American Cinematographer - February 1990 - 38

Cochran, Murphy and Heyward cruised down the
East coast at 165

m.p.h. in a Lockheed Vega piloted
by Russell Thorpe. O'Neill, in one of his periodic
states of debilitation, desperately wanted to go to the
airstrip to see the craft but his wife, Carlotta Mon¬
terey, wouldn't allow it, even setting a strict limit on
the visitors where they could not talk to O'Neill
longer than an hour at a time.
He approved their new material, which
took clues from the play and created a narrative
depicting Jones' rise to power. O'Neill agreed to a
price of $30,000 but with one stipulation: Brutus
Jones could only be portrayed by Paul Robeson.
Krimsky learned that Sam Goldwyn, in¬
spired by the Metropolitan Opera production, had
already contacted O'Neill about filming Jones with
Lawrence Tibbett in blackface. Goldwyn tried to
bring his own peculiar logic to bear by arguing that
A1 Jolson had played The Jazz Singer. Krimsky, now
needing to gain Robeson's participation, went to
London where the actor made his home.
"Robeson did not particularly want to
make a film in the States," recalled Krimsky. "He
was not anxious to come here to star in The Emperor

Jones. In 1933 you couldn't take Paul to a restaurant
in this country. In New York we couldn't have even
gotten him into a third-rate hotel." Robeson agreed
to do the film out of deference to O'Neill. "He didn't

do it for me," said

Krimsky

Robeson, like O'Neill, had

irrevocable

stipulation. His contract, dated February 24, 1933,
specified services to be rendered in the United
States "excepting only such portions ... as may be
south of a line along the Mason-Dixon Line from the
Atlantic to the Pacific coasts."
DuBose Heyward was a poet and play¬
wright from South Carolina whose greatest success
was
Porgy. His view of the Southern Black was
gathered firsthand and though criticized for perpet¬
uating racial cliches, Heyward wrote honest charac¬
ters, though certainly filtered through the lens of a
white Southerner. His script for The Emperor Jones, a
remarkable first screenplay, is a model of how to
open up a theater piece for film narrative without
violating the original. It is clean and communicative,
deftly establishing character and locale with a poet's
economy, lean and coherent in relating action to the
camera.
Heyward's dialogue, like O'Neill's, is writ¬
ten in vernacular

that has

studied flavor.

After

seeing the finished film O'Neill
would complain that hands other than Heyward's
tinkered with it to make it "flashier, more exciting, a
compromise neither artistic nor commercial" - an
unreasonable charge. "However, I wail not," con¬
cluded O'Neill characteristically "I got my money."
With Robeson on board, the screenplay
was constructed to accommodate his magnificent
singing voice. Heyward did this artfully, so that the
songs sprang naturally from the narrative: "Let Me
Fly" at the revival meeting, "Same Train" as Jones
departs to begin his new job as a pullman porter,
"John Henry" and "Water Boy" during the chain
36

American

Cinematographer

The spirituals comment on and
compliment the narrative and are never held long
enough to protrude as specialty numbers (some¬
thing that always happened in Robeson's later films
like King Solomon's Mines, where story stood still as
Umbopa delivered some distinctly non-African
songs).
gang sequence.

The first two-thirds of the movie is

Heyward's material. In rural South Carolina, Brutus
Jones bids goodbye to his girlfriend and community
as he assumes a new
job as a pullman porter. (To be
a
pullman porter was a mark of black achievement at
this time. Today's audiences who laugh at the outsized rejoicing during this departure scene don't
realize that it was a well-paying, highly desirable
escape from crushing poverty for a rural black man,
and a position that was accorded great respect by the
community). The farewell is set in the Hezekiah
Baptist Church. As the preacher asserts Jones' place
on the
path of righteousness, his girlfriend worries
that he'll keep fast company up North.
Jones learns quickly from his friend Jeff
and is soon posted to the private car of the railroad's
president, where he uses his cunning to profit from
a stock
manipulation that he overhears being
plotted.
The image of the uniform is used through¬
out the film to chart Jones' fall from grace. A cliche
of the gangster films of this period centered around
the hoodlum's wardrobe: once seen being fitted for
an
expensive suit, spiritual redemption was imposs¬
ible and he was firmly on the road to hell. Similarly,
Brutus admires his porter's uniform at the outset. In
Harlem, flush with his stock profits, he preens
before a mirror in a tuxedo. This image is restated
once Brutus
gains his throne, sheepishly admiring
himself in a succession of mirrors he has ordered
installed in his throne room.

Jones' descent into corruption begins when
Jeff takes him to a buffet flat, a remarkably frank
location for a movie of this period. So called because
of the wide variety of sexual entertainment they

offered, buffet flats flourished along the Northeast
train routes as safe havens for pullman porters
where they could eat, drink and indulge their sexual

appetites under the protective eyes of a sympathetic
madam who could be trusted to safeguard their
considerable bankrolls during their stay. The action
was
soft-pedaled to the degree that Krimsky, recall¬
ing the sequence forty years later, ingenuously
termed the locale a "house rent party."
Brutus' first act of violence is the murder of

his

pal Jeff during a crap game at a "juk" joint.
Though Jeff causes the incident by playing with
crooked dice and is the one to pull a knife, Brutus
wrests the blade

from him and deliberately plunges
a bizarre and
finely realized se¬

it downward. In

quence,
than

Jones

escapes

and "there is

a space

of less

minute in which the juk changes its charac¬
ter." When a white Irish cop bursts in he is met by
a

Jeff's body lying on the floor, but the crap table has
become

pool table, and the occupants of the room

February 1990

American Cinematographer - February 1990

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