Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 25) I ran a DVD for my husband Charles and I of the 1944/1945 (the former is the copyright date, the latter the year it was released) version of Christmas in Connecticut, which Charles had surprised me by naming his all-time favorite Christmas movie. (I’ve reviewed it for moviemagg twice: in 2009 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/christmas-in-connecticut-warner-bros.html and in 2020 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/12/christmas-in-connecticut-warner-bros.html, and I’ve also reviewed the O.K. but mediocre 1992 remake with Dyan Cannon in Barbara Stanwyck’s role, directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/christmas-in-connecticut-turner.html.) Then I put on the “live” Turner Classic Movies broadcast for another one of our all-time favorites: Cabin in the Sky (1943), based on a 1940 all-Black Broadway musical composed by Vernon Duke with lyrics by John Latouche (after both Ira Gershwin and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg turned it down) and essentially a rewrite of the Faust legend, as God’s and the Devil’s representatives fight over the soul of Joe Jackson while his wife Petunia looks on and tries to keep him on the straight and narrow. She’s got a rival for his affections: entertainer Georgia Brown, who works at “Jim Henry’s Paradise” nightclub and has successfully seduced Joe away from Petunia. The stage version was a vehicle for Ethel Waters as Petunia; her co-stars were Dooley Wilson (known today almost exclusively for his role as Sam in Casablanca) and the Black dancer and choreographer Katharine Dunham. MGM producer Arthur Freed bought the movie rights and made the film in 1943 with Waters repeating her stage role, but the other two leads were cast with different people. Joe was played by the great Black comedian Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, who’d become a star on Jack Benny’s radio program and, because Benny was that rare comic star who let his sidekicks score off him, he’d got to play streetwise instead of stupid and is one of just two Black male comedians from Hollywood’s classic era whose work is still funny. (The other is Mantan Moreland.)

As for Georgia Brown, Freed was giving a major star buildup to Lena Horne even though before Cabin in the Sky he’d just used her for guest musical numbers in other people’s films and hadn’t given her a real acting role. (This was so MGM’s Southern distributors could easily remove her songs from the versions of the films shown there.) Horne got back-to-back chances to act in this film and Stormy Weather, another all-Black musical she made on loanout to 20th Century-Fox, but after that it was back to the salt mines of guest appearances in other people’s films. One of Freed’s great unfulfilled dreams was to cast Horne as Julie Laverne in his 1951 version of Show Boat – the character was supposed to be a part-Black woman “passing” as white – but MGM’s distribution people went ballistic and pointed out that no theatre in the South would show a film featuring a Black woman romantically involved with a white man. Cabin in the Sky was also the first film directed entirely by Vincente Minnelli; up until then he’d been under contract first to Paramount and then MGM, but he’d only done individual numbers in other people’s films: with Martha Raye and Louis Armstrong in “Public Melody No. 1” from Artists and Models (1937); the great number with animated models of fruits enacting a symphony orchestra in Strike Up the Band (1940); and Lena Horne’s numbers in Panama Hattie (1942). Apparently he got the job because no other MGM director wanted to do a film with an all-Black cast (though King Vidor had done Hallelujah! with an all-Black cast in 1929). Hall Johnson, a Black choir director who’d been involved with the show on both stage and film, went ballistic when he saw the first draft of the script (the credited screenwriter was Joseph Schrank, with an uncredited Marc Connelly contributing additional dialogue) and wrote a letter to associate producer Albert Lewis. Johnson called the script “a weird but priceless conglomeration of pre-Civil War constructions mixed with up-to-the-minute Harlem slang and heavily sprinkled with a type of verb which Amos and Andy purloined from Miller and Lyle, the Negro comedians.” Johnson added, “The script will be immeasurably improved when this is translated into honest-to-goodness Negro dialect.”

Cabin in the Sky also suffered from Ethel Waters’s notorious jealousy towards other Black women who sang. A decade earlier she had blackballed Billie Holiday from opening for her at the Apollo Theatre because Billie had auditioned with “Underneath the Harlem Moon,” one of Waters’s biggest hits. Now Waters, in the middle of her transformation from raunchy Black nightclub performer to born-again Christian who sang a hymn or two in the Billy Graham Crusades, treated Lena Horne similarly shamelessly. “I objected violently to the way religion was being treated in the screenplay,” Waters later wrote. “All through the picture there was so much snarling and scrapping that I didn’t know how in the world Cabin in the Sky ever stayed up there.” Horne remembered that while Waters didn’t confront her directly, “the kids who were working in scenes with Ethel Waters told me she was violently prejudiced against me. Miss Waters was not notably gentle towards women and she was particularly tough on other singers.” Director Minnelli said, “Ethel didn’t like Lena at all. It always seemed so ridiculous to me, because Ethel was such a great artist. In New York it was her show, but now it was divided.” Minnelli also fought with the MGM art department, who kept trying to make the picture’s sets slovenly instead of looking like the dwellings of decent people who just didn’t have much money. MGM opened their wallets to recruit star Black performers, including Louis Armstrong (though they gave him virtually nothing to do; as a member of the Devil’s “Ideas Department,” he’s in just one scene, playing an unaccompanied trumpet solo and speaking a few lines of comic dialogue) and Duke Ellington (who got a far more prominent role as bandleader at Jim Henry’s Paradise in the final scene: he played his son Mercer Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” and a new song of his own called “Goin’ Up,” with a long out-of-tempo trombone solo by Lawrence Brown in the middle of an uptempo swing number; a modern critic suggested that Brown’s solo was meant to represent a preacher denouncing the evils of the nightclub even within a number played there) as well as an all-star cast of Black actors in the supporting roles.

Lucifer, Jr. (the Devil’s representative) is played by Rex Ingram, repeating his role from the stage production, who’d previously played “De Lawd” in the 1936 film The Green Pastures, Marc Connelly’s sensationally successful play depicting scenes from the Bible enacted by Blacks (therefore making Ingram the first actor who played both God and the Devil on screen; he would be followed by Max von Sydow and George Burns, who had the distinction of playing God and the Devil in the same movie, Oh, God! You Devil, in 1984). The forces of good are led by “The General” (Kenneth Spencer, with an imperious bearing similar to Paul Robeson), who also plays the local minister in the framing sequences. The other Devil’s “Idea Men” are Mantan Moreland, Willie Best (who’d originally been billed as “Sleep ‘n’ Eat” until Bob Hope, an anti-racist before anti-racism was cool, demanded he be credited under his real name), and a Black comedy duo billed as “Moke” (Fletcher Rivers) and “Poke” (Leon James). Gangster Domino Johnson was played by the great Black dancer John “Bubbles” Sublett. Ernest “Bubbles” Whitman played club owner Jim Henry, and Bill Bailey, Pearl Bailey’s brother, played a dancer in the song “Taking a Chance on Love.” According to Hugh Fordin’s biography of Arthur Freed, The World of Entertainment, the original release prints of Cabin in the Sky were in sepia – which would be a much better way to watch this aesthetically beautiful film; though this was Minnelli’s first full directorial effort, his remarkable eye was already very much in evidence. Also, Arthur Freed followed the usual practice of studios filming stage shows and threw out about half the original Broadway score, instead hiring Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg (so he got to work on this project after all!) to create new ones. That was partly because the major movie studios also owned their own music publishing companies, so hiring writers to create new songs meant fewer royalties they had to pay to outside publishers, and also because that way they could have a song eligible for the Best Song Academy Award – which they got: the Arlen/Harburg “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” was nominated, but lost to “You’ll Never Know” by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon from the 20th Century-Fox musical Hello, Frisco, Hello. The other songs Arlen and Harburg contributed were a faux spiritual called “L’il Black Sheep” and a duet for Waters and Anderson called “Life’s Full of Consequences.”

The Duke/Latouche songs retained from the original show included the title number, “Taking a Chance on Love” (which the modern critic I cited above questioned because the supposedly righteous anti-gambling Petunia is using a whole bunch of gambling metaphors to declare her love for her errant husband) and “Honey from the Honeycomb,” Georgia Brown’s seduction song. The plot is pretty simple: Joe Jackson has just scored a job as an elevator operator when three scapegrace “friends” he owes money to dragoon him into going to Jim Henry’s Paradise for one last game against Domino Johnson – only things go haywire and Joe is shot and mortally wounded. Thanks to Petunia’s intense prayers (this part of the movie sounds like It’s a Wonderful Life three years earlier), God decides to spare Joe and give him six months to mend his ways and find righteousness. But Joe’s memory of this encounter is wiped clean, so he has no idea that his fate for all eternity is dependent on the next six months. The Devil’s forces arrange for him to win $50,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes, only Joe blows most of the money on Georgia Brown. It all comes to a climax in which God’s army literally attacks Jim Henry’s Paradise with a tornado (for which MGM recycled the famous one from The Wizard of Oz) and destroys it, leaving behind a staircase to Heaven at such twisted angles it looks like St. Peter has suddenly become Dr. Caligari. Joe and Petunia both die, and Petunia is immediately granted entrance to Heaven but she has to persuade God’s staff to let Joe in – which they finally do once they learn that Georgia Brown has also “found religion” and donated all the sweepstakes money Joe gave her to the church. The sequence in which Petunia puts on a fancy dress and belts out “Honey from the Honeycomb” to prove she can be just as low-down and bad-ass as Georgia is electrifying and almost unbearably ironic, since Ethel Waters is enacting her own transition from raunchy nightclub star to born-again Christian in reverse. Though Freed, Minnelli and Schrank didn’t entirely avoid the hints of patronization that usually infected Hollywood’s attempts to show African-Americans sympathetically, Cabin in the Sky holds up beautifully and enabled Minnelli to move up – after one more piss-ant assignment, replacing another director on a Red Skelton vehicle called I Dood It, a remake of Buster Keaton’s 1929 silent classic Spite Marriage, Minnelli once again got a film worthy of his talents: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), with an all-star cast featuring Judy Garland at her most incandescent.