https://sites.tufts.edu/amandalee2026/2025/02/16/out-of-the-past-jacques-tourneur/

Ms. Lee moves into an examination of the social understructure that makes its appearance in an early scene from OUT OF THE PAST, where Jeff Markham (Bailey) tracks down Kathie Moffat's maid in a Harlem nightclub.

All the observations are solid, but Ms. Lee isn't yet a noirista--thus she doesn't know to namecheck the actress playing Eunice (Theresa Harris). If she'd done so, an added resonance to the race barriers she discusses would amplify her comments. Theresa Harris was attractive, but she wasn't Lena Horne (or, later, Dorothy Dandridge), so she was relegated to playing maids and nurses for the bulk of her career in Hollywood. She did so in more than a hundred films from 1929 to 1958, with more than two dozen roles in pre-Code films alone--often stealing the scene or scenes she was in.



Her filmography is astonishing:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0365382/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t28

Her quote (posted at the IMDB) would make a perfect coda for Ms. Lee's presentation:

I never felt the chance to rise above the role of maid in Hollywood movies. My color was against me. The fact that I was not 'hot' stamped me as either an uppity 'Negress' or relegated me to the eternal role of stooge or servant. I can sing but so can hundreds of other girls. My ambitions are to be an actress. Hollywood had no parts for me.