In I Passed for White, a middle class girl, who looks white but is “secretly” black, marries a wealthy white man. This leads to conflict, as she tries to hide her past from his racist family.
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One of the greatest Broadway musicals comes to the screen in this tale of music, racial bigotry and enduring love as outsized as the American heartland set aboard a Mississippi River Show Boat. Magnolia Brown has grown up onboard a sailing theater, plying the river from town to town to entertain people, and she has always dreamed of a life on stage. When the star’s, Julie LaVerne part African American ancestry is revealed and she is forced to leave, Magnolia steps in to take Julie’s place on stage.
Magnolia soon falls in love with her leading man, the handsome gambler and rogue, Gaylord Ravenal (Howard Keel—Kiss Me Kate, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), and the two marry, have a daughter and live happily–for a while. But Ravenal’s gambling debts force Magnolia to find a job, and Julie LaVerne again leaves her starring role–this time voluntarily–to give Magnolia the break she needs, an opportunity that leads to stardom.
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Fred Astaire sang and danced his last musical lead in Finian’s Rainbow, director Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of the 1947 Broadway hit. Astaire plays an Irish rogue who plants a stolen crock of leprechaun gold in the soil near Fort Knox to reap what he thinks will be a rich harvest. In tow are his spirited daughter (Petula Clark), a lovestruck leprechaun (Tommy Steele) and a bigoted Southern senator (Keenan Wynn) transformed by misbegotten magic.
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Robert Young, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan star in this noir classic, the first Hollywood film to confront anti-Semitism. When a police detective and an army sergeant investigate the murder of a Jewish man, their search leads to a soldier whose strong feelings of anti-Semitism became violent during a night of drinking.
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