Paul Robeson films / Saul J. Turell documentaries
A fascinating Criterion DVD set, and a good-but-frustrating Janus Films disc.
Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist (Criterion set, 2007). Grade: B
Three Documentaries (by) Saul J. Turrell (Janus DVD, 2006). Grade: B-
Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist (1979). Grade: A
There’s four discs in the Criterion set, with eight films on them. Your library may have the whole set available, or each disc separately. The Turrell documentaries are part of a larger Janus films set called 50 Years of Janus Films, with 10 discs/52 films in it. Our library has those separately, which is how we got Three Documentaries. Both have Tribute to an Artist included; and that’s the one you absolutely HAVE to see. The rest are fun for movie history buffs, with a few exceptions (we’ll get to ‘em).
First off, who was Paul Robeson? Well, he was an interesting, amazing guy, with an interesting, frequently amazing life.
He was born in 1898, the son of a Quaker schoolteacher and a Presbyterian minister who’d escaped slavery at age 15 via the Underground Railroad. Robeson went to college at Rutgers University, the only African-American student there at the time; he was noted for his singing, scholarship, and football skill. He was named an All-American (a kind of All-Star honor for college football players) and voted valedictorian of his class. He played in the NFL for two seasons (for Akron and Milwaukee) — while obtaining a law degree from Columbia University!
With the support of his wife Eslanda Goode (a chemist at New York-Presbyterian hospital), Robeson eventually devoted himself to singing and to acting, primarily on stage but with a few movie roles.
Robeson was a fierce supporter of the labor movement, of anti-colonial uprisings worldwide, and of the anti-racism movement in America. As you’d guess, these things did not make him a favorite of the McCarthyites or their enforcer, J. Edgar Hoover. And some statements Robeson made at a peace conference in Poland were deliberately misquoted to make it seem as though Robeson was equating America with fascism (he wasn’t).
Rather stubbornly, Robeson defended the Soviet Union even when he knew it was persecuting anti-Stalin dissenters. He opposed the Korean War. And he was loudly/proudly against the KKK. These things and more were the background to anti-Robeson violence in Peekskill, NY (in the same Hudson River valley region as Woodstock), that prevented him from performing a concert there in 1949. The anti-Robeson attackers went after concertgoers with rocks and baseball bats, screaming racist and antisemitic obscenities. 140 people were hurt, thirteen quite seriously.
By 1950, Robeson had his US passport taken away — and his college football awards wiped out by the reference books of the time. The passport was a big financial blow, as Robeson’s concerts drew huge audiences overseas. He got the passport back in 1958, but his voice had faltered a bit by that point, and his health would start to fail him a few years afterwards. He was pretty thoroughly blacklisted in America; it became hard to find his once-bestselling records.
Criterion’s Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist is worth checking out for the booklet alone. It’s not long, but it’s lively-written and interesting. Influential independent filmmaker Charles Burnett writes about African-American films financed, shot, and released outside the studio system. Historian Clement Alexander Price writes about the disappointing nature of Robeson’s screen efforts (largely because he had so little artistic control): “most of his films brought him deep frustration, as well as criticism from those he respected. In the end, his film career left a dubious legacy.”
There’s an excerpt from Robeson’s autobiography Here I Stand, explaining his developing attitudes on what roles he should play: “In the early days of my career as an actor, I shared what was then the prevailing attitude of Negro performers – that the content or form of a play or film scenario was of little or no importance to us. What mattered was the opportunity, which came so seldom to our folks, of having a part – any part – to play on the stage or in the movies; and for a Negro actor to be offered a starring role – well, that was a rare stroke of fortune indeed! Later I came to understand that the Negro artist could not view the matter simply in terms of his individual interests, and that he had a responsibility to his people, who rightfully resented the traditional stereotyped portrayals of Negroes on stage and screen.”
(No doubt the same decision was faced by many other actors of color when they were frequently up for parts as criminals & drug dealers in 1980s movies. Is a humanizing performance of a stereotypical character better than none at all?)
We watched about half of this box set. One was 1933’s The Emperor Jones, a talkie version of a role Robeson had played onstage. It was a Eugene O’Neill play, and the role didn’t originate with Robeson; Charles Sidney Gilpin played it first. But Gilpin had a drinking problem, and frequently changed the play’s n-words to something milder. Robeson kept the dialogue as written, and was a big hit in the production.
The film is mostly a curiosity, where you get to hear Robeson’s booming voice and see his towering physical presence. Sample dialogue: “Any woman is baggage what gets heavier and heavier, the longer you totes 'em. You got to change 'em to keep travelin' light. Here's $40. And good-bye!” It has an interesting sequence at the end when Jones is being chased by the island people he’s wronged; it’s color-tinted a bit and has a kind of hallucinatory feel. Interestingly, even though the Hays Code wasn’t in full force yet, it did require the removal of one shot; we can’t see Robeson hitting a white guy.
Body and Soul (1925) was Robeson’s first screen performance; he plays both an evil violent escapee posing as a pious preacher… and the bad guy’s nice twin brother (who barely gets any of the screen time). It’s written/produced/directed by African-American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux, and notable for the kinds of things it shows. A considerable number of “mixed-race” actors, for instance. And when one character uses the n-word, they’re chastised by another for being ignorant; education levels are shown to be a form of varied opportunities.
Almost half the film had to be trimmed to appease local state censors, and that footage is sadly lost. We’ve got a rape and murder in the allowed footage, so you can guess the rest of it was even harsher. It’s possible that the extended cut would have included more of a role for the “good twin” Robeson, and maybe had an ending that made more sense — this one falls back on “it was all a dream.”
Native Land (1942) is a staged documentary, a series of short scenes depicting various times that companies had used hired goons to illegally attack union organizers. Robeson does the narration. It’s really terribly written and amateurishly acted; the intentions may be noble but this is a painfully poorly-made film.
1979’s Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist is a great film, though. It’s one of the best short documentaries I’ve ever seen. And that led me to seek out other films by director/film historian Saul J. Turell. There’s the Robeson one and two more on the Janus Three Documentaries disc.
The Great Chase (1962) is a collection of silent film chase sequences; or, really, silent film action sequences. Many don’t have chases at all, just great stunts or sets or fight scenes (and one very jumpy lion). The energy level falters a little at the end, yet for most of this 81 minutes you’ll be terrifically entertained.
The most frustrating thing here is a lack of film identification. For example, we’re shown a Cecil B. DeMille movie with a fun Evil Madman Victim Drowning Lair — the title isn’t given. (It’s 1925’s The Coming of Amos.) There’s a film shot in the Amazon, supposedly called “Jungle Treasure” that I can find no record of. (Try websearching anything with the word “Amazon” and “film” in it and see what you get! Thanks, bald supervillian Jeff.) An absolutely amazing train stunt/chase scene that’s presented with NO identification, as if it’s part of a serial… but I’m 90% sure it’s Chasing Choo Choos, a “two-reel version of Play Safe showing only the train chase” from 1927. It’s great (you can see a crappy copy at this link), but it should have been labeled. And a terrific sequence with Douglas Fairbanks as, clearly, Zorro is simply called “the masked Robin Hood” — wow, why?
The Love Goddesses has some interesting pre-Hays footage, including some racy/nudie stuff. However, the way it’s presented here is a visual travesty! The film is shown in old-timey “box” ratio (1.33:1), but it’s squeezed! Everything looks artificially skinny! So, Turell must have made it in widescreen for 1965 audiences… meaning he blew up the old images to fit the widescreen! Then these later got squeezed back down to fit early home video TV screens! Here’s an example of how this would be done, Clara Bow in 1926’s Mantrap:1
Now, here’s that image blown up for widescreen (by me):
See how the top/bottom are chopped off? Now, here’s widescreen squeezed back down to 1:33 for home video:
Ugh! Now the top/bottom of the original are still gone, PLUS it’s squeezed! Yuck!
This is hideous, and Janus Films should NOT have put this film on disc this way. Especially considering that Turell (who died in 1986) used to own Janus Films! (Now both Janus and Criterion are both owned by film producer Steven Rales, so if he kills them, it’ll be good old fashioned Hollywood stupidity/greed, not McCarthy-style blacklisting.)
Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist IS presented correctly, and it’s a beautiful, basically perfect film. It’s narrated by Sidney Poitier with both the ironic, angry humor and the powerful feeling he was so great at. At just 30 minutes long, it necessarily doesn’t give you a broad picture of Robeson’s life/art, but it doesn’t shortchange you, either. You won’t feel like you barely got the Cliffs Notes version.
It’s shaped around Robeson’s signature song, “Old Man River” from Show Boat, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. Over time, Robeson would alter those lyrics himself, to fit his personal/political stances. The 1936 movie of the 1927 stage musical changed the n-word to “darkies”; later, Robeson would skip that portion altogether. “Get a little drunk and you land in jail” became “show a little grit and you land in jail”; “I’m tired of living and scared of dying” became “I must keep fighting until I’m dying.”
The film has newsreel footage from the Peekskill attcks, and it’s stunning stuff. Again, this is New York, not Alabama, yet it looks like the worst footage of rednecks attacking marchers in 1965. I had never heard of this violence.
So, no matter whether you get the Criterion disc with Tribute to an Artist or the Janus Films disc, this one’s a must-see. The Criterion set has that great booklet to go with it; the Janus films disc has that fun clip footage in The Great Chase. Or, you could get both! It won’t hurt ya. Tribute to an Artist won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 1980. By that time, Hollywood embraced stories about all those noble souls who stood up to McCarthyism and the blacklist. Hollywood loves to celebrate people who dare to stand on principles; when it’s not completely caving to anyone in power who threatens its profits.
Final fun thing from Tribute to an Artist: we see a still photo of Robeson in the 1943 stage version of Othello. Iago sure looked to be José Ferrer, so I checked, and it was José Ferrer. With Uta Hagen as Desdemona. (She would later be blacklisted partly because of her closeness to Robeson.)
Ferrer and Hagen were married at the time, but Hagen was having an affair with Robeson. So, Othello was actually sleeping with Iago’s wife, in a sense! And Robeson had an affair with Peggy Ashcroft who played Desdemona in the London production as well… although she wasn’t married to that play’s Iago.
Based on a Sinclair Lewis novel, oddly enough.