The Emperor Jones (1933 film)
Encyclopedia
The Emperor Jones is a 1933 film adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...

 play of the same title
The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill which tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African-American man who kills a man, goes to prison, escapes to a Caribbean island, and sets himself up as emperor...

, directed by Dudley Murphy
Dudley Murphy
Dudley Murphy was an American film director. Murphy was born on July 10, 1897 in Winchester, Massachusetts...

, featuring Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson
Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...

, Dudley Digges
Dudley Digges (actor)
Dudley Digges was an Irish stage and film actor.Digges was born in Dublin. He went to America with a group of Irish players in 1904, and became successful both as an actor and producer. For a time, he was stage manager to Charles Frohman and George Arliss...

, Frank H. Wilson, and Fredi Washington
Fredi Washington
Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington was an accomplished dramatic film actress, most active in the 1920s- 1930s. Fredi was a self-proclaimed Black woman, who chose to be identified as such, and wished for others to do so as well...

. The screenplay was written by DuBose Heyward
DuBose Heyward
Edwin DuBose Heyward was a white American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. This novel was the basis for the play by the same name and, in turn, the opera Porgy and Bess with music by George Gershwin.-Life and career:Heyward was born in 1885 in Charleston, South Carolina and was a...

 and filmed at Kaufman Astoria Studios
Kaufman Astoria Studios
The Kaufman Astoria Studios is an historic movie studio located in the Astoria section of the New York City borough of Queens.-History:It was originally built by Famous Players-Lasky in 1920 to provide the company with a facility close to the Broadway theater district. Many features and short...

 with the beach scene shot at Long Beach, New York. Robeson starred in the O'Neill play on stage, both in the United States and England; a role that had helped launch his career.

Plot

The film is based rather loosely on the play, adds an entire backstory before O'Neill's actual play begins, and includes several new characters that do not appear in it (such as Jones' wife, and a friendly priest who advises him to give up his evil ways). Some people consider the movie to be just a vehicle for showing off Robeson's musical talent (he sings a number of times in the film). However, the film does provide what may be Robeson's greatest dramatic performance in a movie, considered by many to be worthy of an Oscar nomination that it did not receive.

In the film version, the opening shots are of an African ritual dance. Some critics are quick to assess the opening as representative of the "primitive" black world to which Brutus Jones will eventually revert. However, more scholarly-based reviews of the film understand the complexities of the allusion to and comparison between the roots of the African American church and the rhythmic chanting often seen in African religious practices. A quick dissolve takes us into a Baptist church in the American South, where the dancing of the congregation presents an image that argues for a continuity between the "savage" Africans and the ring-shout Baptists. Such suggestive editing may be the kind of element that causes viewers to suspect the film of racism.

Similarly, the film makes copious use of the word "nigger", as did O'Neill's original play
The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill which tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African-American man who kills a man, goes to prison, escapes to a Caribbean island, and sets himself up as emperor...

. African Americans criticized O'Neill's language at the time, so its preservation and expansion in the film present another cause for critique. Given Robeson's subsequent career as a Civil Rights activist, the spectacle of his character using the term so frequently in regard to other blacks seems shocking today.

As for the plot, Brutus Jones has just been hired as a Pullman Porter, a job that served the upward mobility of thousands of African American men in the first half of the twentieth-century. Jones proudly shows off his uniform to his girlfriend Dolly (and the film's audience), setting up the contrast with the later scenes in which "the Emperor Jones" parades around in overdone military garb. But Jones is quickly corrupted by the lures of the big city, taking up with fast women and gamblers. One boisterous crap game
Craps
Craps is a dice game in which players place wagers on the outcome of the roll, or a series of rolls, of a pair of dice. Players may wager money against each other or a bank...

 leads to a fight in which he inadvertently stabs Jeff, the man who had introduced him to the fast-life and from whom he had stolen the affections of the beautiful Undine (played by Fredi Washington).

A stint on the chain gang
Chain gang
A chain gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work, such as mining or timber collecting, as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include building roads, digging ditches or chipping stone...

 allows the film its first opportunity to show Robeson without his shirt on, an exposure of male nudity unusual for 1933 and certainly for a black actor. Here and later the director plays on Robeson's sexual power and, implicitly, on cultural stereotypes about the libidinal power of black men. Jones escapes the convict's life after striking a white guard who was torturing and beating another prisoner. Making his way home, he briefly receives the assistance of his wife before taking a job stoking coal on a steamer headed for the Caribbean. One day, he catches sight of a remote island and jumps ship, swimming to the island.

The island is under the crude rule of a top-hatted black despot who receives merchandise from Smithers, the dilapidated white colonial merchant who is the sole Caucasian on the island. Jones rises to become Smithers' partner and eventually "Emperor". He dethrones his predecessor with a trick that allows him to survive what appears to be a fusillade of bullets, creating the myth that he can only be slain by a silver one. Jones's rule of the island involves increasing taxes on the poor natives and pocketing the proceeds.

The highlight is a twenty-five minute spoken monologue taken directly from O'Neill's play
The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill which tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African-American man who kills a man, goes to prison, escapes to a Caribbean island, and sets himself up as emperor...

, in which Brutus Jones (Robeson), hunted by natives in revolt, flees through the jungle and slowly disintegrates psychologically, becoming a shrieking hysteric who runs right into the path of his pursuers.

Awards

In 1999, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...

.

DVD release

The film is in the public domain now, and can be purchased at many online outlets. A newly remastered version (with commentary and extras) was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection in 2006.

Similarities to Kipling story

Both the play and the film bear several striking similarities to Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

's The Man Who Would Be King
The Man Who Would Be King
For the 1975 film based on this story, see The Man Who Would Be King "The Man Who Would Be King" is a short story by Rudyard Kipling. It is about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan...

. In Kipling's story, the main character also sets himself up as a godlike figure to the natives, proclaims that he can only be killed by a silver bullet, and tries to flee after the natives revolt against him.

Cast

  • Paul Robeson
    Paul Robeson
    Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...

     – Brutus Jones
  • Dudley Digges
    Dudley Digges (actor)
    Dudley Digges was an Irish stage and film actor.Digges was born in Dublin. He went to America with a group of Irish players in 1904, and became successful both as an actor and producer. For a time, he was stage manager to Charles Frohman and George Arliss...

     – Smithers
  • Frank H. Wilson – Jeff
  • Fredi Washington
    Fredi Washington
    Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington was an accomplished dramatic film actress, most active in the 1920s- 1930s. Fredi was a self-proclaimed Black woman, who chose to be identified as such, and wished for others to do so as well...

     – Undine
  • Ruby Elzy
    Ruby Elzy
    Ruby Elzy , was a pioneer African American operatic soprano.-Early life:Elzy was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi and educated at Rust College, the Ohio State University and the Juilliard School,...

     – Dolly
  • George Haymid Stamper – Lem
  • Jackie "Moms" Mabley
    Moms Mabley
    Jackie "Moms" Mabley, born Loretta Mary Aiken , was an American standup comedian and a pioneer of the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" of African-American vaudeville.-Early years:...

     – Marcella
  • Blueboy O'Connor – Treasurer
  • Brandon Evans – Carrington
  • Rex Ingram
    Rex Ingram (actor)
    Rex Ingram was an American stage, film, and television actor.-Early life and career:Born near Cairo, Illinois on the Mississippi River, Ingram's father was a steamer fireman on the riverboat Robert E. Lee...

    – Court Crier

External links

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