Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist (Janus Films, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Celluloid Closet TCM showed a half-hour mini-documentary on the life and times, both easy and hard, of Paul Robeson: Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, written and directed by Saul Turell. The film was narrated by Sidney Poitier, who in a sense succeeded Robeson as the great Black star who didn’t have to play servile comic-relief roles on screen. Both Robeson and Poitier managed to portray figures of such towering authority audiences simply could not have believed they could be the usual Black stereotypes; even when Robeson played a servant, as he did in Show Boat both on stage and in Universal’s magnificent 1936 film (directed by James Whale with his usual sympathy for the outsider, and featuring Robeson in a music-video-style performance of the show’s signature song, “Ol’ Man River,” that among other things convinces me that Whale had the hots for Robeson, as just about every straight woman or Gay man he met did), he played with such mastery and power he didn’t demean himself. Saul Turell tracked the familiar outlines of Robeson’s rise and fall: his rise occurred during the 1920’s and 1930’s when he rose to movie stardom (though he made most of his films in Britain because there he didn’t have to deal with Hollywood’s out-front racism) after he’d achieved fame on stage in Eugene O’Neill’s plays The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. (O’Neill had written these for a Black actor named Charles Gilpin, then had worried they could no longer be produced after Gilpin retired – until Robeson came along.)

Fortunately The Emperor Jones was filmed with Robeson as star and Dudley Murphy directing by an independent company in New York in 1933, and so we have an audio-visual record of his performance in it even though the script was by Porgy and Bess writer DuBose Heyward, who stuck on an extended prologue showing how Brutus Jones got to be the Emperor of a Caribbean island in the first place. Robeson had been an all-star football player in college and had trained to be an attorney, but he got sidetracked into acting and then singing after he was told by a director in a particular play that he should make his exit whistling. Robeson told the director he didn’t know how to whistle, so the director said, “Just hum … or sing.” Robeson sang, and blew everyone away with the range and power of his bass voice. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the part of Joe in Show Boat for him, though when the musical premiered in 1927 Robeson was in Britain and so another Black singer, Jules Bledsoe, played the part on Broadway – though Robeson played it in Britain in 1928 and on Broadway in the 1932 revival that was Florenz Ziegfeld’s last production. Robeson also became the first Black actor to star in William Shakespeare’s Othello with an otherwise all-white cast, in Britain in 1930 and in L.A. in 1943, with the then-unknown José Ferrer as his Iago (there had been some previous productions of Othello with all-Black casts), and though Robeson’s performance was not filmed it was recorded as an audio-only album by Columbia and this show features a clip of Robeson in costume explaining how he worked out the correct “Shakespearean” pronunciation of the dialogue.

The second half of the story is familiar – and sad; it tells of how Robeson ended up caught in the post-war U.S. blacklist of liberal and progressive entertainers in general and Black entertainers who spoke out against racism in particular. Robeson never made any secret of his admiration for the Soviet Union and Communism in general, he made an infamous statement in 1949 to the effect that American Blacks should refuse to fight for a government that treated them as second-class citizens, and after he came home from a 1949 concert tour in Europe the U.S. State Department rescinded his passport in 1950 on the grounds that allowing Robeson to travel would endanger the U.S.’s national security. This cut him off from any income whatever, since he couldn’t work in the U.S. and he couldn’t go anywhere else (though he gave a few preposterous concerts at the U.S.-Canada border in which he stood on the U.S. side while the Canadian audience sat or stood to hear him in their country), and though Robeson eventually won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1958 his health had started to fail and he ultimately retired in 1961 and died 15 years later. Narrated by an actor who essentially took over from Robeson as the African-American star both Black and white audiences could look up to as a figure of national, racial and human pride, Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist is a nice little vest-pocket telling of Robeson’s story and in particular of the ways he “tweaked” the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” over the years, from his first recording of the song (which included the “N”-word before Hammerstein deleted it) to later versions in which he changed the ending to, “I must keep laughing/Instead of trying/I must keep fighting/Until I’m dying,” transforming Kern’s and Hammerstein’s faux spiritual into a song of political, social and moral protest.