Dudley Murphy | The Emperor Jones / 1933

the black gatsby

by Douglas Messerli

 

DuBose Heyward (screenplay, based on the play by Eugene O’Neill), Dudley Murphy (director) The Emperor Jones / 1933

 

For anyone who was read or seen Eugene O’Neill’s play or watched Dudley Murphy’s film, loosely based on the original—and for once I am going to presume most of my audience has done one or another of these things so that I do not have to have to devote a great deal of time to the plot—the first question might be, why is this work being included in a study of LGBTQ film?

     As I wrote in the introduction to Volume 1 of this series, it is my intention to discuss all films that represent an LGBTQ figure, even if she, he, or the non-binary gendered figure is of minor importance to the overall story and, at times, even debatable as to whether such figures are truly gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or transsexual. Moreover, I include the many films in which characters portrayed generally as heterosexual, through the coded gestures of the writer, director, or actor can also be read as an LGBTQ figure or as existing as part of a larger milieu of sexual or gender confusion, even if on the surface of the story they remain heteronormative.

     To immediately relieve the troubled minds of those who want accountability, I will point to the moment when Brutus Jones (Paul Robeson) is first taken by his friend Jeff (Frank H. Wilson) to a Harlem "buffet flat” run by a woman Jeff introduces as Marcella, with short hair and an open white shirt, who looks like a lesbian—and is played by one, Jackie “Moms” Mabley who throughout the 1920s and 1930s appeared in androgynous clothing, recording several "lesbian stand-up" routines.

     This is the Harlem of the “Renaissance” where Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, Countée Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, along with the popular wealthy Midwestern white boy Carl Van Vechten—hung out in just such places as well the numerous gay gathering spots. They’re missing in Murphy’s movie (although he’d already done the equivalent of what we would later describe as a music video for Bessie Smith, St. Louis Blues in 1929). But you almost feel their presence in this scene.

      Let me assure you, to my knowledge, there are no more direct analogues to the LGBTQ community in The Emperor Jones, but the film is embedded in gay sexuality in so many other ways that it difficult to even know where to begin. Perhaps we should start with the director himself, whose life biographer Susan Delson summarizes:

 

“It’s a life that reads like a picaresque novel interspersed with movies. ‘I feel I have been so fortunate to have been in what I call the creative centers of the world at the right time,’ he wrote. And he was. He moved effortlessly from Greenwich Village bohemia to avant-garde Paris, the Harlem Renaissance, Hollywood, and beyond. Tall, blond, and charming, he was a cheerfully wide-ranging philanderer with little thought for the consequences. For him, scrapes and scandals were normal background noise, from courtroom dramas to love-crazed divorcées. Looking back on his life, mad and gay (in the giddy, nonsexual sense of the term) were among his favorite adjectives.”

     At one time or another, Murphy worked with Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Duke Ellington, and a good number of the famed Algonquin Round Table members. As Delson summarizes, “He talked montage theory with Sergei Eisenstein and got drunk with James Joyce. Charlie Chaplin turned up at parties; Dashiell Hammett was a poker-player regular. Fats Waller purportedly worked out arrangements at the piano in Murphy’s New York penthouse, and at Murphy’s instigation, what became the only surviving North American mural by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros was painted in the yard of his Los Angeles [Pacific Palisades] home.” He attempted to write to film with William Faulkner. And in his last few years, he and his fourth wife, owned and ran the famed Richard Neutra-built hotel Holiday House which was a favorite haunt of stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe.

     Even more importantly, however, was the fact that Murphy had directed several important films before The Emperor Jones. Beginning with The Soul of the Cypress in 1921, an experimental short in which “the poet” falls in love with a “dryad” who lives at the soul of the cypress. The Dryad, played by his then wife Chase Harringdine, demands that if he is truly in love with her that he must give up his life. Torn between life and love, he eventually throws himself into the ocean, becoming the “song of the sea” which sings to the “soul cypress” for eternity. What isn’t generally know, according to film scholar David E. James, is that Murphy eventually added a pornographic coda to the end of the film, utterly transforming it mythical story into a work with an “erotic theme and social message.”

     A few years later, Murphy collaborated on a truly experimental film with French artist Fernand Léger to produce Ballet mécanique, premiering at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik in Vienna on September 24, 1924. It was to have accompanied George Antheil’s important work of the same title, but the musical work ran for 30 minutes and the film was only 17 minutes long. Later in 2000 Paul Lehrman produced a version of both works brought together.

     As I mention above, Murphy also shot several of what today we might describe as music videos not only with Bessie Smith, but with jazz tap dancer Jimmy Mordecai and, in Black and Tan (1929) with Duke Ellington and his orchestra.

      What few commentators ever mention is that only the year before The Emperor Jones, Murphy directed a seemingly more traditional Hollywood film about sports, The Sports Parade starring the popular actor, Joel McCrea. But with a script by gay screenwriter Corey Ford, the film not only featured the almost prerequisite pre-Code pansies, but focused on a deep friendship between two football players, Brown and Baker, that gradually was revealed to be a love story between the two men. Murphy scanned his camera over McCrea’s body as the actor sat dressed on what almost appear to be undershorts before entering the boxing ring in the same garment which fully revealed his cock and crotch. As I wrote in my essay on that film published elsewhere in this volume, “Just after its release actor William Gargan (who played Baker to McCrea’s Brown) described the film as ‘high camp: Boy meets boy; boy loses boy; boy gets boy.’ After pantingly watching Sandy contort his shorts in every imaginable angle to reveal what he might; refusing to give up he wins the bout, and, as Johnny runs into the ring, the two grabbing one another’s hands, Irene meekly joining them, Robert Benchley declares he cannot to watch any more. Head writer Corey Ford, was evidently a closeted gay man who dared in an early draft to have Sandy sing the line ‘a bisexual built for two.’”

      And I need also mention that he worked as an uncredited script and dialogue contributor to both Tod Browning’s English language version of Dracula and George Melford’s Spanish language Drácula.

      Murphy brings much of his experimentalism to The Emperor Jones, particularly in his blending of music and narrative; and through Paul Robeson’s acting and physical presence as he captures it on camera, he infuses the O’Neill-based work with his interest in male eroticism as demonstrated in unexpurgated version of The Soul of the Cypress and The Sports Parade.

      In DuBose Heyward and Murphy’s production, Brutus Jones’ story does not begin as in O’Neill’s original—when awakened from his sleep by the white trader Smithers (Dudley Digges) the Emperor is told that all his court has abandoned him on the isolated island to which he has escaped—but is given instead a long two acts before this scene, laying out his life in chronological order instead of in flashbacks. Although the more traditional narrative pattern takes away much of dramatic energy of the film’s last act, it allows us to get to know this man as he grows and learns from white oppressors who dominate his world.

     Although Jones is already beloved and almost worshipped in the small black Georgia church where Murphy’s film begins, such a special dreamer, as Jones is, must adventure out in the larger world. Jones does so by becoming a railroad porter, a way many blacks of the day had of traveling and absorbing the majority culture’s way of thinking and values, not to ignore the fact that it was a way that many of them moved into better jobs in the urban worlds to which the trains took them.

     Even before he leaves on his adventure, Jones has already created a fantasy around his uniform almost in the manner that Emil Jannings worshipped his uniform in of a hotel doorman in F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). For the much more protean and energetic Jones, however, it is merely an entry into a new world about which fantasizes.

     Learning quickly through his Harlem experiences and by becoming the private porter to a railroad executive, he is soon is a position to subtly blackmail his employer by suggesting that it might be too bad if the details of a merger—about which he has overheard the men talking—should leak out to the public. The businessman pays his off, but also sends him back to the regular north to south train runs, without further access to the private cars where he has been serving.

     With that extra money, however, Jones simply buys more time, women, drink, and gambling money to build up the beginnings of a new life. From the women themselves—particularly from the two-timing Undine (Fredi Washington), who previously was his best friend Jeff’s woman—he learns to use them up quickly before moving on to others or, preferably, to live in a world without women, an important aspect of the work that is generally not discussed. Just as he has left his first love, Dolly (Ruby Elzy), so does he abandon Undine, without relying on others as he attempts to move up in his admittedly limited societal world.

       Indeed, the bad feelings about the relationship he has had with Undine, end in a gambling session with Jeff, who attempts to cheat him, ending in a fight with Jones, Jeff’s murder, and Jones’ imprisonment.

       Through it all Jones does seem to be someone special. Even on the chain gang, shirtless and singing the remarkable song “Water Boy,” Robeson’s beautiful bass voice, his glistening body, and the pure beauty of the man’s intelligence beaming out through his eyes, turns this actor’s portrayal into something more than O’Neill’s description of Brutus: a “tall, powerfully built, full-blooded Negro of middle age.” When asked by the brutal white foreman of the gang to open the hot-box out of which a man falls, nearly dead, before commanding him to then beat him, Robeson’s Jones turns to his original faith to substantiate his refusal and justify what in 1933, given the pervasiveness of US racism and its continued support even in the early days of the code, could not be fully shown, as the actor grabs the white man, pushes him away, and escapes in a truck under a pile of cement blocks.

     But from here on in, the movie, returning to O’Neill’s original script, to it put mildly, is troublesome. The voyage on which Jones now travels will lead to a world which seems to fully parallel the treatment that he has received in racist America, but with him now reversing roles, becoming a racist enforcer, himself spouting the ugly words that demean members of his own race, and consequently, reducing his own language to the ugly racial epithets such as “nigger,” “nigger circus,” and “bush bunnies.” And just as suddenly the man who spoke and sang so eloquently just a short while before is himself reduced to the language of uneducated slaves. As he lectures the only white on the island, a trader who has attempted to buy him, but whom he has bested: “Dere’s little stealin’ like you does, and dere’s big stealin’, like I does. For de little stealin’, dey gets you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin’, dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall O’ Fame when you croaks. [Reminiscently] If dey’s one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman ca’s listenin’ to de white quality talk, it’s dat same fact. And when I gets a chance to use it I winds up Emperor in two years.”

      The original actor who played The Emperor Jones in O’Neill’s early productions, Charles S. Gilpin argued with O’Neill about Jones’ language, and despite the playwright’s insistence that he had developed the dialogue through his friendship with an African-American tavern keeper, the actor demanded to change the hated word to “Negro,” as well as dropping some of his “dems, disses, and dats.” For the 1925 stage revival O’Neill replaced him with Robeson, who at first had also rejected O’Neill’s view, but gradually changed his mind, eventually arguing "O'Neill had got what no other playwright has—that is, the true authentic Negro psychology. He has read the Negro and has felt the Negro's racial tragedy."

     At the time of the film’s release, the Rutgers College All-American football hero and class valedictorian who went on the play in the National Football League and receive his LL.B from Columbia Law School, had already become well known as a singer, stage actor, and outspoken black activist. Robeson had himself become involved with the Harlem Renaissance through his stage performances of both The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. In 1928 he had become a singing actor of note through his London performance of Show Boat.

     Critic Hilton Als summarizes Robeson’s situation:

 

By the time the film version of The Emperor Jones was produced, Robeson had become the American theater’s first great black hope. When the rights to the play were purchased, O’Neill not only demanded that Robeson reprise his stage triumph but also that the actor’s name appear over the title. For his part, Robeson insisted that the film be shot above the Mason-Dixon Line, the better to avoid the cruel effects of apartheid. Often, an artist finds himself living in a strange home. But America in 1933 was crueler than most: segregation, the Depression, mob violence, Prohibition—a moralistic age that presaged our own. Still, what better moment for Robeson to tackle the role that would make him a star? For he must have known that Brutus Jones—despite O’Neill’s limitations in his conception of the role—was a “bad nigger,” that all-too-real being who disavowed what America said he should be: subservient, invisible.”

 

     The foremost question on our minds, accordingly, is not only how does Robeson, but how can he possibly embrace the role demanded of him by the writer, or in this case, director?

      Robeson, himself provides one clue in his own statements: 

 

   "As I actor, civilization falls away from me. My plight becomes real, the horrors terrible facts. I feel the terror of the slave mart, the degradation of man bought and sold into slavery. Well, I am the son of an emancipated slave and the stories of old father are vivid on the tablets of my memory."

 

      Fortunately, in Murphy’s film version, Robeson has been able to stand aside from the true “Emperor” for a fairly long time before he must fully embody him. In his slow movements up and down the social world dominated by white laws, he has been somewhat distant and observant, teaching himself, if you will, not only about their motives and methods, but learning how to do without—without the traditional heteronormative supports, without the sustaining love of women or even friends. As he puts it when he leaps from the steamer on its way to Jamaica, “trouble” has come to define him. He is a true loner, a complete outsider, swimming to a world he is told, just like the one his now escaped, wants no part of his kind. And in fact, upon arriving he is immediately condemned to further imprisonment and death. He is saved only by becoming a slave like his ancestors, bought by Smithers who plans to use him without pay in his trading business.

     Yet Jones the character is able through clever dealing and wit, in part through his very “presence,” to rise up again and turn the tables, becoming not only a “partner’ with Smithers but soon thereafter an Emperor whom, he declares, can be killed only by a silver bullet—a trick he has performed by emptying the soldier’s guns of bullets and filling them with blanks, thus making it appear that their bullets have had no effect.

     Almost the moment the words “emperor” cross his lips, we see the actor in all his true magnificence, in part through Murphy’s trick of bringing the camera closer to his central figure and placing it somewhat lower so that it looks up to encounter Robeson’s commanding presence. Throughout the film, but even more particularly for her on, Murphy’s camera, through the cinematography of Ernest Haller (who served the same role for Gone with the Wind, Jezebel, and Mildred Pierce and is rumored to have been gay) makes love to Robeson’s Jones.

      At the same time, moreover, the actor himself suddenly pulls himself into the character and signifies his presence. As if suddenly recognizing his own beauty, demanding that mirrors be placed throughout his now royal residence, he becomes the grandest Narcissus of all. And gradually we come to realize that Jones is in love with another man—himself. Having lost touch with the rest of the world he has become a delusional lover of the man in the mirror, but significantly in that process he also becomes a lover of the black men he represents outside of the social hierarchies of both the white world and those of willingly bow to him.

     Surrounded now only by a bevy of black soldier boys, selected couples to whom he has awarded false entitlement such as “Archduke and Duchess of Manhattan” and “Lord and Lady Baltimore,” and the now subservient and comic white man, Smithers, who is perhaps the only who truly admires the clever black ruler who now can threaten his existence.

     And even though he now has appropriated the disgusting language of the racist white world, we love and admire him through Murphy’s portrayal focusing as does the director on our “white” (male and female), “gay,” and even “spiritual” gazes. He is the black man who both master and his mistress lust after, who the gay boys droll over, who the spiritual revere. Robeson walks down the hall flanked by mirrors and glides across the special running carpet with the grace of a model showing off the cut of his royal coat, the one he long ago imagined he might be wearing someday when he worked as a porter. In short, the director purposely eroticizes him, just as Robeson fully enters the physicality of Jones so that we might love and fear him simultaneously, just as Smithers does.

     The role is very similar, as some commentators have noted, to the way Cagney and Robinson and later Robert De Niro and Al Pacino embodied beauty and power as evil gangsters. Indeed, Robeson’s rise to power bares a great resemblance to the gangster and mafia movies. As “Danny” from the generally well-written PreCode.com site observes:

 

“Jones’ journey is a common one in American myth. The confident and clever young man working his way up the class structure, though here it is the far more treacherous route that African-American men, in an era of lynchings and segregation, had to nimbly tread. Thomas Doherty goes so far as to call Jones “the Black Gatsby,” a man whose desire to make good on the American dream is unable to overcome a past [that] consumes and destroys him.”

     Few of us might wish to really know a gangster or a member of the mafia, but we are fascinated by their kind in the movies, even if they represent nearly all the values we everyday men and women daily work against. Killing and stealing their way to the top, they cannot help but remind us of wealthy business executives without their utterly boring demeanors and lives. These men, at least, like cowboys, fight it out with guns and knives.

     Some observers have also compared Jones to Dracula, reminding us of the director’s involvement with that film. But Jones is not at all frightened by mirrors, which only remind him of physical and sexual beauty, as his image is reflected in his full magnificence. The Emperor might certainly strangle a man as he almost does Smithers—one of the very first scenes on film of a black man physically abusing a white, also demanded by the Hays Code to be cut—but there is no indication that he might ever sink his lovely pearly whites into someone’s neck. Given the silver bullet myth he has concocted, you might say as a monster he is more like a werewolf, another creature that undergoes an enormous physical change.

      But whether gangster or monster, or even as both, it is Robeson’s sudden ability to embody Brutus Jones that literally forces us to drop our jaws in awe as we simultaneously realize that in our beloved gaze we have objectified a real human being, revealing ourselves as voyeurs peering into the reprimanding face of beauty with both unspoken admiration and horror in fact he is, finally, a kind of Frankenstein, a monster our own society has created.

      Like all such totemic objects of desire, before he reveals too much of us, he must be destroyed. The drum, the mix of love and hate in our hearts, and the terror in Jones’ will be heard until he is hunted down and killed like Kurz in The Heart of Darkness.

       In his essay “Master of Disguise: Paul Robeson and The Emperor Jones,” Als summarizes the ideas what I have just expressed quite nicely from the actor’s point view, without giving credit, however, also to the filmmaker:

 

“…Robeson must have found something in O’Neill’s critique of Jones’s fiction, with its implicit message that the truth will find one out, race and class notwithstanding. Today, one can see that Robeson best conveyed that thesis through his character’s physicality. He uses O’Neill’s language as a cloak in which to wrap his powerful body. As Jones attempts to flee the island that was never his home, casting off his partially self-conferred majesty like a robe, Robeson uses his large, handsome face to break through the double mask of race and invented black language. So doing, the film is a credible document of an actor not trying to play black, but to be black. As Robeson works through the language to impart something of the mystery and heartache and power that trouble Jones’s eyes, head, and torso, he reveals all that is good and still necessary to see in his collaboration with O’Neill: their joint creation of a mournful song of being that ends in race and capitalism’s necessary but ultimately unachievable death.”

Los Angeles, February 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 7, 2023).