Last weekend I took in the first five minutes of "The Male Animal" on the Turner Classic Movie channel. This was a 1942 movie based on a James Thurber play that I had never seen before. Five minutes was about all I needed since it seemed to be one of those standard comedies set on a college campus that usually has somebody like Mickey Rooney or Dick Powell running around in a raccoon coat trying to impress some cheerleader.
In the opening scene, Henry Fonda-playing a professor named Tommy Turner-exchanges repartee with his wife Ellen played by Olivia DeHavilland and their maid Cleota played by Hattie McDaniel. It seems that they were having a dinner party later that evening for some bigwigs at the Michigan university where he works, including the dean and a powerful trustee but Cleota has mistakenly put the caviar in the oven to heat up. Since DeHavilland played a Dixie bell in "Gone With the Wind" and McDaniel was playing essentially the same kind of eye-rolling part she played in the racist classic, that was enough for me.
About 90 minutes later, while surfing across the TV dial, I paused to watch a bit more of "The Male Animal" out of morbid curiosity. Fonda is in front of a packed lecture hall giving some kind of speech on the need for free speech on campus. That piqued my curiosity. But when it turned out that the context was his risking his job to read a prison letter by Bartolomo Vanzetti to his classroom, I decided to get my hands on the movie so much so that when I discovered it was not available from Netflix, I bought a VHS copy on amazon.com. As you will see from the case I try to build for the movie, it is one of the most striking Hollywood movies ever made on the question of academic freedom that resonates deeply with today's witch-hunting environment. It will have a strong appeal for left audiences today despite the stereotypical role played by Hattie McDaniel and despite its affinity for the collegiate comedies of the 30s and 40s, most of which deserve the obscurity they languish in.
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