Okay, so we need to talk about this one. Oh, yes, we need to talk. In this film from 1936, Marc Connelly adapts his own Broadway hit for the big screen. The premise is that what we have here are a series of Biblical stories as seen from the perspective of, to quote from the media of the time, “the Negro mind.” Yeah. That. It’s easy to just come to a movie like this in 2020 and see it as an entirely racist production and trust me, you’re not wrong. Did I mention that Marc Connelly was white? Did I mention that his co-director William Keighley was also? Did I mention that this exploration of “the Negro mind” is entirely the conception of white minds? Did I even NEED to mention any of that? The entire film is written in an embarrassing Uncle Remus dialect; in fact, Rex Ingram’s stately turn as a white-beared God figure, cringe-inducingly called De Lawd, was a direct inspiration for Uncle Remus in Song of the South. When Noah gathers animals for the ark in a series of cages, all of the names are crudely misspelled; the setting is obviously a plantation (though we never quite see anyone work in the fields) and De Lawd is a sonorously voiced, widely grinning, quite literally Magic Negro. Heaven is depicted as a never ending fish fry; De Lawd decides to send the cataclysmic Flood after watching two pimps have a knife fight; I mean, how long do you want me to go with the details? I think I’ve had enough.
If you can get past the cringe element of that stuff, you can get at a few things that are kind of interesting in a critical sense. Rex Ingram’s version of De Lawd is, for instance, will make you uncomfortable for a lot of reasons, but maybe the most lingering is the way it calls to mind the way a lot of movies use Morgan Freeman even today. There’s an essay in there somewhere. And this film’s entire cast is African-American, something that has to rebound to the film’s benefit at least a little, considering the struggle all of these performers had in the movie business in the 1930s. And I’m able to look at works of art as being from the time they’re from, you know. I’m a huge fan, for instance of 1941’s Cabin in the Cotton, a film that certainly has racial problems. But that film was very good at humanizing its characters, something The Green Pastures doesn’t have much interest in.
But for all the problematic racial elements in this film, I think my largest problem with it wasn’t as an enlightened (at least relatively) viewer in 2020, but just as a film lover in general. It’s an incredibly sloppy movie in all sorts of ways. It’s a series of Biblical vignettes and I get that, but it’s just a very weird kind of theology this movie seems to be preaching and De Lawd is a painfully shallow character, acting however he can best serve the screenplay. And let’s not even get into the appearance (kind of?) of Jesus, who’s in the movie for less than ten seconds. This seems like a bit of an oversight in a movie supposedly from the perspective of Black Christians. This movie is really just unbelievably weird. It’s shocking to me that a movie this wacky could have been a huge hit, which it was. I mean, for example, De Lawd creates the universe because he’s eating custard and it’s too thin. He creates the Firmament in order to thicken it up and then things go from there. “Let there be a whole lotta foimament,” he says. I mean I don’t think that’s racially problematic; it’s just incredibly stupid.
There are a couple of bright spots here and there. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson is on hand as Noah and he’s kind of endured as a character actor in a way a lot of his peers didn’t because he brought real humanity to his characters by finding a way, quite subversively, to underplay things. He has an easy naturalism that really stands out against the overblown theatrical cariacatures of the rest of the cast. And a singer named Edna Mae Harris is charismatic and funny in a very brief appearance as a woman who angers God by playing the ukulele on Sunday. Yeah. Anyway, this movie is really terrible, just viewed as a film, and that means the problematic racial elements have no buffer and they just land with a thud, making the movie even worse. Historically significant, I suppose, but it’s almost unwatchable. ½ star.
tl;dr – an awful movie on a basic technical level, this one is also filled the brim with terrible racism; historically significant, but practically unwatchable. ½ star.