The Emperor Jones (United Artists). In Eugene O'Neill's play, the most effective scenes were the ones which showed Brutus Jones, deposed and terrified, scrambling through a forest made dreadful by darkness, ghosts and the drums of a pursuit. These sequences are the least convincing in the cinema produced by John Krimsky and Gifford Cochran. Fading in pictures of the shapes that the Emperor Jones thinks he sees somehow makes the shapes less real, less frightening. The elaborate hysteria that makes Jones waste the silver bullet he has been saving for himself and, after wandering in circles, come gibbering back to be riddled by the bullets of his subjects, seems a little implausible. This may be partly because Paul Robeson, playing his first cinema role with effortless honesty, has in the earlier part of the story made the Emperor Jones a person so plainly and completely real.
Brutus Jones is pleased with his uniform when he gets a job as Pullman porter, gratified by the girl he steals from his friend Jeff. When Jeff comes at him with a knife, Brutus kills him and goes to a chain gang. When a guard whips him, he kills the guard, sets off as stoker on a boat bound for Jamaica, swims ashore when the boat passes an inviting island. Here Brutus Jones comes to his great days. He works for a white trader (Dudley Digges), forces the trader to make him a partner, bluffs the island's black king off his throne. For two and a half years he struts in his palace, wearing patent leather boots and admiring his magnificent body in a corridor of mirrors he has placed there for the purpose. He has almost satisfied his desire to get enough money to retire to a country where there are no Jim Crow laws when, one day, he wakes up in an empty palace. He sets off, still grinning, to beat his way through the forest to the coast.
Ably directed by Dudley Murphy—who had been wanting to make the picture for ten years and who got Producers Cochran & Krimsky interested when he showed them his script last spring—The Emperor Jones is clearly intended as much for O'Neill audiences as for the cinema public. Producers Cochran & Krimsky imported Maedchen in Uniform last season. They are now in Paris trying to persuade Director Rene Clair to come to the U. S. Convinced that moving pictures do not need mass audiences to be financially successful, they are planning to back their belief with three or four more pictures in the next year. The Emperor Jones was made at Paramount's old Astoria, L. I. studio. It is less ambitious than last winter's operatic version of what has come to be regarded as a U. S. classic. Almost all the dialog is O'Neill's; he approved of a few additions made by DuBose Heyward to expand the beginning of the story. Good shot: Jones teaching a handful of what he scornfully calls "bush-niggers" how to shoot craps.