THE EMPEROR JONES (1933)

Brutus Jones (Paul Robeson, pictured) is given a sendoff by the congregation of his Baptist church on the occasion of him getting a job as a cross-country train porter. His girlfriend is worried that he'll slide into bad ways, and fairly quickly, he does, led by his pal Jeff into gambling and consorting with loose women. When Brutus is upgraded to working on the car which contains the president, he overhears a sensitive conversation and blackmails a businessman. He also takes Jeff's mistress Undine from him, but later drops her for another, leading to the two women engaging in a brawl on a dance floor. In a different brawl, over the use of crooked dice in a craps game, Brutus accidentally kills Jeff and is sentenced to hard labor on a chain gang. When he refuses an order to beat an unconscious prisoner, he smacks a guard on the back of the head with a shovel and manages to escape. In short order, he leaves the country and works on a steamer ship, and when he hears reports of an all-Black island in the Caribbean, he jumps ship to investigate. The island has a dictatorial king, but when Brutus is bought by Smithers (Dudley Digges), a white trader who does a lucrative business on the island, he gets Smithers on his side, makes the islanders believe that he is invulnerable to anything but a silver bullet, and deposes the ruler to become the Emperor Jones. He raises taxes, sends the money offshore, and plans to leave soon as a rich man. But what if the people get fed up before he can make his escape?

Eugene O'Neill’s play probably works better symbolically than as realism, and this movie strives to combine the two styles with mixed results. The melodramatic first half-hour seems to be just getting backstory out the way to get to the fireworks on the island. Even here, however, a sense of real danger and tragic consequences is never fully developed. The play is largely a one-man show and Robeson, who played the role on stage, is up to the task of carrying the film. Though there are other characters here, he only really gets help from Dudley Digges who strikes the right note as a man who realizes quickly that he'll do better as a sniveling assistant to Jones rather than as his "owner." The last section, with Jones on the run through the jungle from his abused people, is well-paced and atmospheric, and Robeson is excellent as a haunted man falling apart. Fredi Washington, best known as the daughter who passes for white in the 1934 Imitation of Life, is fine as Undine, but no one else really gets to make an acting mark here. The film was an independent production, and looks and feels like one, so the chief draw here is seeing Robeson do O'Neill, and that’s enough to make it worth a viewing. [TCM]