[Dixielandjazz] FW: "The Green Pastures, " "Cabin in the Sky" reviewed

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
Two very interesting DVD reviews via the Australian Dance Bands list.
Kind regards,
Bill. 
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Smilin' Them to Death
by Gary Giddins
New York Sun, January 10, 2006

Africans, kidnapped and enslaved in the New World, soon learned
to "signify" -- to communicate with one another in a way that
wouldn't rile massa, for whom a different kind of communication was
necessitated, as summed up by the grandfather in the opening pages
of Ellison's "Invisible Man": "I want you to overcome 'em with
yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and
destruction." We forget that massa, too, had need to signify.
Bounded by fundamentalists and Puritans, he could no more exercise
his wild side or express irreverent attitudes toward sex, religion,
and race than blacks could stump for empowerment or date massa's
daughter.

Slaves had their say by making music of Exodus and desire. Whites
had theirs by pretending to be slaves: nature's dim-witted children
who said the darndest things.

This is a severe simplification, but in examining the ongoing if
mutable allure of minstrelsy, we tend to focus on racist stereotypes
as vehicles for hatred, when in fact they also served as vehicles
for freer, if not necessarily free, speech. As blackface minstrelsy
slowly, slowly lost its appeal, it was successfully supplemented by
the all-black theatrical pageant, written and produced by whites and
presenting an America in which there are no whites and,
consequently, no racism.

Not that the black communities they envision don't have problems,
like choosing between De Lawd and Lucifer, prayer and gambling,
obeisance and transgression. These pageants, most famously Marc
Connelly's 1930 Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Green Pastures," which
sent a generation of white critics into paroxysms of teary
gratitude, did triple-duty. They indulged in heresies by ascribing
them to Negro folk culture; furthered the national illusion that,
even in their segregated neighborhoods, stock Negro types made their
way through life yesing (but with no thought of death and
destruction); and thrust ingenious black performers into the
limelight.

Warner has now released DVDs of three of the most celebrated all-
black musicals (Fox is sitting on the other two from the same
period, "Hearts in Dixie" and "Stormy Weather"), which came out in
seven-year installments: King Vidor's "Hallelujah" in 1929, Connelly
and William Keighley's "The Green Pastures" in 1936, and Vincente
Minnelli's "Cabin in the Sky" in 1943. An all-black cinema had
thrived in black communities since the silent era, producing low-
budget musicals, dramas, and Westerns. These, however, were major
studio releases from MGM and Warner, distributed with the knowledge
that Southern white theaters would boycott them. Yet they made money
in their day, and continue to startle and entertain.

Warner, of course, worries that some people may take offense. In a
written warning that can't be skipped or fast-forwarded, the company
disavows images it acknowledges as "wrong then and wrong now"; it
also provides commentaries by black scholars, much as it included an
introduction by Whoopi Goldberg in a recent collection of Looney
Tunes, characterizing racial stereotypes as a part of history we
need to confront. You can understand the hesitation. Is it really
okay to take pleasure in Mantan Moreland as one of the funniest
movie comedians of his day, or are we obliged to watch grimfaced as
he gets more mileage from the line (in "Cabin in the Sky"), "I was
the one that thought up flies," than any actor had a right? You
wonder, when a commentator characterizes Louis Armstrong as a great
musician who incarnated an Uncle Tom image.

The 21st-century irony that hovers over these movies -- all of which
present a fundamentalist religious dichotomy between good and evil,
rationalizing a literal interpretation of the Bible by crediting the
viewpoint to Negro children or Negro illiterates (Eddie Anderson's
Little Joe, in "Cabin in the Sky," signs his name with an X) --
stems from our awareness that now they would be enacted by the
intelligent-design crowd. The high priest of Israel in "The Green
Pastures," who takes God's name in vain to further a political
agenda, is Pat Robertson without the obsequious grin.

"Hallelujah" is a remarkable film, not only for the subject and
cast, but because King Vidor filmed much of it on location in
Tennessee and Arkansas, providing a documentary authenticity in his
depiction of cotton farming, baptisms, and shotgun housing. So what
if two songs, including a putative old-time spiritual ("Waiting at
the End of the Road") were written by Irving Berlin? At the center
of the film is the dynamic Nina Mae McKinney, the first potential
black sex symbol -- reportedly 16, when the film was made.

McKinney's career soon vanished: Hollywood offered no more black
Jezebels until Lena Horne's brief movie fling 14 years later. Still,
here she is, wearing her heart or a pair of dice on her bodice, a
black variation on the woman in the bulrushes, luring a too-easily
enticed farm boy away from God before dying in a muddy ditch. Her
nightclub dance, justifiably compared by commentator Donald Bogle to
Elvis's moves in "Jailhouse Rock," is not to be missed, and the
film's theme of rehabilitation never seemed more pointed than now,
when the idea of rehabilitation is so out of fashion. The DVD
includes two 1930s shorts with McKinney and the magnificent teenage
Nicholas Brothers, born to sport fedoras and determined --
especially speed-demon Fayard Nicholas -- to avoid every cliche when
they can devise infinite variations on a basic time-step.

"The Green Pastures," which also comes with a Nicholas brothers
short and the infamous "Rufus for President," with Ethel Waters and
7-year-old Sammy Davis Jr., begins with risible references to "very
simple, devout people" who are "humble" and "reverent," but comes
powerfully alive in the broad harmonies of the Hall Johnson choir.
Set in New Orleans, which began when "the whole world wasn't nothing
but a mess of bad weather" and where a child is warned against
growing up to be a "transgressor," it moves quickly to heaven -- a
combination fish fry and prayer meeting. De Lawd, wittingly
incarnated by the striking Rex Ingram (even more witting as Satan
in "Cabin in the Sky" -- he was versatile), creates Earth to provide
firmament for his custard. Religion is the custard of the people.

Eddie Rochester Anderson is very funny as Noah, but most of the
minstrelsy here is designed to disguise such heresies as God not
bothering to listen to prayers, and a conclusion (cleverly borrowed
from the poorly married prophet Hosea) in which a non-biblical
soldier named Hezdrel converts God from wrath to mercy. "The Green
Pastures" postulates the moral growth of God -- something you can
only suggest through the eyes of Negro children. Even so, they show
God but not Jesus; minstrels do have their limitations. De Lawd
doesn't know who Jesus is or where he comes from, though he looks
awfully beatific watching the crucifixion.

Minnelli's first film, "Cabin in the Sky," deserves a better
treatment, with a more learned commentary or documentary than it
gets. It does offer a major audio-only extra: the excised five-
minute Louis Armstrong version of "Ain't It the Truth," previously
available on records, though it fails to explain how the number
figured in the screenplay. Had they included Armstrong's number in
the original film, he would have stolen the show -- it was the most
ambitious orchestration and production in the film.

As released, Armstrong, though fourth-billed, appears only in a
wondrously funny scene set in Hades with Ingram, Moreland, Willie
Best, and other competing black comics. The original idea was to cut
from Hades to Armstrong's performance, which begins with a swinging
vocal, followed by a trumpet solo and coda that leads to a blazing
orchestral episode and finale, brimming with high notes. As
Armstrong's trumpet reprises the melody, the scene was to shift to
Earth, where Ms. Horne's Georgia Brown sings the same song while
luxuriating in a bubble bath.

That idea was scotched by order of the Breen Office, which could not
abide a beautiful black woman in a tub, but her scene was filmed,
and a clip is included in the montage that accompanies the
recording. Unfortunately, the DVD does not include the unedited
audio performance of Duke Ellington's "Going Up." His appearance in
the film, all too brief, and prominently featuring trombonist
Lawrence Brown, is nonetheless a moment of glory -- one of many.
Minnelli is so spellbound by the talent at his disposal that the
film plays as vaudeville basted by dramatic vignettes. Waters and
Ms. Horne have their best turns ever in film musicals, as does
Anderson ("Life's Full of Consequences") and John Bubbles.

Two complementary tap numbers play variations on the stereotype of
the grinning, gravity-defying Negro dancer. First Bill Bailey (whose
kid sister was Pearl) does a relatively conventional buck-and-wing
to "Taking a Chance on Love." Then, in one of filmdom's all-time
show-stoppers, the incomparable Bubbles, singing and dancing to the
self-effacing minstrel anthem "Shine," turns that characterization
on its head, as he spins (note the one-legged turns, a la Peg Leg
Bates) the material into an expression of narcissistic thuggery,
smiling the entire community into death and destruction.

(A benefit for 91-year-old Fayard Nicholas will be held on Sunday,
January 22, at 2:30 p.m. at Mount Sinai Hospital's Stern Auditorium,
at 101st Street and Fifth Avenue. The show includes a lineup of tap
dance legends as well as a screening of the Nicholas brothers
documentary, "We Sing, We Dance." Tickets are $25.)
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by Dave Kehr
New York Times, January 10, 2006

The French film historian Jacques Lourcelles has called King
Vidor's "Hallelujah" the first great American sound movie, an
opinion that finds strong support in Warner Home Video's excellent
new edition of the 1929 film. It is issued with "The Green Pastures"
(1936) and "Cabin in the Sky" (1943) as part of three features with
African-American themes, all of which share the peculiar curse of
having been ahead of their own time but behind our own in terms of
racial politics. 

"Hallelujah" traffics in stereotypes but never betrays the humanity
of its characters. As Zeke, the sharecropper who loses his family's
savings to a pair of loaded dice, the unjustly forgotten Daniel L.
Haynes is a towering presence with a Paul Robeson-size baritone. (He
would finish his film career seven years later, with an unbilled bit
part in Fritz Lang's "Fury.") Nina Mae McKinney, as the honky-tonk
temptress Chick, projects the full-blooded female sexuality that was
a constant of Vidor's most personal work, up through "The
Fountainhead" (1949) and "Ruby Gentry" (1952).

Filmed on Southern locations using portable sound equipment
originally developed for newsreels, "Hallelujah" contains a number
of scenes -- the workings of a saw mill, hands plucking at a cotton
field, a mass baptism -- that now look like the purest documentary.
But the film's striking realism comes in large part from Vidor's
unmanipulated, unfiltered use of sound. Working with a single
microphone and the two-dial mixer developed by the head of MGM's
sound department, Douglas Shearer, Vidor captured sound with a
simple truthfulness that would not be equaled until, quite self-
consciously, Jean-Marie Straub revived this "primitive" early
approach for his experimental feature of 1968, "The Chronicle of
Anna Magdalena Bach."

There is no mouthing to playback, no post-synchronization, none of
the dubbing and looping that would soon make the soundtrack the most
artificial element in Hollywood filmmaking. And now that the
original soundtrack of "Hallelujah" has been digitally scrubbed of
the pops and hisses it acquired over years of poor duplication,
Vidor's accomplishment stands out even more clearly. Here indeed is
a road not taken, toward a modern, materialist cinema rather than
the elaborate stylization soon to be imposed by the studio
system. "Hallelujah" remains an eternally fascinating what-if.

The two other films in the Warner grouping display a certain fearful
symmetry: both "The Green Pastures" (directed by Mark Connelly and
William Keighley) and "Cabin in the Sky" (the first feature film of
the great Vincente Minnelli) were based on Broadway hits. Both deal
in the stereotypical division of black life into warring cults of
blues and gospel music; both feature the imposing Rex Ingram -- who
gets to play God (a k a De Lawd) in Connelly's condescending recap
of the Old Testament as imagined by a rural preacher, and Satan (or
more accurately, his no-account son, Lucifer Junior) in Minnelli's
sparkling musical. 

But where "The Green Pastures" is frequently cringe-inducing,
Minnelli's film requires little apology for a contemporary audience.
Eddie Anderson, Jack Benny's sidekick Rochester, plays the Faustian
Little Joe, a good but weak man whose loyalties are divided between
the eternal archetypes represented by the good-time girl Lena Horne
(who has the advantage of her astounding beauty) and his loyal,
churchgoing wife, Ethel Waters (who has the greater advantage of
performing two Harold Arlen-Vernon Duke classics, "Happiness Is Just
a Thing Called Joe" and "Taking a Chance on Love"). The film is full
of the thrilling emotional crescendos that were Minnelli's
specialty -- concordances of camera movement, lighting, music (and
later color) that seem to lift the drama to an entirely new plane.

All three films come with commentaries by leading film scholars and
several of the surviving participants, as well as supplementary
shorts and trailers. $19.98 each, not rated.
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