04/10/2025
In 1933, "The Emperor Jones" was released with a black actor's name (Paul Robeson) getting top billing over a white actor for the first time, and an integrated cast into an America in which the Scottsboro boys were still being held for trial. The film opened to excellent, often glowing reviews in the trade, mainstream and African-American press - for Robeson's powerful performance and often noting director Dudley Murphy's visual innovations. Theaters in Times Square and Harlem were immediately sold out.
But releasing the film in the rest of the country was problematic. It remained controversial for its use of language even among liberal, northern, African American audiences - who nonetheless flocked to see it - and when distributed elsewhere, particularly in the South, the response was virulent: more than forty lynchings erupted in its opening week across the South where it wasn't showing yet. United Artists distributed the film and yanked it out of the midtown New York theater for a routine Wallace Beery comedy, after only two weeks. Elsewhere, post-production cuts were made taking out offending language wherever it occurred. The film became increasingly jumpy and unintelligible as it spread out to neighborhood theaters across the country, and business fell.
But "The Emperor Jones" made a powerful impact, despite its erratic earnings, by showing Robeson as a complex, sexual, morally ambiguous black man on the screen. It preserved his legendary performance and made him the first African-American screen star, and the most highly-visible African-American activist against racism at home and colonialism abroad, in the 1930s and '40s. Unfortunately, his was an all-too-brief career, cut short in 1950 by racist Red-baiting by the FBI and HUAC that denied Robeson a passport for the next eight years, created a nationwide disinformation smear campaign in the press, and suppressed concert performance, recordings and all of his films, including this one. For many decades, it was impossible to see this 1933 film even on television, because of the level of vicious repression of this brilliant black performer and activist by a racist FBI and Federal government.
The jungle scenes in the film were originally to be shot in the swamps of the American South, but when Robeson signed for the film, he had a clause inserted in his contract that specifically prohibited filming in the South, due to that area's violent racist history and strict racial segregation. The scenes were therefore filmed on a studio set in Astoria, Queens, New York.
"I shall take my voice wherever there are those who want to hear the melody of freedom or the words that might inspire hope and courage in the face of fear. My weapons are peaceful, for it is only by peace that peace can be attained. The song of freedom must prevail." (Wikipedia/IMDb)
Happy Birthday, Paul Robeson!
