The Broadway hit play "The Green Pastures" with an all-black cast brought to the screen in 1936 by its (white) writer/director Marc Connelly is a milestone, especially for successfully selling a movie without any white folks visible in heaven or on earth. Framed as a Sunday School telling of major stories (greatest hits) from the Old Testament, it shows a Jehovah (Rex Ingram) repeatedly vexed by what those created in his image do, soothed by his personal assistant the angel Gabriel (Oscar Polk) playing a very conventional black servant part except that his mastuh is also black.

Even with frequent stereotyping as the human, uh-hum, race as feckless, the representation of Jehovah as black and those made in his own image (very literally in that Rex Ingram also plays Adam) was sufficiently unsettling to get the film banned in much of the American South and by the English Lord Chamberlain. An All Mighty taking pleasure in ten-cent seegars unsettles me, and I can easily imagine the whole spectacle striking Jews and Christians as blasphemy. For my part, I just wish it was more entertaining.

It has its moments, including the gospel chorus at the heavenly fish fry before humanity is created, and the economical representation of malice in front of the ark Noah is about to fill, and a brash ukulele player unimpressed by divine denunciations of breaking the Sabbath. The sets are blessedly free of the excesses of Cecil B. de Mille's Biblical epics. Instead, the costumes are mostly from Louisiana of the 1930s, looking like the Sunday School children may have imagined the Biblical figures they were being told about. (I have to say that the angel wings are sub-bargain basement, though.)

Some of it is quaint; much of it is patronizing, though I recognize that it provided work for some black actors and a gospel chorus, as well as being sufficiently "radical" (in the sense of taking the priority of blacks for granted) to upset some people at the time.

The stories are dramatized perfunctorily, with lots of heavenly business interspersed. The climax is notably peculiar. Jehovah has ceased paying any attention to humans, but his ear is caught by a "Hebrew" captain named Hezdrel (Ingram, yet again), who is defending Jerusalem from King Herod (not the Romans?). Hezdrel has a cannon and his men have World War I uniforms. Hezdrel explains suffering and mercy to Jehovah in ways that I can't imagine making any sense to the Sunday School class. (Maybe that is why some of them are asleep at the end?) This very talky scene seems to me to add questions of heresy to those of blasphemy. I don't recall humans educating God as being orthodox Baptist theology (though my Baptist grandparents weren't theologians, they were regular Bible readers). After that, the film is quickly over with Gabriel spotting someone (not Jehovah's son) stumbling up Golgotha carrying a cross.

If the play was written instead of only being acted by African Americans, it might be an occasion for considering the interpretations of the tribulations of the Chosen People in the Hebrew Scriptures, but what is on the screen is an old-time religion imagined by an urban white playwright. The often venial people and the simple-minded population make the audience (at least me) sympathize with the frustrated and sad Creator, but I'm insufficiently moved by the very dated spectacle to try to sort out racism from challenges to racism. "The Green Pastures" is an odd historical artifact, but one I find insufficiently entertaining (like "Cavalcade" (see http://www.epinions.com/content_85150961284); unlike the all-black "Four Saints in Three Acts" and "Porgy and Bess" that were similarly written by whites).

(Ingram went on the next year to play N_____ Jim to Mickey Rooney's Huckleberry Finn, was the hammy genie in the 1940 "Thief of Bagdad,"and got to play Lucifer (Jr.) in the next Hollywood all-black extravaganza, "Cabin in the Sky" in 1943.)


Recommended:
No