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Date Posted: 09:25:17 09/16/12 Sun
Author: Jarrod
Subject: Ethnic stereotypes abound on BONANZA
This is not a criticism, or if it is, it's a constructive one...recent episodes have me thinking how much the writers relied on stereotypes to tell particular stories. Sometimes it works, if done in a humorous way, and sometimes it falls flat. Even with the comedy episodes, there can be a stinging bias contained within the stories and especially the performances, if they are done by actors of nationalities different than the ones they are portraying on screen. While I like the Rossi family of wine growers, Jack Kruschen is clearly not an Italian in real life and it is ultimately an exercise in tomfoolery and a cartoon at best. Penny Santon who plays the wife and mother made a career on television out of playing mamma mias who served up another plate of linguini and neurosis, notably as John Aprea's mother in 'Matt Houson' during the 1980s. The episode that bothered me most was Susan Strasberg as a gypsy in 'A Severe Case of Matrimony.' I had no problem with her acting and felt her work to be very entertaining, along with J. Carrol Naish, known for his vast repertoire of ethnic characterizations. But the story seemed like such a put-down that gypsy folk are beggars, thieves and schemers that by the time the final credits rolled I had to say I was offended on behalf of such people worldwide. Now an earlier episode where Louise Sorel plays a gypsy woman who has visions seemed much less reliant on stereotypes. She was a modern day Bernadette who just happened to be a gypsy girl-- so that I could accept. These other episodes clearly show the era in which they were made, well before political correctness was commonplace. Yet one cannot help but wonder why the writers were not more enlightened with such representations, even for comedy's sake, and whether or not audiences in the 1960s cringed as I do now. These are definitely not episodes I would show to kids today that I was trying to interest in the series.
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Re: Ethnic stereotypes abound on BONANZA -- lhoplover, 11:12:20 09/16/12 Sun [1]
If you are that sensitive, you better not watch any episode of "All in the Familly" with my buddy Archie Bunker and his nemesis George Jeferson.
Talk about politically incorrect!!!!!!!!!
Jose
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Re: Ethnic stereotypes abound on BONANZA -- Jarrod, 16:07:03 09/16/12 Sun [1]
@SWC: I think you are right, the change in political climate and the ivil rights movement probably influenced what was starting to air on network TV. @lhoplover: I think by the time we get to the early 70s, Norman Lear and his writers were subverting the stereotypes and poking fun at the way ethnic characters had been shown before.
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From Rick's notes -- SWC, 10:14:42 09/22/12 Sat [1]
...on "Enter Thomas Bowers":
Trivia: During the making of this controversial story, Pernell Roberts sounded off and cited it as "racist" in tone, and General Motors, the sponsor objected to it, with the civil rights movement going on at the time. The network backed David Dortort and it was made and aired, and was considered a landmark achievement in television, considering the racial bigotry that was plauging the country.
After the fifth season was wrapped, NBC was compiling the season's best episodes for the summer reruns in 1964, and David made sure that the network included this episode to be rerun on the NBC stations across the country. The stations heavily requested the episode for the summer rerun season, but at least two stations in the South, one in Texas and another in Georgia refused to air it and scheduled other programming instead.
I'm not sure what Pernell's objections were but he never needed much prodding to object to things.
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Look to the Stars -- SWC, 15:50:55 09/16/12 Sun [1]
This episode, (Season 3, Episode 26, 3/18/62), fascinates me. William Schallert plays a teacher who hss expelled a series of "trouble makers" or students who couldn't keep up from his class. At a hearing it's pointed out that they represent every ethinic group but his own and he realizes that his judgements were informed by his own bigotry.(Strangely, he didn't realize this before but I guess there is such a thing as subtle bigotry).
But what I noticed the most is that while Jewish and Indian and Mexican and Chjinese children and some others were represented, there was no black children. I wondered if the network decided, as they often did in those days, that people in the south wouldn't watch if there were any black characters, unless they conformed to stereotypes.
Two years later, Bonanza did "Enter Thomas Bowers, (Season 5, Episode 30, 4/26/64), which was aobut a black man and specifically about racial prejudice. My interpetation is that after two years of mostly favorable news coverage about the civil rights movement, TV executives were willing to attack bigotry, rather than support it in their decisions.
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Re: Look to the Stars -- Jarrod, 16:09:54 09/16/12 Sun [1]
Thanks, I will look into reviewing these episodes you have mentioned.
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Re: Any BONANZA episode is better than... -- Rick, 00:09:57 09/17/12 Mon [1]
... the TV-movies and its next generation!
R :)
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Re: Look to the Stars -- Steve, 12:24:23 09/19/12 Wed [1]
Here is "Look to the Stars"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiMHoozJeC4&feature=related
Re-watching it, I wondered if the absence of a back student was simply the writer or producer's decision that it was unlikely that there would have been a black child in Virginia City at that time. The general idea was that the episodes were taking place 100 years before they were first viewed and in 1862 the Civil War was far from voer and Lincoln had not emancipated the slaves so the surge of former slaves into the west would not have taken place yet.
Still, there could have been: the gold and silver rushes drew people form all over the place and ex- or escaped slaves might well have been there. And it would have been a good move for the producers to put a black child in the picture, considering what was going on in America in 1972. I have to feel that it was considered at some point and that somebody decided not to.
By the way, That's Penny Stanton as the mother.
"Enter Thomas Bowers", two years later:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P-t_JZetIs
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Question for Rick -- SWC, 10:24:35 09/22/12 Sat [1]
Do you know what opera singer dubbed Willaim Marshall's singing voice in "Enter Thomas Bowers"?
By the way, Thomas Bowers was a real person:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowers_(singer)
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Re: Question for Rick -- Rick, 18:25:50 09/22/12 Sat [1]
SWC,
Marshall did his own singing in the show. I don't think his voice was dubbed over. When I compiled rerun info, I came across two TV Guide listings in Texas and Georgia and "Bowers" was not aired that summer on those affiliates.
Rick
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Thanks -- SWC, 20:53:20 09/22/12 Sat [1]
I assumed he was dubbed but I note his Wikipedia article says he was an opera singer as well as an actor. His voice in the episode sure sounds terrific.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Marshall_(actor)
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Re: You're welcome -- Rick, 02:42:56 09/24/12 Mon [1]
You're welcome. I recall reading he sang opera. You can tell by listening to his voice--as he sings, it matches his speaking voice.
Rick :)
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Re: Ethnic stereotypes abound on BONANZA -- Ponderosa Pete, 23:12:32 09/17/12 Mon [1]
Most insightful comments, Jarrod. I think the best answer is probably the simplest. When you're in the business of producing 34 shows a season, a new show every 6 days, and you have to account to the network programming department, its censorship department (standards & practices), your corporate sponsor (in BONANZA's case, Chevrolet, which has to account to its parent company, General Motors, which doesn't want to risk doing anything that will adversely affect its "bottom line"), and you're under pressure to keep the ratings up and the violence down (as the sixties progressed), you're bound to churn out a few clunkers.
And David Dortort had a reputation for having weak scripts he bought fixed, or he'd know the reason why. And if the reason was . . . . they were too bad to be fixed . . . well, he'd have them fixed anyway! And the fact that they should've been abandoned would be evident on the screen. (E.g., "A Severe Case of Matrimony" to name one. And another -- my personal worst -- "The Lawmaker," and the laundry list of writers attached to that one tends to validate my theory.)
But as Lorne Greene said (and I am paraphrasing): "Nobody ever said that every show we do is great. But even if only 8 or ten shows per season are great, that's a lot more good theater than there'd be without BONANZA."
On the whole, despite the clunkers, BONANZA stands up pretty good against over shows, and stands the test of time, cuz we're still dissecting it, over 50 years later.
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Re: Ethnic stereotypes abound on BONANZA -- Jarrod, 14:53:31 09/23/12 Sun [1]
Good post! Some episodes stand up v-e-r-y well. It occurred to me that while we're having a discussion of ethnic stereotypes, as much as I love the actor and his comedy, Hop Sing is probably the most stereotypical character on the series, and even in the episodes that stand-up well, his presence sometimes detracts. I think most viewers tend to find him funny and relatively harmless so they overlook just how much he projects the writers' racist views of an entire culture of people.
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Re: Ethnic stereotypes abound on BONANZA -- kayleetara, 00:03:39 11/12/12 Mon [1]
Have you seen the episode where Hop Sing falls in love with a white woman? The only episode to really feature Hop Sing, it clearly addresses the prejudices against the Chinese. And there is another episode where the man running for sheriff frames a young Chinese boy for murder as he attempts to run the Chinese out of VC. Bonanza's concepts stands up very well to the test of time, though it did have its missteps. For example, Marlo Thomas playing a Chinese girl was pretty bad.
And Pernell Roberts was a social activist in the '60s that wanted his proposed wife to be an Indian and be played by a black actress. I thought that would have been an interesting concept. They ended up with Kathie Browne, who've I've always disliked for some reason. Didn't like her in "Wink of an Eye" (Star Trek) either.
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