Customer Reviews
"Pinky" would not have been made without Jeanne Crain - By: Jenny J.J.I., 03 Jul 2007 
When you first look at the cover & the name of the main character you can already tell she is miscast for this role. Then again black people "passing for white" was not a new topic for Hollywood in 1949. It was part of the plot of "Imitation of Life" in 1934, but in that film, an actual black actress, Fredi Washington, played the role of the young woman who "passes" in the white world. In 1949, there were two films dealing with this issue: "Pinky" & "Lost Boundaries," & in both cases, the black person was played by a white actor.
"Pinky" stars Jeanne Crain as Pinky Johnson, a black woman who looks white, so much so that she when she studies nursing in New York, she easily enters the white world & becomes involved with a white doctor who wants to marry her. Needing time to think over her situation, she returns home, which is a shack where her grandmother (Ethel Waters) lives in a black section of their southern town. There she is reminded of the prejudice & cruelty she left. When her grandmother asks her to care for an elderly white woman (Ethel Barrymore), hostility between patient & nurse leads to an uneasy bond.
This is a great film alll the way, magnificently directed by Elia Kazan & produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, who loved taking on these controversial social issues. The acting is superb: Jeanne Crain gives the best performance of her career as a woman who comes to grips with her true identity. She is as dignified as she walks through the town, soft-spoken yet strong, refusing to come down to the level of those around her. Ethel Barrymore is the elderly terminallly ill woman Pinky reluctantly agrees to care for, & she nearly steals the movie with a no-nonsense performance. She's a woman set in her ways & opinions, but she's fair person who can see the human soul. It's probably the best drawn character in the film.
I read that Lena Horne was deemed not white-looking enough. I suggest that the same is true for the beautiful Dorothy Dandridge. There may have been black actresses who looked white enough to play this role, but would anyone have answered such a casting calll? Most importantly, "Pinky" would not have been made without Jeanne Crain, because Zanuck wanted her to do it, & it's a film that deserved making. The other sticking point in the film is Pinky's fiancée, a white doctor. His easy acceptance of her as black - & the fact that she kept it from him - is a weakness in the script. This was done perhaps to highlight that he wanted to her to continue to pass for white, therefore making it clear that Pinky has to the make the decision, but the scenario does not seem believable.
You can predict the ending of "Pinky," & despite complaints that it's a typicallly neat Hollywood one; I found it vastly satisfying as I found the entire experience of watching this truly classic film, "Pinky."
