D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967) represent opposing poles in the treatment of the African-American male in Hollywood films. The portrayal of black men in both films is absurd, but their intentions were quite different. Griffith, the Southern-born director whose great career was a milestone in the development of the medium, claimed until his death that his film was not racist despite the thousands of African Americans and white Americans who explained why it was, indeed, a landmark in screen racism. His conception of the old stereotype of the sexually predatory black male, intent on despoiling white females, gave cinematic form to one of the most prevalent myths involved in white fear of black people. Kramer, on the other hand, was a devout liberal interested in furthering the cause of integration and he made a film that was intended to deal a death-blow to this stereotype. But his answer was to provide a black man so nearly flawless that the character tumbled over into what would have been a new stereotype except that it proved, for the most part, to be the first and last of its kind. In a way, however, the character of Gus, the renegade Negro in The Birth of a Nation (played by a white actor in blackface) who aspires to no higher goal than the white woman, was also the last of his kind. In the fifty years between these two films the many stereotypes of black people that were employed in Hollywood films included the black male primarily as emasculated "toms" or "coons," playing a range of rascally, sometimes clever and sometimes simpleminded characters who were little threat to anything but the self-respect of black audiences. But the hypersexual buck who threatens the virtue of white heroines disappeared from the screen. Indeed, in general, black men who appeared in Hollywood films were either sexless or, at most, comically interested in black women. Thi...