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.