Waitors

This morning in Sainsbury's I queued for a coffee; there was only one person in front of me but the waiter/coffee server, who was dark skinned, probably an Ethiopian, was so slow in everthing he did that when the woman in front of me said " pot of tea please and four lattes" I thought better of waiting and just sat down and re4ad the newspaper. Probably he was in training; there was no one there to help him and I did feel a little sorry for him but feeling sorry for him was not going to hasten the arrival of my beverage.
He remindedf me of those "darkies", as they were then called, who appeared in films in the late 30's and early 40's and who always appeared slow and rather daft. I recall one whose name I never knew, a servant to Bob Hope in two films one of which was "The Cat and the Canary" an excellent thriller/comedy; he spoke in a "Down-South" accent and did everything wrong so that Bob Hope could make fun of him. We in the audience laughed along with it all. You don't laugh now. It's not surprising that blacks in America (and here) are so sensitive to criticism or suggestions that they are somehow inferior when films like that made them appear stupid.
Times have changed and, in general, for the better.
I was reading David Thomson on the D.W.Griffith film "Birth of a Nation" in which blacks are treated contemtuously and cruelly; Griffith makes the Ku Klux Klan to be the heroes of his film. The film when it was made was very popular and, indeed, was graetly responsible for the uprising of the Klan so that they were rejuvenated into carrying out further lynches. Thomson believes it to be a horribly one-sided and prejudiced film but that it has qualities that make it fascinating. He concludes: "Yes, you should see this appalling film."
I doubt if even an art house or film society would dare show it these days.
I have just seen D.W.Griffiths's silent film "Orphans of the Storm" and that is terrific. I once showed a BFI copy of this film (abridged to half an hour) to a group of Technical College students in a Film Study class. When I asked, at the end of the year, which film or part of film they enjoyed most out of the many I showed them, they all said "Orphans of the Storm".