Songs of freedom

The Paul Robeson Centennial pays tribute to a big man

by Steve Vineberg

"PAUL ROBESON CENTENNIAL FILM FESTIVAL," April 2 at the Brattle: The Emperor Jones, Body and Soul, and The Proud Valley.

April 3 at the Harvard Film Archive: Borderline and Show Boat.

April 4 at the Museum of Fine Arts: Sanders of the River and Song of Freedom.

April 5 at the Coolidge Corner: Jericho, Big Fella, and the final segment of Tales from Manhattan.

It's taking four local venues to house a centennial celebration for Paul Robeson. Well, he was a big man: six-foot-four, with the presence of an affable storybook giant and a basso profundo as big and deep as a river. Robeson made 11 movies and recorded dozens of songs in a wide variety of genres, but today he's known mostly as a political icon, a social crusader for the rights of African-Americans whose leftism got him in trouble during the HUAC days. (His passport was revoked in the '50s; it wasn't until the '60s that he was permitted to resume the European concert tours that had won him worldwide popularity much earlier in his career.)

Certainly he earned his legend. The son of an escaped slave, he went to Rutgers on an athletic scholarship and emerged Phi Beta Kappa; he played pro football and graduated from Columbia Law School. It was Eugene O'Neill who brought him into the professional theater in the mid '20s when he cast Robeson in The Emperor Jones as a replacement for the original star, Charles Gilpin, whose alcoholism had become increasingly debilitating. Robeson played Brutus Jones in New York, too, and then created the role of Jim Harris in O'Neill's racial melodrama All God's Chillun Got Wings -- the first controversy of his life, when the play's treatment of a mixed marriage incited bomb threats and an exceptionally nasty pre-opening press. Robeson entered the mainstream in 1930, performing in the first revival of Show Boat, where, as Joe, he sang Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II's "Ol' Man River." And despite his work with O'Neill, it's that role -- and that song -- that he was most closely associated with during his lifetime, after he re-created his performance in the wonderful 1936 movie version.

Although he didn't make many films -- his last, Tales of Manhattan, came out in 1942 -- the 11 he did do, some in America and some in England, are fascinating because they cast him in a range of both political and aesthetic contexts. (The "Centennial" celebration of his film work has all of them except for the 1937 King Solomon's Mines -- an odd omission, since it was probably his most popular picture.) They include his 1924 debut in Body and Soul, which was made by the pioneering black filmmaker Oscar Michaux for all-black audiences, and Sanders of the River, from 1935, an Africa-set adventure with a strictly British-colonial point of view that Robeson fought to keep from being released. You can certainly see why when you read intertitles like "Under Sanders' just rule the Peoples of the River enjoyed their primitive paradise," though it's not clear what Robeson expected when he read the script. (Perhaps the Edgar Wallace source novel, which I haven't read, is significantly different in tone.)

The weekend celebration includes The Proud Valley, a tribute to the courage of Welsh coal miners that Robeson, in his leftist sentimentality, loved best of all his films. The film has the visceral effectiveness characteristic of coal-miner pictures, but contemporary audiences might balk at its overlay of wartime patriotism: after an explosion that closes the pit, the miners fight the London owner to let them reopen it despite the danger, appealing to Britain's need for coal in the onslaught of the incipient war. (The Proud Valley would make an ironic pairing with Barbara Kopple's documentary Harlan County U.S.A.)

In quite a different social vein, the celebation also includes two British potboilers with stupefyingly idiotic plots, Song of Freedom and Jericho, both featuring Robeson as a black Westerner who comes to the rescue of primitive peoples in distant lands. In Song of Freedom he's an English dock worker whose great vocal talents are discovered by an excitable composer. He becomes an opera singer -- starring in a piece called The Black Emperor, a bowdlerization, uncredited, of The Emperor Jones -- but he's dissatisfied, feeling the call of his African roots. Learning by chance that he's descended from a royal tribal family, he sails over to bestow the gifts of civilization on his long-lost kin. When he finds them more primitive than he'd bargained for, his loyal wife (Elizabeth Welch) reminds him that the worse off they are, the more he can do for them.

In Jericho, Robeson plays a kind of black Lawrence of Arabia, a World War I soldier about to be shot for a misapprehended act of heroism who escapes to Africa and leads a tribe of nomads to victory against their enemies. He also lands his commanding officer in the brig for five years -- a detail the filmmakers include to spur a revenge plot, then dispose of in the movie's baffling final reel.

These movies also display Robeson's loyalties both to the avant-garde and to popular culture. Here he is in Borderline, an experimental late silent by Kenneth Macpherson that addresses the subject of racial tensions directly. A married white man's affair with a black woman -- Robeson's wife (played by his real wife, Eslanda Robeson) -- incites the white community at a Swiss mountain resort. (The poet H.D. shows up, bizarrely, as the white protagonist's injured spouse.) And here he is in Dudley Murphy's 1933 film version of The Emperor Jones, which reconstructs O'Neill's play, omitting its political ironies but making an honest attempt to replicate its expressionist style. On the other hand, we see him in the big, satisfying soap-opera musical Show Boat and in the affable English musical comedy Big Fella, where he and the endearingly modest café singer Elizabeth Welch, so badly used in Song of Freedom, are sweetly matched. He gets to play opposite the great Ethel Waters in the 10-minute final segment of Julien Duvivier's anthology film Tales of Manhattan, but don't get too excited. This episode, a misbegotten attempt at the folk-fable style of The Green Pastures and the following year's Cabin in the Sky, is Robeson's most embarrassing moment on screen.

Almost all of Robeson's movies emphasize his natural good humor, his superman's strength (he hoists a dying miner in his massive arms in The Proud Valley and escapes from a chain gang in The Emperor Jones under a truckload of rocks with no visible injury), and his magically gargantuan, genie-of-the-lamp presence. We get to see some darker sides of him, though, in the fervent Borderline. Macpherson shoots him more as a piece of sculpture than as a performer, but something comes through anyway: a rugged carelessness, a smoldering anger, a natural claim to the camera.

The Emperor Jones likewise casts him in a different light from his later pictures. This is the serious -- i.e., ironic -- version of the black-savior story Robeson revisited in Song of Freedom and Jericho. Brutus Jones is a cross between a salesman -- a cousin to O'Neill's most famous creation, Hickey in The Iceman Cometh -- and a gangster. He's a small-town Baptist boy who hoists himself into the Harlem high life; when he accidentally kills another man in a jealous casino brawl, he hops a freighter to the West Indies, where he scams his way into the monarchy of a tiny island.

This is one time when Robeson had a chance to use his size and charisma dramatically rather than just to give pleasure (as he does most memorably in Show Boat): the play is built around Jones's conviction, which flies audaciously in the face of his social background, that he's an emperor by right. The sniveling cockney trader Smithers (Dudley Digges) rescues Jones from expulsion by the original chief by paying cash for him; then, when Jones usurps the throne (by trickery), he treats Smithers as his flunky, calling him "white man" with a mixture of disdain and menace. It's only a matter of time before his subjects rebel against his tyranny, driving him into the jungle, but he meets a spectacular end, "in the heighth of style," as Smithers says admiringly.

The climactic breakdown monologue in the jungle, which Robeson delivers in tremolo as a kind of spoken aria, is a bit of a disappointment -- his energy is amazing, yet you're conscious all the time that these big, expressionist emotions were conceived for the stage (where they were probably stunning). But Robeson's performance has both grandeur and wit. It was his finest hour on screen. What a pity that, though he lived four more decades, he never got a chance to match it.

For a review of Paul Robeson's The Peace Arch Concerts, go here.