Unscrupulously ambitious Brutus Jones escapes from jail after killing a guard and through bluff and bravado finds himself the emperor of a Caribbean island.
(72 mins.) Released 1933-09-19
Director: Dudley Murphy
Stars: Paul Robeson, Dudley Digges, Frank H. Wilson, Fredi Washington
Drama | Music
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023985/
originally posted 11 Oct 2017
Watched now because I thought it might fall into the musical category. Although Robeson sings a couple of songs, I don't feel that it fits the genre, hence the "{nm}" designation on the title of this post.
I'm giving this a 5 because I don't understand Jones' collapse at the end.
[Spoiler Alert for several paragraphs] So a rural man seeks a better life, and becomes a Pullman porter. He likes the life on the road, and doesn't return to his rural home. He gambles and cavorts with women (mostly one), but his ambition pushes him to seek duty on "the president's" car. Here he tries to insert himself in the business he observes, and gets sent back to the routes in Georgia.
In his gambling/womanizing life, he kills his former friend in self defense, and gets sentenced to hard labor. At the quarry, a guard wants him to beat a fellow prisoner with a bat, he refuses, and as the guard does it, Jones kills him with a shovel (defense of another). He then climbs into the truck hauling rocks out of the quarry, and encourages the skip-loader operator to dump an extra scoop of rocks on him, hiding him from the guards, or at least convincing them he's dead.
He survives that and makes his way to his old home town, simply using this as a rest stop to escape again. Next he's on a Caribbean freighter, and he decides to swim to shore on a lesser island before arriving somewhere he could be recognized by the police.
The island is governed by a black "king", whose guards capture Jones when he washes ashore. He is "saved" by a white trader on the island who buys him from the king. Jones learns the trader's business, eventually achieving partnership. Then he wants to assert himself further into the island powerbase, replaces the bullets in a gun with blanks, and provokes the gun owner to shoot at him repeatedly. He declares that he can only be killed with a silver bullet, and becomes the Emperor of the island.
He adopts a Nazi-looking crest, and Napoleonic uniforms. His court visitors dress in Louis XIV clothing to match. But he's a harsh ruler, and over-taxes the populace. The people riot, his court staff abandon him, leaving only his white trader/partner to apprise him of the situation. He finally realizes he'll have to leave, and exits via the jungle.
In the jungle he's haunted by past events, and shoots at each ghost that haunts him. (I don't understand why he's plagued by ghosts here. He's awake. Is he physically diminished somehow?) Eventually the "law" of the island catches up with him, and shoots him with silver bullets. The End.
[end of spoilers] I don't feel I should have to research a film to understand it, but I don't want to watch it a fourth time for clues (once was the commentary track). So the wikipedia entry says "This section was written as a nearly autobiographical account by [playwright] O'Neill, who had gone off to Honduras the year after his graduation from Princeton and gotten hopelessly lost in the jungle, resulting in hallucinatory fears." We get no indication of lots of time passing in the jungle, so I still don't understand why Jones went nuts so quickly.
Worth watching for Robeson's voice and his physical and psychological presence.
John Krimsky and Gifford Cochran Inc. (distr. UA), dir. Dudley Murphy, William C. de Mille (uncredited); 5
