Last weekend I finally watched The Great White Hope after intending to see it for years. Not only am I something of a James Earl Jones fan, but the play debuted here at Arena Stage in my hometown before becoming a sensation on Broadway and ultimately being made into the film. The story is a highly idealized telling of the life of boxer Jack Johnson, here called Jack Jefferson. Jones, who created the role on stage and stars in the film, plays a black boxer whose winning of the world championship makes him the focal point of the hopes, expectations and pressures of both the black and white races.Jones is simply terrific. It's great fun to see him young and spry, and the performance is everything I'd hoped based on reading about it many moons ago in Theatre History class. The story, as you might imagine, is somewhat dated -- lots of easy tossing around of the n-word, and white folk obsessed with seeing the n--- defeated that simply doesn't register as true anymore: seems downright loopy. What was more interesting to me is that while the outright racism of a certain time has been defeated, the other form of racism depicted in the film still flourishes.
In what to me was the most powerful scene, right before the Championship bout, the Jones character greets a black preacher and some his congregants who, for reasons of race, haven't been able to get tickets. They tell Jefferson they're praying for him, and a teenager talks about how much a Jefferson victory will mean to him. Jefferson asks why it means so much to him, and the kid answers that if Jones wins, he'll be able have self-respect. To which Jefferson replies (as I recall it):
Son, if you aren't there yet, all the boxing matches in the world ain't gonna give it to you.Which seems to me is the right answer, but the Reverend rebukes him for it, and Jefferson leaves angry, saying (again, from memory)
you aren't praying for me. You aren't praying, "Lord, protect him from harm during the fight or Lord, may he get out of town without getting shot." All I am to you is a big, black fist.I'm still not certain what, in the economy of the movie, we were supposed to think of Jefferson's character. There's a scene where, dressed in a tophat and tails, he leads a large crowd into a lavish post-championship party. Seemed like a reasonable celebration to me, but a prophetic character interrupts the party to accuse Jefferson of selling out to the white man, and later another black reverend complains of Jefferson that his lifestyle confirms certain white people's low opinion of blacks, and thus harms the race. It wasn't clear to me whether the party scene was meant to be an indicator of a lavish lifestyle and generalized debauchery on Jefferson's part (as, say, a Bill Cosby today might complain of the life of a rap artist), or if we were meant to think the Rev. was a bit of a prude. I chose to understand it in the latter sense.
Throughout the story, Jefferson's effort is simply to be a man, and, as indicated above, the pressure on him from his own race and family to be some kind of savior of or exemplar of his race proves to be nearly as onerous as white society's intent to beat him and humiliate him. At one point Jefferson tells reporters,
I ain't aimin' to be no black man's liberator. My mama told me Mr. Lincoln did that already. That's why y'all shot him, right?Well, we haven't come all that far if we still have to announce as if it were interesting that so-and-so is the first black person to do whatever. As if that had the slightest bit of significance. What, are we still doubtful that blacks can achieve? Anyway, a very worthwhile performance in spite of being dated.
An old movie that doesn't come off so well is Cecil B. deMille's Sign of the Cross, which we watched last night. Oh, lordy. It's Quo Vadis without the realism. Claudette Colbert is wonderful as the Empress Poppeia, but everyone else is melodramatic and stage-y. We did not realize at first --but quickly discovered-- that Sign of the Cross was filmed pre-Hayes code. Colbert has a peek-a-boo bath scene (this is 1932), and the final half of the movie is dedicated to showing us how debauched the Romans were for the terrible death and killing spectacles they watched by having us watch terrible death and killing spectacles. The film won an Oscar for cinematography. Excellent death-by-exotic animal shots.
Oh, it's truly awful. Stupid dialogue, wooden acting, and the Christianity presented is treacly and unreal-- lots of staring into the heavens and wishing to die to be with the Master, as if Jesus were the big Jim Jones In The Sky. At one point, when the Roman Prefect (who's supposed to make the ladies swoon, but is wearing so much eyeliner it's embarrassing) is begging his Christian paramour to renounce her faith to be with him, she happily refuses him so she can die with her brethren. No good reason is given, you're just supposed to know. He tells her this is inhuman, and my sympathies were entirely with him--and by movie's end, with Nero.
I just wanted everyone to be eaten and get it over with.
