Word: robeson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...went out for the Rutgers University football team, other players beat him up and pulled out his fingernails; he bore the abuse to prove his worth, and when he graduated he was a two-time All-American and the school valedictorian, exhorting his classmates to "catch a new vision." Robeson did. Four years later he was starring for O'Neill, giving the first concert composed entirely of songs by African Americans and playing the two lead roles (as a philandering preacher and his sweet-souled brother) in Oscar Micheaux's silent film "Body and Soul...
...this, his one "race" film, Robeson plays both the venal "Reverend" Isaiah T. Jenkins - an ex-con who wows the faithful with his sermons and woos them with a brutal hand - and Isaiah's saintly brother Sylvester. Of course it's Isaiah who gets the screen time, because Robeson could seize the screen by pouring more of his roguish majesty into the part. Isaiah wows the church ladies with his orations, then sullies their virgin daughters and pockets his victims' life savings (hidden in a Bible!). The actor's playing here is as broad as Broadway, but Micheaux wasn...
...America and its film industry had not been so profoundly racist, Robeson would have been on his way West. But Hollywood thought that blacks should simply shuffle and mewl; so Robeson's one major U.S. film role was in Dudley Murphy's 1933 independent film production (released by United Artists) of "The Emperor Jones." The spectacle of Robeson lording it over not only black savages but a white trader in the 1933 "Emperor Jones" film was galvanizing. And threatening: he'd have to find film work elsewhere...
...went to Britain, where he lived for the rest of the 30s. In a quartet of modest, engaging films, Robeson would sing, act a little, show off his burly torso, flash that intoxicating smile-and, uniquely for a black actor, get top billing above whites. He played African kings, or ordinary Joes who somehow take over tribes, in "King Solomon's Mines," "Sanders of the River," "Song of Freedom," "Jericho"; all tapped into Robeson's natural nobility. As Roland Young says in Solomon, "I always thought that fella had a spot of royal blood...
...Robeson often signed for films expecting script approval, only to feel trapped in stereotype by the time of shooting. So the camera catches him in the corpse of his original enthusiasm--an actor's version of passive resistance. Perhaps his naivety was as huge as his talent. He believed that Hollywood moguls would give a black actor (any actor) final cut, and that Stalinism was not slavery but liberation. Through three decades of Soviet tyranny (including the murder of one of his Russian-Jewish friends), he remained faithful to the U.S.S.R. And here his charm failed him. He could sell...