Siren of the Tropics (Établissements Louis Aubert, La Centrale Cinématographique, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 22) my husband Charles and I watched a really quirky film as part of Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart: Siren of the Tropics, a bizarre 1927 production from a French studio called Etablissements Louis Aubert, distributed by La Centrale Cinématographique, and a vehicle for African-American cabaret and theatre star Josephine Baker. Born in St. Louis in 1906, Baker made her stage debut there at age 8, and at 13 ran away from home to seek stardom in New York City. She made it as far as the chorus line in the all-Black revues Shuffle Along (1922) and Chocolate Dandies (1924) before she got discovered by a white woman, Caroline Dudley. Dudley was putting together an all-Black show called the Revue Négre for a theatre in Paris and hired Baker as a featured performer. Baker became acclaimed with the Revue Négre and later on at the Folies Bergère in 1926 for her energetic dancing and her shockingly scanty costumes, including one consisting of a skirt of 16 bananas and nothing above it. (The booklet for the Columbia Art Deco Series reissue of Baker’s 1920’s recordings includes a photo of Baker in this costume or one much like it.) She went on to a long if rather up-and-down career, mostly in France except for a few brief trips back to her homeland. She married a Frenchman, industrialist Jean Lion, in 1937 (though they broke up three years later), gave up her American citizenship and became a French national, and died in Paris in 1975. Baker was also an active supporter of the anti-Nazi Resistance and the civil-rights movement, and refused to perform before racially segregated audiences. Siren of the Tropics was hastily thrown together in 1927 as a vehicle for Baker at the peak of her early popularity in France. It had two directors, Henri Étiévant and Mario Nalpas, plus a far more illustrious name in filmmaking history, Luis Buñuel, as assistant director. The script was by Maurice Dekobra, and the first half of the movie had me wondering if he ripped off the basic story from the Biblical tale of King David, Bathsheba, and her husband Uriah. The David character is the Marquis Sévéro (Georges Melchior), who sits around his big house and loafs all day while his wife (Régina Dalthy) takes care of the family business, whatever it is. (Charles joked that all she seemed to do all day was sign executive orders.)

The Marquis demands that his wife agree to a divorce so he can marry his goddaughter, Denise (Regina Thomas, a typically winsome silent-screen heroine), though Denise only has eyes for André Berval (Pierre Batcheff), an engineer in the Sévéro family’s employ. To get rid of his rival, the Marquis drafts a letter to Álvarez (Wladimir Kwanine, though like a lot of Russian actors working in France then he’s billed only under his last name), steward of the Sévéro holdings in the Caribbean. The letter announces that Sévéro is sending André to an island called Monte Puebla to investigate opportunities for prospecting on the Sévero landholdings there. He adds, ominously, “It would suit me very well if Monsieur Berval were never to return to France.” We’re told in the intertitles that Álvarez is a villain and has a secret fortune of which no one knows the origin. The film then abruptly cuts to Monte Puebla, where we meet Josephine Baker at long last. She’s playing a native girl called Papitou, and like most such characters in 1920’s and 1930’s movies (Joan Crawford played a similar role in her first talkie, 1929’s Untamed), Papitou is a wild child with an odd mixture of exuberance and naïveté. Papitou is the daughter of hard-core drunk Diego (Adolphe Canté), who looks white on screen (and even more so in his imdb.com head shot), suggesting that Papitou is mixed-race. As Papitou, Baker gets to do a lot of jumping around, showing off her long legs that made her an excellent dancer, and also showing her tits on screen with a brazenness that would have been strictly forbidden in Hollywood even in the genuinely “pre-Code” era of 1927. André and Papitou have their obligatory meet-cute when he rescues her from Álvarez as Álvarez is trying to rape her, and she’s immediately smitten with him even though he just puts her in the “friend zone.”

When Madame Sévéro and Denise don’t hear from André for a while, they decide to take the ship to Monte Puebla themselves and find out what’s happened to him. Meanwhile André accidentally discovers the secret of Álvarez’s mysterious wealth; all along he’s been mining the Sévéro-owned mountains himself, using a crew of Black workers he treats about the way Alberich treated the Nibelungs in Wagner’s Ring cycle. Eventually Papitou reports Álvarez to the local police, who rescue André from his clutches and arrest Álvarez and his cronies. That happens with half the film left to go, and in the second half Papitou, anxious to get to Paris to be with André, stows away on the ocean liner taking them back there after she finds that she can’t afford anything like the 65,000-franc fare. (There’s a nice scene satirizing the inherent racism of the time and place as Papitou desperately tries to fight her way to the ticket booth, only she’s ignored and swamped by the white people buying tickets for the ship.) At first the boat’s security people describe Papitou as “all-black” until she hides out in the ship’s bakery and gets flour all over her, after which they say she looks “all-white, like a ghost.” She’s caught, but is rescued by a white woman who hires her to serve as governess for her multitude of children – and both Charles and I noticed the eerie anticipation of Baker’s own future as the adoptive mother of the so-called “Rainbow Tribe” of 12 children (though all the kids in the film were white while Baker’s were of different races), whom she spent so much money on she was forced into bankruptcy despite her lucrative stage career. The woman agrees to pay for Papitou’s passage, and later two theatrical producers discover her and decide she has the makings of a great dancing star. She agrees but only on the condition that André Berval will be there for her opening. Luckily that proves easier than you’d expect, because at the insistence of his wife, Marquis Sévéro has finally agreed to let André marry Denise and host a reception for them.

The announcement of the engagement hits the newspapers, and the producers arrange for the reception to be at the music hall where Papitou will be performing. She does a wild dance on stage, but backstage there’s the inevitable misunderstanding in which Denise becomes convinced that André is in love with Papitou and breaks their engagement. Ultimately Papitou realizes that André is only in love with Denise, and under the inspiration of a verse from André’s prayer book (which he inherited from his mother) hailing the nobility of sacrifice, Papitou gives him up and gives what the titles declare is her last show in Paris. (They don’t say what happens to her after that; maybe we were supposed to believe she returned to Monte Puebla, though I’d rather it had ended like Greta Garbo’s first American film, Torrent, in which Garbo’s character accepted losing the man she loved to another woman and continued her lucrative stage career as an opera singer.) Siren of the Tropics is an uneven movie whose first half is considerably more entertaining than its second, though the second half still has the virtue of preserving at least a slice of Baker’s spectacular theatre act. The version we were watching was a reissue from 2005 by Kino Lorber who hired Donald Sosin to do the music score. Sosin backed most of the film with his own piano, but for the scenes in Monte Puebla he shifted to guitar. About the only glitch in his underscoring was his decision to back Baker’s actual stage performances with a raucous mixture of modern-day Dixieland jazz and 1940’s rhythm-and-blues (the R&B influence is particularly apparent in the shuffle beats Sosin’s drummer played). I wish that Sosin had instead referenced Baker’s own records from the period for the right orchestral sound for her numbers. Oddly, though the film was a hit, Josephine Baker didn’t make another one for seven years, until Zou Zou (1934), by which time sound had come in and we got to hear her sing in French. Ironically Baker’s rather thin voice, with its light, fast vibrato, sounded better in French than it did in English, even though English was her native language and she hadn’t started recording in French until the early 1930’s, when she felt comfortable enough with French to sing in it. While nowhere near as good as Baker’s two other films, Zou Zou and the even wilder Princesse Tam Tam (1935), Siren of the Tropics is an estimable film and a good if rather quirky showcase for the personality of its highly talented but rather unlikely star.