Pinky

Elia Kazan directed this, one of Hollywood's early attacks on racism, starring Jeanne Crain as Patricia "Pinky" Johnson. Patricia is a light-skinned black woman who is studying nursing at a New England medical institute. A white doctor, Thomas Adams (William Lundigan), has fallen in love with ...more

Part of the post-war cycle of "social problem" films and one of the first Hollywood productions to tackle American racism head-on (but with a Hollywood casting compromise), Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949) examines Southern bigotry through the experience of an African American woman who can "pass" for white. With Jeanne Crain's Pinky caught between her love for a white Northern doctor and her allegiance to her grandmother Ethel Waters, Kazan (taking over for John Ford) schematically yet effectively ...more