Because times have gotten a little tough of late, Harry Henderson
(David Bruce) decides to fire the gardener and have himself and his wife
(Jane Frazee) and son (Stuffy Singer) do the yardwork themselves on
Saturdays. But as soon as it's Saturday, everyone in the family finds a
perfect (and costly) excuse not to do his or her share, and they all
burden their black maid Beulah (Hattie McDaniel) with the job - and Beulah
hasn't got an ounce of talent for gardening, nor is she fond of the
extraload of (unpaid) work. But she is a benign woman so she does what she
can ... and almost kills Harry's prizewinning rosebush in the process.
Panicking, she takes the rosebush to the local flowershop to have it
examined - but then the shopowner accidently sells it. He promises to get
the rosebush back until tomorrow, and in the meantime, he lends her
another, bigger rosebush, to be returned the next day. Harry fails to
notice his prize-winning rosebush has been replaced and compliments Beulah
on her gardening skills, much to her dismay. The enxt day, back at the
flowershop, all the shopowner can offer her is a yet bigger rosebush,
since the new owner of Harry's rosebush refuses to give it back - and now
Harry really does get ecstatic over Beulah's green thumb, so much so that
she has to bribe the new owner of the bush with a turkey dinner to return
it. But while that man gets a turkey dinner, Beulah lets her employers
suffer by giving them coldcuts for Saturday dinner - until Harry agrees to
rehire the gardener again. Hattie McDaniel's comedy is spot on,
and as much was to be expected, but the rest of this episode is just
standard 1950's sitcom fare, even if it has a black woman in the lead.
What's more important than the pure story of the piece thoughis its
underlying politics. Sure, on the surface, this is a story about a white
family and their funny black housekeeper, as blacks were pretty much
reduced to subservient roles (if they were shown at all) in that era. But
on closer inspection, Beulah's white family doesn't strike one as
particularly smart or particularly likeable, in fact they are snotty
suburbaniteswho shy away from menial labour but aren't too intelligent
either. Beulah on the other hand is the only active element in the family,
and while she might not be a philosopher in the classic meaning of the
word, she is able to use common sense to solve her problems - which is
actually an interesting approach considering the series was produced in
the early 1950's, when racism was much more overt in the USA than
nowadays.
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