Clarence Muse

Fifty years in American film, more than 150 pictures, and a place in history that arrived at the beginning rather than the end: Clarence Muse was the first African American to appear in a starring role in a major studio film, the 1929 Hearts in Dixie. He was also a screenwriter, a director, a singer and a composer, and he was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1973.

The credits collected here show what that career looked like from the inside, and it is not comfortable reading. Between 1931 and 1947 he is a coach driver in White Zombie, a Pullman porter in Shadow of a Doubt, a porter on a train in The Thin Man Goes Home, a servant in The Black Swan, a hat check man in Love Crazy, a doorkeeper at the Supreme Court in The Talk of the Town. Eight of the twenty credits listed here are uncredited parts. That was the arrangement Hollywood offered a Black actor of his generation, and Muse took the work and held the standard inside it, which is why his face is familiar from films that never printed his name.

The end of the run is better. He is Cudjo in Buck and the Preacher in 1972, part of a Western made by and about Black Americans, then Snapper in Car Wash. His last credit here is The Black Stallion in 1979, as Snoe, a small warm part in a film with a genuine feel for old men and boys. Fifty years is a long time to keep turning up.