The Cinema
" The Emperor Jones." At the Marble Arch Pavilion
ABOUT half of this film is over before Brutus Jones, the ambitious negro, reaches the island which is the scene of Eugene O'Neill's play. We have watched hiM, first, leave his South Carolina home to become a pullman porter. He lords it over negro society in Harlem, makes money by specu- lation, kills a man in a gambling-room quarrel, and is sen- tenced to the chain-gang. Escaping, he signs on as a ship's stoker, and finally evades justice by swimming ashore to a Caribbean island where he finds only one white man-a shifty trader engaged in exploiting the negro population, ruled over by a top-hatted negro President.
All these early episodes are well done. They make a graphic adventure story, and Paul Robeson is an impressive figure in his first talkie part. But they are not quite right as preparation for the psychological drama that follows. The essential theme of Eugene O'Neill's play is the failure of a sophisticated negro to resist primitive fears when he loses the support of his American upbringing and becomes a fugitive in the bush. So long as he is able to persuade the island negroes to imitate the white man's social conventions, while he plays on their superstitions with contemptuous scepticism Jones is easily their master. But when his oppressed subjects at last desert him, and their tom-toms are heard threateningly at night in the jungle, he is drawn back into their world, and finds that it still rules his blood.
The real theatre of this symbolic drama is the consciousness of Jones, and the audience should be made to feel inside his consciousness, with the outer world existing only in relation to it. The film starts off too objectively, showing us Jones as one character among others, and so the forest terrors remain also external, observed by the audience but not felt with the immediate intimacy that the situation demands. The pro- ducers ought to have risked a boldly original treatment, sacrificing varied adventure to inner intensity.
Still, this is a picture with many unusual qualities. Robe- son's performance is in itself worth seeing ; the photography is always good and sometimes brilliant ; the smaller negro parts are exceptionally well played ; and effective use is made of three related forms of musical sound-negro spirituals, Harlem jazz, and the throb of native drums.
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