Welcome to Film School! This is a column focused on movie history and all the stars, filmmakers, events, laws and, yes, movies that helped write it. Film School is a place to learn—no homework required.
Man (Uncredited). Singer (Uncredited). Carter (Uncredited). Entertainer (Uncredited). Henry—Hotel Porter (Uncredited). Porter (Uncredited). Porter on Train (Uncredited). Kyba. Frank (Uncredited). Porter (Uncredited). Hotel Porter (Uncredited). Porter (Uncredited). Ben—Bank Janitor (Uncredited). Porter. Porter (Uncredited).
Clarence Muse was a true multi-hyphenate. He was a composer. He could sing opera. He had a law degree. He ran a theater. He wrote sketches and plays and stories. He was the first African-American Broadway director. Most prominently of all, he was an actor—and one full of talent, charm and gravitas. Because he was a Black actor who worked in Hollywood during the classic era, however, the monumentally talented Muse was rarely given roles that were worthy of him.
That opening list of parts did not come from when he was just starting out, but 15 years into his movie career. There wasn’t any real trajectory for him, no bigger roles as he became more well-known; in his whole time as a classic Hollywood mainstay, for every part that gave him something significant to do, there were five that largely involved a few minutes of him carrying plates or luggage for the film’s white stars.
Clarence Muse had established himself as a popular stage personality long before Hollywood came a-calling. When it did, in 1929, to ask him to star in the first all-Black feature musical Hearts in Dixie, he requested the then-exorbitant weekly paycheck of $1,250, assuming he’d be turned down. He was not, and thus began a long, complicated relationship with the movies.
He was working in Hollywood around the same time as Hattie McDaniel, the first Black actress to win an Academy Award (for her performance as Mammy in Gone With the Wind). McDaniel spent her career fielding jibes from activists about her playing an endless string of roles in servitude to white characters. Her famous response was, “I’d rather make $700 a week playing a maid than earn $7 a day being a maid.” Muse was very much of the same mindset.
Like McDaniel, Clarence Muse was an advocate for change from the inside out, all too aware of the industry’s racial precarity, and of the opinion that imperfect representation was better than none at all. And like McDaniel, he was often subject to harsh criticism from those that disagreed; the nickname, “Hollywood’s perennial Uncle Tom” followed him throughout his career, all the way to his New York Times obituary. Nevertheless, in the face of ardent disapproval from some quarters, he continued to battle for the dignity of his characters, even if those characters were largely bit parts and stereotypes.
In Safe in Hell, Muse is Newcastle, the porter in a hotel on a fictional tropical island, claimed to be the only place in the world which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with America—that’s why Gilda (Dorothy Mackaill) heads there after killing a man in self-defense. The hotel is full of lecherous, dangerous men; Newcastle and his Black colleague Leonie (the resplendent Nina Mae McKinney) are the only people Gilda can trust. To quote Thomas Cripps from his 1977 book, Slow Fade to Black, “The whites live off their pasts; the blacks off their carefully cultivated principles, hidden under their cool manners. They rise above the script.” Both Muse and McKinney refused to speak their lines in the offensively written dialect; Muse even affected a British accent, for good measure.
Invisible Ghost is a ridiculous movie, with a plot that revolves around Bela Lugosi being hypnotized into smothering victims to death with his dressing gown. Despite his legendary status, Lugosi was never a particularly strong actor, and was sometimes downright laughable; though Muse is just playing his butler (of course!), it’s striking to notice how much more actorly authority he possesses than the film’s actual lead.
Muse co-starred with the other king of the Universal Classic Monster movies, Boris Karloff, in Night World. It saw Muse as Tim, the doorman at gangster Karloff’s shady club, and the heart of the film—he’s the first character we meet, and arguably our audience surrogate. Like Safe in Hell, Night World is full of disreputable types, and Tim is one of few honorable souls depicted; while Karloff’s gangster has committed many crimes, none hits us so hard as his refusal to let Tim visit his ailing wife in the hospital until it’s too late. That Muse actually gets to have a life outside of his relation to the white characters makes Night World depressingly atypical—to get parts like that, he’d usually have to have a hand in the production himself.
The most important instance of that was Broken Strings, which Muse co-wrote, and in which he plays Arthur Williams: a renowned classical violinist who suffers a ruinous hand injury. With the family’s finances threatened, Arthur’s son (William Washington) starts making money by playing jazz music in clubs, which horrifies the jazz-hating Arthur.
Although Broken Strings is no masterpiece—the non-Muse performances are largely weak, and the screenplay’s stakes hard to believe—it remains a remarkable production, even in the sheer fact of its existence. There are no white characters anywhere, and without being forced into servitude, the Black characters are free to pursue their own interests and passions. During the classic Hollywood era, this was only happening in “race films,” movies with all-Black casts produced for Black audiences, saddled with far more budgetary constraints than their studio counterparts.
Another such example was an 11-minute short, The Broken Earth, which sees Muse’s sharecropper praying his dying young son back to life. The heavy religiosity could have been off-putting in the hands of another actor, but Muse’s immense gravitas makes those 11 minutes mesmerizing. Watching today, it underlines the tragedy of how rare it was to see Muse command the screen.
And The Broken Earth was a rarity. For the majority of his career, Clarence Muse continued to slog away in studio films, diligently investing tiny, often offensive stock characters with dignity. After 30 years of that, he more or less retired from the big screen following his appearance in 1959’s Porgy and Bess.
In the 1970s, when he was in his 80s, Clarence Muse was brought out of retirement, and got the chance to work with the next generation of Black movie stars: Richard Pryor in Car Wash, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier in Buck and the Preacher. He died in 1979, on the same day his final film, The Black Stallion, premiered.
Looking back on his legacy, the speech his violinist Arthur gives to an audience full of smiling Black faces at the beginning of Broken Strings seems appropriate:
Friends, I am lost for words. I have struggled year after year to make myself worthy of your appreciation, and I am overjoyed to play for my folks. It matters not if I shall play for the people of the world, there’s a kinship tonight that strikes sheer, that will live forever in my memory. Something that only you and I can understand. Thanks, goodnight.
For our final character actor, we’ll explore the life of a man who killed the husband of his lover with his bare hands—and then continued to have a successful Hollywood career. Next week: Paul Kelly.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.