Vincente Minnelli (1943)
It’s hard to know how to respond. An all-black cast in an MGM (Arthur Freed-produced) musical of the time assures the film’s place in cinema history. The collection of performers on display – they include Ethel Waters, Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson, Lena Horne, John W Bubbles, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – is breathtaking. This was Minnelli’s first Hollywood feature and the whole thing is very well and tightly directed – especially if you see it, as I did, just twenty-four hours after The Harvey Girls. The song score is a mixture of old and new, and of mixed quality too, but the best-known number – ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ – became a standard, and truly belongs to Cabin in the Sky: it was written, by Vernon Duke, John La Touche and Ted Fetter, for the Broadway stage version in 1940 (which George Balanchine choreographed).
Yet the racial assumptions of the piece leave you repeatedly shocked and once or twice open-mouthed at what a white audience of seventy years ago was prepared to accept in depictions of African-American lives. The comedy-drama of the battle for the soul of lovable rascal Little Joe (Rochester) presents characters of moral simplicity – simple-mindedness – that would surely have been ridiculed if the story had been about white folks of any class or creed. The religious conceptions are hard to take, not just because they’re literalised tackily but because they reflect the minds of people who are conceived of as children. It takes time to get used to Ethel Waters, as Joe’s lovingly tolerant, devout wife Petunia: she’s occasionally overpowering but she manages the several speeches she addresses to God skilfully and she’s great when Petunia briefly turns ‘bad’ and dances with John W Bubbles (who also does a spectacular tap solo). Rochester himself is very good – he’s surprisingly naturalistic. Rex Ingram as Lucifer Junior has an astonishing (though overused) laugh; Kenneth Lee Spencer, his divine counterpart, is sonorously wooden – he speaks his lines like the opera singer he was. I can’t explain why Lena Horne as the temptress Georgia Brown made me uncomfortable but she did – maybe a suspicion that in order to present a black woman as convincingly sexual she had to be as light-skinned as this. And Horne works too hard, and unnecessarily, to be seductive.
9 November 2011
