A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… you might have got away with jaw-dropping ethnic stereotypes like this. Where else than the much-maligned first Star Wars prequel might you find the Nemoidians - a back-stabbing, kimono-wearing, ‘Engrish’-accented trade contingent known for its greed and cowardice? Or the Toydarian junk store owner Watto – a money-obsessed, Yiddish-sounding, hook-nosed, hand-rubbing slaveholder? And finally, as a multicultural sorbet, how about Jar Jar Binks - the jive-talking, cheerfully subservient quasi-Jamaican bag-carrier? Essentially, this is Love Thy Neighbour set in space.  Wistful, frothy romance... elbow-length velvet gloves… Audrey Hepburn’s doe-eyed vulnerability… truly, in adapting Truman Capote’s novella, Blake Edwards created a timeless Hollywood classic. And in 2012, it was even selected for preservation in the US Library of Congress. Such adulation, however, overlooks one bizarre fly in this elegant ointment: Mr Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s myopic Japanese neighbour.  The idea? Some light comic relief from stormy affairs of the heart. The reality? Mickey Rooney, with ludicrous accent, hachimaki headband, prosthetic eyelids and buckteeth. Oh, and thick yellowface. This is why the movie has seen something of a re-assessment of late – with screenings cancelled and Rooney's portrayal described variously as “a cringe-inducing stereotype", “supremely racist” and “…an offensive ethnic caricature”. And the actor himself? “It breaks my heart,” Rooney said in a 2008 interview before his death last year. “If I’d known people would be so offended, I wouldn't have done it.”  Ever idly wondered why Michael Bay was never in the running to direct Selma? Meet Mudflap and Skids - the black-stereotyped android vans that purport to “bring the funny” in Bay’s second (or was it third?) Transformers outing. Despite being robots from the future, neither can read, both speak in a kind of foul-mouthed ghetto jive-speak, and one has gold-capped buck-teeth. They are also irredeemably moronic. This film was released in 2009, for reference.  But how could anyone be offended, you may ask - it’s Dumbo! With the big ears! The sad mum! The weird bit when he hallucinates while drunk! And, it turns out, some curious ethnic stereotyping. Even over 70 years ago, Disney were sailing close to the wind. For example, there’s the "Song of the Roustabouts", where faceless black circus workers erect the big top while singing, “We slave until we’re almost dead / We’re happy-hearted roustabout/… Keep on working / Stop that shirking / Pull that rope, you hairy ape!”. Or how about when Dumbo and Timothy Q. Mouse land in a tree after their pink elephant bender and meet five blackbirds – patently wisecracking, flashy-dressed caricatures of African-Americans, with a leader called… Jim Crow.  “This is the Eighties, man! It’s the Cosby decade! America loves black people!” And so begins C Thomas Howell’s justification for one of Hollywood’s more jaw-dropping high-concept movies: a rich white teenager takes “tanning pills” so he can qualify for a Harvard scholarship only available to African-American students. A premise, indeed, which could have elicited a rich, perceptive satire on race-relations… were it not for the shoe-polish thick blackface. And the Jheri curls. And calling women “lardy-assed white bitches”. And any of the other watermelon-chomping, jive-talking stereotyping that makes up the film’s 104 minute running time.  Ultimately, not even the presence of James Earl Jones, Leslie Nielsen and Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus saved the film from protests, being castigated by the NAACP, and inevitable box office doom. Although it did change history, if you believe New York Press writer Armond White – who claimed the movie somehow predicted the rise of Barack Obama, a real-life student at Harvard Law School in 1988.  Included in the interests of parity, this is the reverse racist modern equivalent of Soul Man - the story of two African American FBI agents attempting to solve a series of high profile Hollywood socialite kidnappings. Which, in the world of the Wayans brothers, means disguising themselves as the world’s most implausible teenage Caucasian girls: dragged up, caked in whiteface and singing along tunelessly to Vanessa Carlton. Offensive? Only if you actually paid real money to see it.  Pre-empting the Eighties buddy cop genre, Richard Rush’s action-comedy saw two lovable San Francisco police officers try to keep a notorious mobster alive long enough to testify. But hang on: that’s “lovable” in a particularly Seventies way. James Caan stars as the unapologetically bigoted Detective Freebie, while Alan Arkin (wearing brownface) plays “The Bean” - his Mexican-American partner. You can see where this is heading: specifically two hours of breathtaking race gags, interspersed with the stupidest car chases the world has ever seen. And yet while the marauding pair beat up hippies, take bribes, slap women around and call people “fags” with impunity, it’s not all knockabout Seventies japery.  As Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman argue in their gay-subtext documentary The Celluloid Closet, the homophobia gets pretty vicious, especially when the duo confront the film’s chief villain - a cross-dressing kidnapper credited only as “Transvestite”. Lisping and preening, the “sicko tranny” finally meets his end being gunned down in a ladies toilet, lying half naked next to a sanitary towel dispenser. No matter: Stanley Kubrick later called Freebie And The Bean the best film of 1974.  True to Ian Fleming’s often unflinching original James Bond novels, the industry’s first globalised movie franchise features enough moments to creakingly raise a Roger Moore eyebrow. From misogynist beginnings in 1964’s Goldfinger - where 007, let’s face it, effectively rapes the lesbianism out of Pussy Galore – to the cartoon black caricatures of 1973’s Live And Let Die, featuring perhaps every gangster/voodoo/island-dictator stereotype you can think of. But nothing quite tops 1967’s You Only Live Twice for sensitive multiculturalism. Screenwritten by Roald Dahl, it sees Sean Connery go ''undercover'' as a Japanese man - a process that involved having prosthetic eyelids added and yellow-face applied and getting his chest hair waxed by skimpily dressed girls.  Brace yourself: as the first film made in compliance with Lars von Trier’s infamously austere Dogme 95 Manifesto, this controversial comedy-drama is taboo-smashing at its most uncomfortable. In short, a bored group of Copenhagen eccentrics attempt to release their "inner idiot" by behaving in public as if they were developmentally disabled. Or, as the group’s leader Stoffer calls it, “spassing” – yes, the Danish equivalent of the English word "spaz".  Add in some general drooling, Jackass-style antics and a gangbang featuring actual penetrative sex, and maybe you start to agree with BBC film critic Mark Kermode. At the film’s first screening at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, he shouted “Il est merde!” repeatedly from the back of the auditorium, before being ejected.  Now Hollywood-ese for “enormous turkey”, Martin Brest’s notorious gangster romance would prove a messy, career-ending box office catastrophe. But it did excel in other areas. Mind-boggling homophobia, for one – such as when Ben Affleck’s grubby street crim manages to “turn” lesbian Jennifer Lopez back to the “right side”, by dint of simply making endless anti-gay jokes. But even more astonishing is the focus of the movie’s central kidnapping: Brian, the mentally challenged younger brother of a powerful federal prosecutor.  Bad enough that Brian’s disability is characterised by strange noises, yelling out obscenities at random, and referring to ejaculations as "penis sneezes". Worse, however, is Justin Bartha's portrayal, conveying mental illness by staggering shambolically and pushing his teeth out of his mouth. Honestly, there are mid-1980s schoolboy impressions of Joey Deacon with more warmth.  True, even classics like 1939’s Gone With The Wind have been accused of romanticising slavery. But none managed to turn racial subjugation into a family film quite like Disney. Set in reconstruction-era Georgia, the studio’s first ever live-action feature told the story of Uncle Remus - a cheerful and possibly magical black ex-slave who loves waxing lyrical about "tar babies" and cheering up little Johnny, a local white boy, with African-American folktales of Brer Rabbit and his pals. And yet this “lighthearted family drama” jarred even in the Forties.  Upon its release the NAACP said the film “gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship” and “helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery”. Released at a time when black filmgoers were still forced to sit at the back of the cinema, Song Of The South was rose-tinted to the point of offensive. (Case in point: lead actor James Baskett was unable to attend the movie's premiere in Atlanta because local hotels refused to put him up.) Which is why it remains the most notorious movie in the Disney back catalogue - and, aside from a 1986 anniversary screening, has stayed locked in the Mickey Mouse vault ever since. Although its influence still lingers: visit any Disney theme park and you’ll still hear the signature tune “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, which won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Song, piped mercilessly into your ears.  In the Pink Panther series of movies, Peter Sellers and director Blake Edwards had already created Cato Fong, Inspector Clouseau’s maltreated and inexpertly hacky-choppy manservant. Forgivable, perhaps - although tellingly, the character was scrapped in the 2006 Steve Martin reboot for fear of causing offence in Chinese markets.  Less explicable, however, is Sellers donning brownface to play Hrundi V. Bakshi – an Indian actor who accidentally gets invited to a lavish Hollywood dinner party and “makes terrible mistakes based upon ignorance of Western ways.” Cue two hours of improvised slapstick, Indian stereotyping (they really like elephants!) and a particularly cringing Apu-style accent. Although the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was purportedly a huge fan, so who knows.  Best known as Adam Sandler's bit-part-playing stooge, Schneider has spent much of the last two decades carefully carving a reputation as the man of a thousand faces. Almost all of them are offensive in one way or another – from food-spitting fundamentalist Palestinians in You Don't Mess with the Zohan to wildly gesticulating Native Americans in Bedtime Stories to boss-eyed Hawaiians in 50 First Dates. But bottom of the curve had to be “Asian Minister” in 2007’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - where he donned a bowl-cut hair cut, heavy prosthetics and the kind of hah-so accent Mickey Rooney might have called his agent about. Truly: a one-man United Nations of awful.  So you’re Mike Myers, the most bankable comedy star in Hollywood history. You’re Austin Powers. You’re Shrek. You’re on a Canadian stamp. What next? Sit at home counting palletfuls of dollars? Or – here’s an idea – loosely cobble together two hours of painful Indian caricatures in a “downright antifunny” depiction of Hinduism? Aint it Cool even called his portrayal of Maurice Pitka, the titular moustache-twiddling holy man, as “career killing”. But it isn’t even the worst part. No, in among endless cringing accents and elephant copulation, that honour falls to a cameo from Sir Ben Kingsley, playing a cross-eyed love guru by the name of… “Tugginmypudha.” Yes, the same Sir Ben Kingsley who also won an Oscar playing… Gandhi.
Disney's dirty secret, gleefully offensive Seventies action, a shameful entry in the Star Wars canon, and more movies that taste forgot. By Chris Bell