Cabin in the Sky

Cabin in the Sky (1943) is Vincente Minnelli's first film, based on an all-Black musical popular on Broadway during World War II.  The film depicts a mysterious world that is part raucously urban and part southern pastoral -- this fantasy-land is devoid of White people.  To our contemporary eyes, the picture is marred because it assumes that the problems of Black folk are eschatological and religious -- not political in other words.  In a world without White people, there can be no racism.  In fact, the problem for Black people in this country has always been White people and, therefore, the film's never-never land presents us with a setting and context that is magical -- in many ways, the film is more like The Wizard of Oz (to which Minnelli makes a direct reference) than something like Intruder in the Dust produced a few years later in 1949.  Although the premises of Cabin in the Sky can be criticized, the execution of the film is pretty much flawless -- the picture is an excellent movie-musical crammed with remarkable song-and-dance numbers and memorable for some extraordinary performances.

A ne'er-do-well, Little Joe, is married to a virtuous woman, Petunia.  Petunia entices her husband to attend Church; she's concerned for his salvation.  Little Joe sneaks out of the service, gets into a dice game with a crooked thug, Domino Johsnon, and ends up shot.  He is brought home to his grieving wife, delirious and badly wounded.  Little Joe dies, but Petunia's "powerful praying", causes God to allow him a period of six months to achieve redemption after he is brought back to life.  Little Joe's spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.  Lucifer Jr. and his minions (dressed in resplendent uniforms like Marcus Garvey militants) decide to tempt Little Joe with money, since filthy luchre is the source of all evil.  Little Joe wins the Irish Sweepstakes and is paid $50,000 in cash.  He wastes his money on booze and gambling and takes up with a wicked woman, Georgia Brown.  At last, Petunia decides to go down to the local juke joint to retrieve Little Joe.  There Petunia, who shows a surprising aptitude for sin, bests Georgia Brown and flirts with the gambler and fancy man, Domino, who gunned down her husband.  At this point, all the main characters are in danger of perdition.  But a tornado sweeps across the plains and destroys the juke joint with the result that both Little Joe and Petunia are killed.  They are called to account and their ledgers read aloud -- Petunia is destined for the pearly gates but Little Joe is damned.  Petunia refuses to go to heaven without her man and God relents, reluctantly allowing Little Joe into heaven -- like Faust, he is redeemed by the ewig Weibliche ('the "eternal feminine" principle of mercy as opposed to justice).  Little Joe gets winded climbing the stairway to heaven and, suddenly, awakens -- his fever broke, and like Dorothy returned to Kansas, he realizes that it was all a dream.  The story is enlivened by fantastic songs including "Taking a Chance on Love" and "Happiness is a thing called Joe".  The cast is superlative.   Ethel Water plays Petunia; Lena Horne is the bad girl, Georgia Brown.  Eddie "Rochester" Anderson is Little Joe -- not only does he perform effectively with his trademark gravelly voice, he also dances well and, even, sings.  Louis Armstrong is mostly wasted as a "The  Trumpeter," one of Lucifer Jr.'s henchmen -- nonetheless, he delivers his lines as if playing cornet; each short speech is phrased as an improvised verbal riff, something akin to scat singing but more articulate.

At the film's climax, all the characters converge on Jim Henry's juke joint where the Duke Ellington orchestra is playing.  The cool and elegant Lena Horne as Georgia Brown hitches up her satin skirt to show the boys her "accessories" and, then, is challenged by Ethel Waters, entering the saloon in a spangly outfit that makes her look like the Queen of Sheba.  Georgia Brown sneers:  "You ain't got what I got!" wiggling a little in the direction of Ethel Waters.  Petunia responds by disdainfully replying:  "I got everything you got, honey, and lot's more of it too" -- something that is indisputably true.  (In some shots, Waters seems to be about twice the size of Little Joe -- she's the queen, regal in all dimensions.)  The film approaches something like cinematic heaven in these bar sequences:  Lena Horne wears a white satub gown matching Duke Ellington's vanilla ice cream suit and the bar-crowd is all jitterbugging energetically when the Fancy Man, Domino Johnson, makes his entrance -- he dances a bit and, then, struts up the steps with the camera on a crane ascending with him, a spectacular movement that ends with a big close-up of the grinning pimp with top hat and cane.  (He has just sung the tune:  "That's why they call me Shine!" about his "hair that's curly/And teeth that's pearly" as well as his fine ebony complexion.)  When Ethel Waters dances, she's fantastically agile despite her size -- she can kick her toes up way above her head to tap against her upraised hand.  She ends up dancing with Domino to little Joe's bug-eyed dismay as a big twister sweeps across the prairie, the same serpentine and murderous cyclone that stalked Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. 

The Thirties were a golden age for films of this sort.  Green Pastures, also starring Rex Ingram, was a big hit in 1936, a sympathetic reframing of several Old  Testament stories featuring an all-black cast.  (It's very good as well.)  Different ethnic minorities began to develop their own cinemas -- the Thirties was also the era of the great Yiddish films including Edgar Ulmer's Green Fields (1937), Yiddle and his Fiddle (1936) and Tevye (also 1937).  This sort of diversity was strangled by the patriotic show of unity required by World War II.  I saw Cabin in the Sky on The Essentials, the show hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and Ava DuVernay, the African American director of Selma among other films.  Ava DuVernay wondered what became of all of the fantastically energetic performers who we see sashaying into the saloon at the climax of the film -- her melancholy rhetorical question is racially inflected, a variant of Clive James' remark that "Bojangles didn't get to become Fred Astaire."   This is not necessarily a racial question:  When I see a film like 42nd Street or Singin' in the Rain, I similarly wonder about the chorus line:  what happened to all of these beautiful and talented dancers?  Where are they now?