American Cinematographer - February 1990 - 36
Photos
by Jack Shalitt, all photos from the collection of the American Museum of the Moving Image
Rise and Fall of The
Emperor Jones, 1933
by Scott Mac Queen
When The Emperor Jones opened in the fall of 1933
it
was
the first time that
black
performer was ever
major American feature film. It was
a
top-billed in a
also the kind of film that would
made in Hollywood, despite the
never
have been
precedent of two
early, sentimental talkies about Southern blacks,
Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah!
Independently produced in New York by
two well-to-do young white men with artistic ambi¬
tions, The Emperor Jones was based on a venerated
experimental play by Eugene O'Neill, then already
enshrined as the greatest playwright of the 20th
century The title role was acted by Paul Robeson, a
powerful young black performer who had been
thrust to international prominence by his perfor¬
mance in the play.
The inspiration came from one of O'Neill's
drinking buddies, Jack Groak. An old-time circus
completed The Silver Bullet (as it was originally
titled) on October 2,1920, after two intensive weeks.
The
playwright's original inclination to cast a white
actor, in blackface, as Brutus Jones was sensibly
abandoned. When The Emperor Jones opened at the
Provincetown Playhouse on November 1, the star
was a black man, Charles
Gilpin.
Brutus Jones, a Pullman porter who,
through cunning and circumstance, has established
himself potentate of a Caribbean island, awakes one
morning to discover that his subjects have revolted.
With assured arrogance he boasts to Smithers, a
low-life Cockney trader, that he will escape their
vengeance. He announces, mockingly, that he has a
charm: only a silver bullet can kill him. As voodoo
tom-toms resonate across the
revolver with
one
island, Jones loads
a
silver and five lead bullets and
who had toured the Caribbean, Groak in¬
escapes into the jungle. Confused and unbalanced
by the ubiquitous drums, Jones is haunted by the
trigued O'Neill with the story of Vilbrun Guillaume
Sam, one-time president of Haiti, who boasted that
shades of his violent life: the men he murdered, the
humiliation of the chain gang. His prayers for deliv¬
he would foil his
erance
man
political enemies if
necessary
by
a silver bullet. This anecdote
coalesced with O'Neill's readings about Congo reli¬
killing himself with
gious feasts and the use of ceremonial drums.
O'Neill gleaned details of black American
life from another crony,
34
and
American
Cinematographer
black gambler Joe Smith,
and
go
unanswered and visions of witch doctors
primeaval crocodile god overwhelm him. He
relives the humiliation of the Negro race brought
from Africa in bondage and sold as slaves. In rage
and anger Jones spends his bullets, including the
silver reserve, on the formless nightmares as he
a
February 1990
American Cinematographer - February 1990
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