DYNAMIC DUOS PART 8: RACIAL EQUALITY . . . IN 1940?!?

What's all this Lethal Weapon malarchy? Hollywood's first integrated buddy team was the unheralded and forgotten pairing of Mantan Moreland and Frankie Darro. In a series of films beginning with "Irish Luck", Mantan & Frankie were amateur sleuths fighting crooks in hotels, radio stations and trucking companies. The strange thing for the time was that both men were genuine friends and treated each other as equals. Both men were on equal economic and social footing; in "The Gang's All Here" Frankie and Mantan were both truck drivers, in "Up In the Air" both men worked in a hotel, etc. Unlike all other Hollywood product of the era (and even long after), these films depicted a white guy who treated a black guy as an equal partner and that, I think, makes these films remarkable. Any person of color in forties films was ALWAYS a servant/employee of the white establishment figure; Mantan and Frankie was co-workers, good friends and equal partners. The white authority figures in this series of films would still look down on Mantan as a menial but Frankie got the same treatment. And each time it happened, Mantan was ready with a barbed gag line to make the audience laugh. Mantan Moreland would later be crucified in the 60's by the NAACP for so-called "demeaning" roles but this was completely unfair and hurt the actor deeply. Unlike such actors as Stepin Fetchit, Moreland didn't bow and scrape but usually had a witty remark to make to "the man". The whole point of these movies was that Mantan and Frankie were the underdogs; working class stiffs who were just trying to get by but always got mixed up in some comical caper. At the end of these films, our two poor laborers always ended up on top as they watched the bad guys get carted away to justice. Along the way, Frankie and Mantan managed to demonstrate that an integrated equal partnership had prevailed. All this during the hopelessly segregated forties. Not bad for a bunch of poverty row quickie B-pictures. Not bad for Mantan Moreland and Frankie Darro.