an inevitable victim of future rapes. The celluloid excuse for displaying her flesh comes when Mahia rips her own bodice and pretends to have been sexually assaulted, in order to help quell the revolt.

Maybe some might see shooting a white mutineer as a heroic act. But Dandridge is not shown as heroine, just as additional trouble. So in both films the tense, intensive nature of a voyaging ship is made into an opportunity to cast woman as other, and black women’s as doubly other, with their troublesome sexiness and loyalty. No other setting is such a locus for conflict. And no other black woman has yet played such a troubling figure at sea. Dandridge is a path breaker.

Jo Stanley is the author of ‘Black Women on White Ships’, Black and Asian Studies Association Newsletter (April 2000). Find out more about her work at http://www.jostanley.biz/index.htm