It's not uncommon these days for performers to reach the room at the top by express elevator; but for Barbara McNair, the trip has been anything but fast or smooth. Though she's now established as one of the most sought-after night-club singers in the country, and has just launched a new career as a film star in If He Hollers Let Him Go, Barbara has more than paid her dues on the long way up. Starting out in Racine, Wisconsin, she got her first break from her parents--a foundry worker and a housekeeper at a retarded-children's institute--who saved their money and sent her to study music at UCLA. But after a year there, Barbara decided she needed experience more than theory and headed for New York, where countless auditions led finally to a monthlong singing stint at the Village Vanguard and a booking on the Arthur Godfrey Show. After that, and a brief go at a Broadway show, she began crisscrossing the country on the night-club circuit, worked in the national company of No Strings and interspersed frequent television appearances with dramatic roles in such shows as I Spy and The Eleventh Hour. But making If He Hollers, due for release later this month, has turned her on more than anything she's done. "I'm hooked," she explains. "I love singing, but it's hard to really develop a mood in a song; it's too short. Somehow, I feel freer in front of a movie camera; I can get down to the bottom pit of emotion." We couldn't agree more, as her nude love scene for If He Hollers--exclusively previewed on the following pages--amply demonstrates. We asked Barbara, as a bonus, to further mix her media credits by posing for a special Playboy shooting, above, off the set. Barbara sees If He Hollers Let Him Go--a tense account of the escape and capture of a Southern Negro convict--as an important advance in the civil rights of film making. After finally dumping the Stepin Fetchit stereotype, she feels, Hollywood created an equally false and condescending image: the Negro as an asexual automation, virtually devoid of romance. "Negroes never seemed to kiss and hug," says Barbara. But If He Hollers changes all that--and then some. As the fugitive condemned murderer, Raymond St. Jacques is not just black but human; during the relentless chase, his mind flashes back to happier --and more amorous--times with his night-club-singer girlfriend, played by Barbara. "This picture really socks it to all those other film makers who wouldn't allow love between a black man and woman," she declares. "The Indians win this time, baby." Barbara admits having had some reservations about doing the erotically explicit love scene shown on these pages: "I had already experienced public nudity at Esalen Institute's sulphur baths in Big Sur. It was there that I realized I had kind of been brainwashed, and I was mad at myself for being hung up about it. But I had to consider the possibility of sensationalism in the movie. Then the director explained that he wanted to contrast the tenderness of the remembered love scene with the brutality of the present, and I forgot my objections. Besides, screen nudity goes along with a lot of other things that are happening today. This country is finally coming around to the sort of freedom Europe's had for a long time. Things are opening up, in films, music, politics--everywhere. People are looking for a more honest approach to life, and that includes a more honest approach to the body."
