the half-full glass
by Douglas Messerli
Marc Connelly, Lynn Root, and Joseph
Schrank (writers, based on the play by Lynn Root), Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke,
George Bassman, and Roger Edens (music), John La Touche (original lyrics),
Vincente Minnelli (director, with “Shine” sequence directed by Busby Berkeley) Cabin in the Sky / 1943
Seeing it for third or fourth time the
other afternoon, the film seemed to be much defter and lighter on its feet than
I had remembered it, at moments, particularly with Waters’ performances of
“Taking a Chance on Love” and “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe” (nominated for
an Academy Award) soaring into the stratosphere. How I wish this once great
torch singer had been able to perform in more motion pictures! She makes the
art of singing seem as easy as breathing out and breathing in, her shining
smile literally dazzling us as she looks the camera straight-on. I could watch
her for hours.
Although the final film cut Lena Horne’s best song—“Ain’t It the Truth,” sung in a bubble bath (clearly studio heads felt that the suggesting of black nudity was simply going too far)—her performance in the group song “Shine” is superlative.
For all of this, however, one has to admit that over all the work is
still too embedded in the “old stereotypes of Negro caricature,” as actress
Jean Muir proclaimed. The religiously devoted Petunia just wants the simple man
she loves, living out the life something close to a poor share cropper, and she
is totally unbelievable when she “dresses up” to win “Little Joe” back in a
nightclub last act. “Little Joe,” as I have already suggested is just that,
“little,” a kind a grown boy tempted by all the evils of the universe—the
typical version of a black male through most of the 20th century. And the world
they together conjure up is filled, like so many caricatures, with little black
babies and “darkies” prepared to enter their all-black vision of heaven—in
short, a world which any white viewer would perceive as pure myth. And like the
ancient Hebrew God, this black God has an extremely personal relationship with
human folk, spinning out cyclones to reward Petunia’s prayers, and allowing
“Little Joe” into heaven by a technicality when Georgia Brown, in penance for
her bad behavior, gives the church all her money. Such “shenanigans,” finally,
hardly matter in the end, as we discover that Joe has dreamt the whole story!
In short, the blacks of the small town Cabin
in the Sky are taken no more seriously than a fevered nightmare, Petunia
and Joe basking in their utter poverty by film’s end.
By the 1940s, moreover, even though this
work gave blacks the opportunity to strut their stuff, the kind of Paul
Green-condescending piety of Green
Pastures or the orgiastic dancing of black ensembles one sees in some of
the Marx Brothers films was fast disappearing, as American audiences began to
be aware of international threats to individual expression, long after the
Harlem Renaissance had taken black arts to new highs. A decade later Ralph
Ellison would write his masterwork, Invisible
Man, which—at least in literary terms—would wipe away the “happy darkie”
sensibility behind Cabin in the Sky.
The saddest thing about viewing this movie today is that these brilliant
performers were so worth watching that we might want to cry out for the lost
opportunities they had to give witness to their talents.* So much radiance and
so little opportunity to represent it on screen or on stage swells my eyes into
tears. Is it any wonder that the great Waters turned to fundamentalist gospel
singing or that Lena Horne found herself on the Blacklist because of her close
friendship with Paul Robeson?
Given that reality, perhaps we should toast with that half-full glass to
Minnelli’s early achievement.
*In saying
this, of course, I am not denying or dismissing the important black film and
stage traditions which early on and throughout the century, did allow these
performers a segregated and separate audience, traditions which are crucial in
the history of American film and theater. I am only declaring that I wish these
same performers might have been more visible for the racially prejudiced white
audiences as well.
Los Angeles, January 19, 2014
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