CABIN IN THE SKY
DIRECTOR...VINCENTE MINELLI
MGM ...1943.
THE PLOT
CABIN IN THE SKY is a sepia tinged Faustian tale. Think Goethe swaggerin' down the mean streets and the crap houses 'n' saloons of Harlem, themed with a soundtrack of swarthy swanky Ellingtonian blues.
CABIN's back plot tells of a small time cad / card-shark 'Little Joe' played by EDDIE 'ROCHESTER' ANDERSON ( of Jack Benny fame), who is gunned down over unpaid gambling debts. He is given six months reprieve by the General aka God (KENNETH SPENCER) to redeem his soul and become worthy of entering the big casino upstairs, or his soul will be condemned to the hothouse and the daemon clutches of Lucius / Lucifer (REX INGRAM).
On the sidelines, playing a barterer for both his heart and his billfold is the copper toned temptress Georgia Brown, as inter- preted by sassy canary LENA HORNE, while Little Joe's wife Petunia, a role filled by haunchy big boned blues mama, ETHEL WATERS, battles for his righteous soul. Other cast members featured are LOUIS ARMSTRONG who toots his trumpet for the Lucifer brigade.
Based on the Broadway musical CABIN IN THE SKY, which itself was inspired by the LYN ROOT play of the same title, performed by an all star black cast, with famed jazz swing maestro DUKE ELLINGTON ticklin the ivories in the original stage production, it was transplanted to the soundstages of MGM, it's ebony soul intact, ELLINGTON's combo recruited along for the ride in the studio orchestra pit, and the famed MGM musical producer ARTHUR FREED breaking in neophyte director VINCENTE MINELLI, for his first virgin screen directors gig.
MGM
METRO GOLDWYN MAYER were of course one of the major five studios in Hollywood in the forties, and indisputably so regarded as the mecca of gaudy glamorous ruritarian musicals. They were seen however as taking a major risk at the time by putting mucho coin behind the production of CABIN IN THE SKY. Racial tensions in the film town had already escalated with the calamitous Zoot Suit Riots and Sleepy Lagoon case in that same year, between the Mexican community and the white marines who saw the pachucos attire as both a fascist and unpatriotic extravagance as well as an affront against the gospel of economical wartime thrift as preached by President Roosevelt.
This time it weren't the black brothers however who were in the hot tub with belligerent white swabs, and they gladly stepped aside so some other caste could take the battering blows of rascist nailed baseball bats.The race question at least between Negroes and Whites in L.A. had already worked out its own demarcation / mason dixon line in both geographical, social and cinematic boundaries by the early forties.
LOUIS B. MAYER, the MGM roaring lion's El Presidente was a closet political progressive, and intuitively sensed a new zeitgeist, black coloured. Noting the influx of even more Negroes into the California state, and predominantly Los Angeles itself, to either sign up for war service in the armed forces, or garner employment in the many factories and shipyards that had been turned over for 24 hour swing-shift war production, MAYER assumed correctly that both the slow acceptance of blacks across America (southern states notwithstanding) as a visible work-force alongside whites in a patriotic war effort, with the blacks' earning of fantastic wages for the first time, added with their newly acquired lower bourgeois aspirations as a result of the feel of that coin in their pocket, that the negro market was primed to exploit.
Viewing L.A in some way a microcosm of a new race relations that would trickle over the more sophisticated MGM markets across the U.S., Louis B. suspected that he could catch that dollar from both white and black audiences, and also control over the new wave of highly talented Negroes who could pump fresh juice into the stale hokeyed musical output of MGM, as well as fill the emptied talent stable that had been vacated by white musical stars.
Yet this was not the first time that MGM had attempted to stage a black musical, nor the first to employ or groom African Americans for roles in their screen outputs. In 1929, they had pitched mucho coin behind King Vidor's 'HALLELUJAH'. They recouped costs but it didn't result in the expected box office boffo, (as in the vernacular of Variety), and the formula of all singin all jivin negroids was junked for the next decade or so. Another groundbreakin' movie in the nascent thirties which had attempted to give voice to the Negro spirit and experience, produced by a major studio with an all black cast was the flick' HEART OF DIXIE, but again both prints and box office returns are obscure.
HOLLYWOOD STEREOTYPING OF BLACK IDENTITY
Hollywood's depiction of the African American character and experience in the late twenties and early thirties however was generally derisive, vulgar and of the most appalling examples of stereotyping to say the least. White vaudevillians as interpreters of Negro song, humour and dance were preferred over the real thing. Citing for example WARNER BROTHERS' "JAZZ SINGER" the first talkie musical in 1927 which reduced the true heart of black minstrelsy to a charcoaled corked paleface AL JOLSON with an oedipal yiddish mammy complex.
In the Academy Award pantheon of racist cinematic schlovel, holding down the top tier would have to be the diuretic discharge of AMOS & ANDY, two white comedians, who bounced from the bakelite radio to marquee success in the dirty thirties. Mugging it as two crazee kiddult picaninnies, with the token axle grease smeared across their mooschs, they lampooned black customs, high-jacked the soul of the African American experience, milking the racial bias with a 'dis and demmed' disregard to an approving and condescending 'spook' audience.
One and all dartboard pin-up favourites of the NACCP.
Yet even black actors were recruited as burlesque acts of the Negro id. Presented as either slow, dim-witted, lazy, uppity or craftily-evil their stage names were monikers of derision, reducing their personalities to little more than rascally junk yard dogs. One readily recalls African American comedians such as Stepin' Fetchit and his screen nemesis Sleep 'n' Eat, who well could be regarded as two black heterosexual drag acts of negro characterizations, serving up and heating racial stereotype in a form of verbal self flagellation to the 'white massuhs' of movie land.
It appeared that white America could celebrate the syncopated sounds of the Negro fused jazz of Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday if it came out of bakelite radio, but would not suffer their glazed pupils having to look at a black face croonin' and moonin' from a movie screen. The Black actors themselves in the earlier epoch of Hollywood were were reduced to merely walk on as merely Aunt Jeminas or Uncle Toms spooning out hacksaw wisdom while spitting out melon seeds. One readily recalls tap dancer extraordinaire Bill Bojangles Robertson, reduced to the role of an Uncle Billie, an all smiling all dancing southern slave, obsequiously soft-shoeing turns with white moppet Shirley Temple in the LITTLEST REBEL. Or Hattie Mc'Daniel in GONE WITH THE WIND, playing Miss Scarlet O'Hara's maid in bugle-eyed sweaty disapproval. The Negro character was corralled in by a mason-dixon line of stereotypical casting, and though there were successful black actors, they were ostensibly playing to a plotted prejudice and caricature by white writers. Reinforcing the African American personality to a crass stereotyping of servile, stupid, chambermaids, shoe shinning jitterbuggin', green tea totin', crapshootin', gospel gabblin' jigaboos.
Seventy eight years after the end of the Civil War, and the abolition of slavery set by President Lincoln, Negro Emancipation had not yet reached Hollywood ! They were still bound in a celluloidal servitude, branded by black nitrate.
Three actors that did cross over, regardless of their on screen peonage as the docile servile class, are showcased in tonite's flick. EDDIE ROCHESTER ANDERSON who plays Little Joe in CABIN, was famous for playing a valet ! (what else ?) to the parsimonious and droll funny man Jack Benny. First appearing on syndicated radio and then onto the movies, he earned some serious fame and coin in the process. He also played UNCLE PETER in the aforementioned cinematic paean to Negro slavery and servitude, GONE WITH THE WIND, not yet four years before in '39.Little Joe's diabolical soul seeker...LUCIUS or LUCIFER, was played by black theatrical legend and Broadway thespian REX INGRAM. Ironically INGRAM had appeared not yet five years earlier in another moderately successful black cast flick, finance by WARNER BROS studios called GREEN PASTURES, in 1936, where he played it white hat as God.
ETHEL WATERS, the ham-boned blues belter who stars in tonight's reeler as Petunia, Little Joe's wife had already conquered Hollywood single handedly. Already famous on her own terms with such Bluebird Victor hits as the lamentative yiddish blues of STORMY WEATHER, she dealt with the studios on her own terms. Appearing in the ZANUCK produced WARNER BROS flick "ON WITH THE SHOW" in '34, where she sang AM I BLUE. The sepia teared tune became a big crossover hit to white and coloured jukeboxes alike. Her 4 week stint at WB netted her 5,000 clams. An astronomical fee for a black actress, for anyone considering that twenty five percent of Americans were doling it at salvation soup kitchens, and WPA lines during this time of the Great Depression. AM I BLUE became ETHEL WATERS standard, most associated with her.
By the early thirties however there was a slow incorporation of black presence in the Movies. CENTRAL CASTING was a beneficent employer, and with a black brother in their front office, one CHARLES BUTLER who saw to it that 11,000 blacks were employed as extras, with the white studios feeding 90,000 buckeroonies into eager Negro hands in that singular year of the Great Crash, 1929.
The depression may have affected the black advance, for a short interim, but with the emergence of the first black agent in Hollywood, BEN CARTER, who shingled up with the white BEN LEVY agency in Hollywood Boulevard, he was able to, with that added 'spook' muscle, influence studio casting to consider more blacks in supporting roles, at the expense of other ethnic types. It was his singular voracious promotion and persistence that the American public grew used to seeing an African American face on screen.
Major studio flicks such as the aforementioned "GREEN PASTURES","SHOWBOAT", the Marx Brother's "DAY AT THE RACES","GONE WITH THE WIND" "IMITATION OF LIFE", and tonight's "CABIN IN THE SKY" featured a dynamic black presence, directly as a result of BEN CARTER'S single minded hucksterism. His influence in the casting these movies brought to the fore to the white eyeball, some of the new wave of educated and trained black actors we are to see tonight, like REX INGRAM, EDDIE 'ROCHESTER' ANDERSON and LOUISE BEAVERS. For that BEN CARTER was the patron saint of the black theatre going public. BEN CARTER was also behind the casting of the very extraordinary and controversial flick IMITATION OF LIFE, whose story line is of a coloured woman's daughter who passes for white, echoing the exact problem that the svelte honey toned star of tonight's feature LENA HORNE would face in her battle with Hollywood in the forties and fifties.
Movies imitate or pre-destinates an actor's life ? Indeed!
BLACK SEPARATIST HOLLYWOOD
There were other black auteurs in the Hollywood movie industry, but they simply conducted a separatist, or rather a parallel black celluloid universe to the white Jewish one that reigned. One studio that was a vigilante promoter of black experience was the MILLION DOLLAR PRODUCTION company. Created and headed up by a RALPH COOPER, a prodigious promoter of black talent in America who originally set up the infamous Wednesday Night black talent shows at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, where amongst many stars, he launched Billie Holiday, COOPER'S company's movie fare featured steamy sirens and pugnacious gangsters in raw plots, low production values, involving usually 30 set ups or more scenes a day, compared to the A budget MGM who would max out at ten. Usual budget costs at MDP never exceeded more than $ 15,000 a pix. COOPER signed the soubrette LENA HORNE (the star of tonight's CABIN) to a one movie contract deal, after seeing her wow audiences in the chorus line at the famed Harlem boite the COTTON CLUB in '36, paying for her ticket to come out west.
The movie DUKE IS TOPS, in which she starred, was neither a successful nor pleasant experience for Horne who was married with child at time. Still the reeler would launch her to a black community, and due to the subsequent success of MISS HORNE in CABIN IN THE SKY, the DUKE IS TOPS was re-launched to the blacks of Central avenue as "BRONZE VENUS", with LENA HORNE'S name above the title ! MDP went into nitrate oblivion shortly thereafter, but not without signing up another caramel copper toned canary, DOROTHY DANDRIDGE who too would follow LENA into the hallowed soundstages of MGM but to more tragic results.
THE PRODUCTION
MAYER, an erstwhile champion of civil rights himself, had arranged before CABIN IN THE SKY went into production, to meet with the Negro political league the NACCP, and it's president WALTER WHITE for script approval. CABIN IN THE SKY may be seen as the first politically correct black movie.
MGM also brought into employ on their lot, a black hairdresser by the name of HAZEL WASHINGTON for the studio's copper-toned signees, namely LENA HORNE and her successor DOROTHY DANDRIDGE.
MAYER also hired MAX FACTOR directly to create a new cosmetic colouring which would become known as "NEW EGYPTIAN" especially for LENA HORNE for special lighting considerations. The same make-up base incidentally would be attempted to be used on ELIZABETH TAYLOR no less in the flick CLEOPATRA.
In the musical department, LENA HORNE also had her old musical chaperone/unrequited ammorata and black tune-smith PHIL MOORE, who had helped created her vocal stylization when they worked together in '42 at hip L.A. boite, the Trocadero.
Yet, unfortunately even though the cast and crew had a progressive champion in the garrulous girth of its President LOUIS B., the negro battalion still had to deal with an excruciating inculcated white racism. On set, the other stars were met with derisive terminology by stage hands who insisted that they be filmed under "Nigger Lite" a device used by film technicians for shading/un-shading in the lighting process. The cast too were banned from the MGM commissary on the first day of shooting, being forbidden to eat with the white employees, by the white starched cafe managers. MAYER himself had the black cast eat with him in his private dining room on the lot every day of the production.
ON SET
The movie was produced by the celebrated ARTHUR FREED unit at MGM, directed by VINCENTE MINELLI, a former window dresser, and his artisan skill of framing scenes comes to light here. It was MINELLI'S first major directorial gig. A virgin double way. He was singin' the miscegenation blues himself, for he was also holding the old torcheroo for the lithesome LENA HORNE. The action on the sound-stage mirrored the tension off. Reel life and real life, fueled the showdown between the old black matron of Hollywood, the husky blues momma Ethel, versus the chilled sensuality of the blushing soubrette Lena, who represented the new Negress in Hollywood, svelte, sophisticated, European chichi'd.
ETHEL WATERS found herself battling MINELLI and his dusky ammorata over both the soul of her on screen beloved, and her beloved career. MINELLI playing biased referee and knowing his flame would get snowballed by the rambunctious blues mama WATERS advised HORNE to ..."Play it small honey chile', just be vulnerable and coquettish."
HORNE did some sweet conspiring of her own, even if it meant subtle self mutilation. Citing the case of the show stopping number "Honey in the Honeycomb", the tune was initially planned to be sung by ETHEL WATERS as a ballad, while her nemesis, MISS LENA would shimmy seductively during the number. However Miss Bronze Venus broke her ankle while spoofing some rare hoofin' and the roles were reversed. LENA got to glaze the saccharine jazz tune with her silky warble, and snare the spotlight, while WATERS was seconded to do her version after LENA had stolen both her chorus and her audience with her sassier version.
But HORNES' AND WATERS' heat wasn't over simply song sheets, but also rumoured the bed sheets. The big boned ETHEL, may well have swung it blue on the bandstand but hot rumour was that she could swang it lavender in the bunkhouse whenever she desired, and studio wags suspected her aggressive cater-waulings may well have been a lesbo come-on to her coquettish nemesis.
Miss Honeybee Horne finally scammed a scene all to herself, crooning a love lullaby while in the obligatory bath-scene. Unfortunately the HAYS OFFICE put a big red X over that episode. The mere thought of a black woman having a bath with white soap suds no less was anathema to the founding fathers of White America's moral rectitude! Incidentally MISS HORNE'S bella corpsa scene was lycanthropised into another movie short titled "Pete Smith's Studio Visit of 1946" without too much hub -a bub-a-bubble from the censors!!!
Standout features in CABIN include vaudeville hoofer BILL BAILEY doing the moonwalk, 42 years before Michael Jackson would claim it as his own, the Busby Berkeley choreographed olio scene "SHINE", and ETHEL WATERS classic rendition of her Academy Award nominated "HAPPINESS IS A THING CALLED JOE."
MGM junkies too might notice the tornado scene in CABIN looks mighty familiar. They're right, the footage was lifted out of the MGM vaults from the studio's 1937 classic Wizard of Oz. There was a war on and even the roaring lion LOUIS B was doin' it cheap with big time rationing on both costumes and celluloid.
AFTERMATH
The most ironic outcome to the political correctness of MGM to present the black experience in cinematic terms, without a condescending wink, was movie's final print itself was initially re-processed and released to general audiences as a sepia tint. To quote MINELLI in a a somewhat rueful admission from his biography "I Remember it Well", he stated, "The film was transformed. It seemed more magical. Sepia created a soft, velvety patina more flattering to the actors' skin tones, and our picture was released that way."
CABIN IN SKY made $578,000 dollars profit. MGM did not follow up with other 'all black' productions.
Ironically it was 20th CENTURY FOX who best exploited MINELLI'S BRONZE VENUS, when she was loaned out by MGM to ZANUCK'S sound stages to star in the lush cinematic blues classic STORMY WEATHER later that year of 1943.
The movie catapulted HORNE into mainstream consciousness, and she became forever linked with the HAROLD ARLEN classic "STORMY WEATHER BLUES". Her rival ETHEL WATERS whose name was once synonomous with this very blues paean in the thirties, lost out to her nemesis in the worst hurt of all, having to capitulate both her identity with that song, and her title as the Queen of the Blues to MISS HORNE with her honey jass lilt claimed it as her signature torch in jukeboxes and marquees all over America, as she still continues to do in this 21st century.
REX INGRAM, the Broadway thespian who played the LUCIFER / LUCIUS role, was arrested for violating the MANN ACT in 1949. Pleading guilty to the charge of transporting a white teenage girl across state lines for immoral purposes, he was sentenced to eighteen months jail. He served just ten months of his sentence, but the incident had a serious impact on his career forever after.
VINCENTE MINELLI'S "CABIN" became his calling card in the hallowed halls of MGM and he and his producer ARTHUR FREED, went on to create luminary celluloid pieces such as KISMET, MEET ME IN ST LOUIS, AMERICAN IN PARIS.
LENA HORNE is still alive, vainly trying to get her Bio-pic off the ground. So far it has indeed been Stormy Weather. With OPRAH WINFREY in the producer's seat since 2003, there have been a revolving door of BRONZE VENUS wanna bes, but MISS HORNE has nixed them all.
Originally mooted for the role of the forties diva was R'N' B pop shriller JANET JACKSON, who lost the part due to her infamous grope/mammary flash indiscretion at the American NFL Final with spook idol JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE. WHITNEY HUSTON too, in a vain attempt of a comeback was also eager to ink her monicker above the title, but LENA HORNE did not approve of a whacked out free basin cocaine junkie playin' da' Bronze Venus. It has now been rumored that ALICIA KEYS has met the Forties Jazz Diva tacit approval, and will play her in a 2010 production.
(C) JIMMY VARGAS 1947 / 2008
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