The Emperor Jones

Paul Robeson was TCM's Star of the Month back in September, which gave me the opportunity to DVR one of his movies I hadn't seen before: The Emperor Jones. Recently I sat down to watch it.

Robeson plays Brutus Jones, who at the start of the movie is a member of a Baptist congregation in one of those small wooden churches that dotted westerns and movies set in the old south. But he's about to leave to try to make his fortune, or at least a modest living, as a Pullman porter. He's good at what he does, enough so that he gets invited to be the personal servant of the president of the company, planning to use the insider information he hears to make money in the stock market.

But, alas, that's not to be. He goes back to a regular route, and in Savannah he meets up with old friend Jeff. They're in a juke joing and get involved in a fairly high-stakes game of craps. Brutus figures out that Jeff is using loaded dice, which leads to a knife fight in which Brutus kills Jeff. Brutus is unsurprisingly caught, and sent to the chain gang.

Brutus isn't a quitter though, and immediately comes up with a plan to escape, which he does, getting on a boat headed to Kingston, Jamaica working as a stoker. However, there's always the possibility of extradition from Jamaica since it's still a British colony, so he jumps ship when it nears an island that most of the boats don't go to.

It's with good reason that boats don't go to this island, because when Brutus washes up on shore he's immediately taken into custody and put into jail, where the corrupe importer/exporter Smithers (Dudley Digges) buys Brutus' freedom. Everybody else on the island is descended from slaves who apparently revolted like in Haiti, and who still believe a lot of the old African religious beliefs their ancestors would have held back in Africa.

Once again, however, Brutus is no dummy, and is able to worm his way into becoming a partner in Smithers' business. From there, he's able to create a situation in which he leads a military coup and installs himself as Emperor. But it's a short lived reign, as he lets power go to his head and almost immediately turns everybody against him.

This was based on a play by Eugene O'Neill, although from what I've read only the last third of the movie is the play and everything that comes before it was written by Dubose Heyward of Porgy and Bess fame. It might explain why the movie feels more like a series of not-quite-connected scenes than a fully fleshed out movie. Robeson does a fine job of acting here, but is unfortunately brought down somewhat by the screenplay. Digges is good too, and there are a bunch of interesting names with small parts in the cast, including Fredi Washington who would go on to Imitation of Life the following year, or Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers as a child tap dancer.

The movie was obviously controversial at the time as one of the first Hollywood movies with a black protagonist holding his own against white characters, but 90 years on, some of the material seems like a huge overreaction. Brutus made Smithers light his cigarette, and some censors wanted to remove that? Then again, the censors absolutely butcherd Robeson's earlier Body and Soul. In the end, The Emperor Jones is an interesting performance in what unfortunately could have been a better story.