NFR Project: 'The Emperor Jones' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Emperor Jones’

Dir: Dudley Murphy

Scr: DuBose Heyward

Pho: Ernest Haller

Ed: Grant Whytock

Premiere: Sept. 29, 1933

76 min.

Another problematic entry. It is a record of a great central performance in a great American play. It is also irredeemably racist.

The Emperor Jones tells the story of Brutus Jones, a lowly Black Pullman porter who schemes his way into power. After killing a man, he winds up in prison, and escapes after killing a guard. He takes over a backwards country in the tropics, and begins lording it over the natives. Finally they, tired of his oppression, revolt. Seeking to make his escape, Jones flees through the jungle. As his pursuers grow closer, he begins to hallucinate, reliving past portions of his life, as he slowly loses his grip on reality.

The great American playwright Eugene O’Neill premiered this play in 1920, anchored by a great central performance by Charles Sidney Gilpin. The play, O’Neill’s second, was his first big hit. However, Gilpin objected to the extensive use of the n-word in the script, and changed it to “Negro” in his performances. When the play was revied in 1925, Paul Robeson was chosen to be the leading man.

Robeson was an American phenomenon. An academic and athletic star, he earned his law degree before devoting his life to acting and singing. His powerful baritone voice, expressive face, and husky frame made him a natural leading man.

O’Neill’s play is in essence a monologue interspersed with flashbacks and visions; for the screenplay, adapted by DuBose Heyward, who is best known for writing Porgy and Bess, made the plot linear instead of impressionistic, as was O’Neill’s approach. This removes some of the incantatory intensity of the original, but it delineates a rise and fall expertly.

The director, Dudley Murphy, had previously made shorts starring Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith, as well as earlier experimental films; this experience was thought to qualify to treat this subject. Seeking to work outside the structure, and strictures, of Hollywood, the film was produced by two individuals and filmed on East Coast sound stages.

The problem at the film’s heart is this – can white writers and directors tell Black stories with any authority? For instance, censors declared that it was not to show a Black man killing a white man, so that moment was excised. In addition, actress Fredi Washington was forced to wear blackface, lest she be mistaken for a white woman (Washington was relatively light in color). In an atmosphere like this, how can an enlightened creation take place?

Jones is written as a powerful and three-dimensional character, but he is still a Black man perceived through a white sensibility. The extensive use of the n-word, and the tendency to see Black culture as an inherently inferior imitation of white culture, now distract from the genuine drama to be found in the film.

The most powerful part of the film is its end, when Jones is on the run, which is closest to the form and spirit of the original play. Robeson is amazing in the title role, moving from smooth self-assurance to outright, screaming frenzy at the end. For all its flaws, Jones is invaluable for preserving his performance.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Footlight Parade.

NFR Project: 'Duck Soup' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Duck Soup’

Dir: Leo McCarey

Scr: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin

Pho: Henry Sharp

Ed: LeRoy Stone

Premiere: Nov. 17, 1933

68 min.

If you think the Marx Brothers are the funniest comedians on film, you are right. If you think this was the funniest film they made, you are right. Therefore, this is the funniest film ever made.

The Marx Brothers had the funniest act in vaudeville, an anarchic explosion of comic energy that was so potent, W.C. Fields would not follow them on stage. Groucho (Julius) was quick with quips, and donned a greasepaint moustache and eyebrows, specializing in playing shysters and conmen. Chico (Leonard) played a comic Italian caricature, and Harpo (Adolph) worked silently, in a bushy wig, with only a horn and a harp to communicate with. (Zeppo stuck around through the five Paramount pictures they made, but he was a straight man.)

Together they rose in the business, disrespecting their material and constantly straying away from it, improvising and addressing the audience. Fortunately, when they did it, undisciplined as they were, they killed. Their aggressively transgressive approach meant that everything normally taken for granted was questioned, mocked, turned inside out. They took reality and made beautiful nonsense out of it.

Their initial movies were adaptations of stage shows (which allowed to perfect their material in front of a live audience), and included musical interludes, a nominal couple of ingenue and juvenile, and a semblance of a plot. Duck Soup was different, made from the whole cloth by a set of gifted comedy writers. It casts aspersions on patriotism, government, the justice system, society, marriage, and common sense.

Groucho is Rufus T. Firefly, who for some reason is chosen to be the head of Freedonia by the obtuse Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont, a potent comic foil). Before long, he’s in a running battle with the ambassador from neighboring Sylvania (Louis Calhern, in an excellent supporting role), leading both countries to the brink of war. Meanwhile, Chicolini (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo), spies for Sylvania, attempt to steal Freedonia’s defense plans. (Their musical interludes are excised here.)

This all culminates in Chicolini’s trial for treason, which soon goes off the rails. (“Look at Chicolini, an abject figure.” “I abject.”) during the middle of the proceedings, Sylvania declares war. Everyone springs into a minstrel-show production number, shouting in jubilation that Freedonia is going to war.

At this point, the movie rips free of reality and flies off into the stratosphere. Groucho commands his army, changing uniform in every take. Harpo puts on a sandwich board and goes out to recruit volunteers. Enemies are pelted with fruit. Even Mrs. Teasdale gets showered with foodstuffs. And the film just ends.

The Marx Brothers were blessed to have Leo McCarey as director. McCarey had honed his comedy skills making Laurel and Hardy shorts, and he knew how to stage a gag and get every laugh possible out of it. Harpo’s battles with Edgar Kennedy, the famous mirror scene, Groucho’s opening number, all use the same crisp, precise timing McCarey was renowned for. McCarey also knew how absurd he could get without losing the audience. All these traits magnified the Brothers’ natural humorousness and raise the film to the status of a surreal masterpiece.

After this film, the Marx Brothers would move to MGM, where producer Irving Thalberg thought their movies would sell better if they had musical numbers to punctuate them, and tasking the Brothers with helping a young couple achieve a happy ending. This set of changes to their anarchic style made them safer, more palatable, although many sequences from these later films can also be termed classic.

In Duck Soup, for the last time the comedians would work at full power, making fun of anything that came their way.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Emperor Jones.

NFR Project: 'Baby Face' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Baby Face’

Dir: Alfred E. Green

Scr: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Daryl Zanuck

Pho: James Van Trees

Ed: Howard Bretherton

Premiere: July 1, 1933

76 min.

Here’s another pre-Code film that got audiences all hot and bothered.

Technically, it was produced under the auspices of the censorious Code, but the Code was not strictly enforced until 1934, so it squeaked in under the wire. In it, a lack of sexual modesty leads to . . . not to doom and damnation, but to great things.

The movie stars a young Barbara Stanwyck as the ravishing and streetwise Lily. She’s a kid working in her father’s speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania. She’s routinely manhandled by the miners and factory workers that frequent the joint, and we soon find out that her dad’s been pimping her out since she was 14.

When her dad dies in an accident, despairing as to how to advance, she is counseled by an older man to follow the doctrine of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” She can’t get through his books, but she gets the message, and soon begins sleeping her way to the top.

She leaves for New York, stowing away on a freight train with her African American friend Chico. When they’re busted by a railroad guard, Lily trades a roll in the hay for the free trip to the big city. Her body is negotiable tender. In the big city, she sleeps her way into an entry-level position at a big corporation. Then she sleeps with a young executive, played by John Wayne who recommends her to his boss. Whom she sleeps with.

As she rises in the company, so the camera rises up the side of an enormous skyscraper to show her new location in the hierarchy. (Up and up the phallic symbol she goes, finally coming out on top.) Another executive and his father-in-law fall for her, leading to a murder/suicide. Seemingly above the scandal, she then hooks up with the playboy bank president. She marries him.

Is their no comeuppance for this sinful young woman. No, not really. The bank folds due to mismanagement, and her husband is blamed. He asks her for financial help (she’s saved up half a million dollars in cash and jewelry), but she refuses. He shoots himself.

Badly wounded, he is transported to the hospital, and she goes with him, because she loves him, by golly. Her money and gems scatter across the ambulance floor, and she states that none of it matters. Curtain.

So there is redemption of a sort, but it’s half-hearted. Her acquisition of money and power are much more interesting than her sudden change of heart. This subversive film is basically a blueprint for getting to Easy Street by being easy.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Duck Soup.