GUEST REVIEW: CABIN IN THE SKY

Movie fan and critic Bruce Kogan is back with a review of the MGM musical Cabin In The Sky from 1943. The movie as important now to African American entertainers now as it was some 70 years ago...

Cabin In The Sky marked Vincente Minnelli's feature film debut as a director and he certainly started on a grand scale. Louis B. Mayer was purportedly reluctant to do black cast feature film with an A Budget, but Minnelli and Arthur Freed's faith in Minnelli paid off big time.

Cabin In The Sky, musical fantasy, with score by John LaTouche and Vernon Duke ran for 156 performances in the 1940-1941 Broadway season. The only two members of the cast who made it to the screen version was lead Ethel Waters and Rex Ingram as Lucifer, Jr. Unless of course you count the Hall Johnson Choir.

It would have never been made if MGM could not get Ethel Waters to repeat her role as the wise and faithful Petunia Johnson praying ever so that her husband Little Joe Johnson gets saved from his evil ways of drinking and gambling and carousing with that no good Georgia Brown on whom no gal made has got a shade. Come to think of it, that song should have been interpolated in the score, MGM should have paid any price for it.

MGM got their work out of Ethel though. She appeared in Cairo with Jeanette MacDonald and Robert Young and the contrasting styles of MacDonald and Waters is something to see in that film.

On Broadway Little Joe's part was played by someone who would make a big splash in Hollywood this same year of 1943. Because Dooley Wilson was playing piano at Rick's place in Casablanca, I guess he missed repeating his role. Stepping in for Wilson was America's most well known butler, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson who did the impossible, get rich working for Jack Benny.

Sweet Georgia Brown was played by Lena Horne, the devil had no better temptress ever on screen, not even Gwen Verdon in Damn Yankees. She does a mean version of Honey In The Honeycomb.

The plot's a simple one. Petunia brings her husband Little Joe to church for the hundred and umpteenth time to get himself saved, but he slips away for a crap game and gets himself shot in the process. He's about to enter the devil's domain, but Petunia's prayers get him a six month stay of his sentence to see if he can mend his ways. After that both heavenly and hellish forces work overtime to have claim to his soul.

LaTouche and Duke gave Ethel Waters two of her best known numbers to sing, the title song and Taking A Chance On Love. Cabin In The Sky has a unique distinction of being one of the few Broadway musicals that came to the screen. Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg wrote some new material including a song for Eddie Anderson Life's Full of Consequences and another song uniquely identified with Ethel Waters, Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe.

Louis Armstrong is in Cabin In The Sky as Lucifer's Trumpeter and while we get a couple of licks from Satchmo, I do so wish that someone at MGM would have given him a number for himself. He doesn't standout as he usually does because of that.

Still Cabin In The Sky is a delightful film, a real treat with some of the best talent in the human race in it...

Bruce's rating: 9 out of 10

BORN ON THIS DAY: ETHEL WATERS

For this last day of October - and of course Halloween, I was hoping I would discover that Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi was born on Halloween but no such luck. However, a wonderful singer by the name of Ethel Waters was born on this day in 1896. Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, as a result of the rape of her teenaged mother, Louise Anderson (believed to have been thirteen years old at the time, although some sources indicate she may have been slightly older), by John Waters, a pianist and family acquaintance from a mixed-race middle-class background.Waters played no role in raising Ethel.

Ethel Waters was raised in poverty and never lived in the same place for more than 15 months. She said of her difficult childhood, "I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family." Waters grew tall, standing 5'9½" in her teens. According to women-in-jazz historian and archivist Rosetta Reitz, Waters' birth in the North and her peripatetic life exposed her to many cultures. Waters married at the age of 13, but soon left her abusive husband and became a maid in a Philadelphia hotel working for $4.75 per week. On her 17th birthday, she attended a costume party at a nightclub on Juniper Street. She was persuaded to sing two songs, and impressed the audience so much that she was offered professional work at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore, MD.

She later recalled that she earned the rich sum of ten dollars a week, but her managers cheated her out of the tips her admirers threw on the stage. After her start in Baltimore, Waters toured on the black vaudeville circuit. As she described it later, "I used to work from nine until unconscious." Despite her early success, she fell on hard times and joined a carnival, traveling in freight cars along the carnival circuit and eventually reaching Chicago. Waters enjoyed her time with the carnival and recalled, "the roustabouts and the concessionaires were the kind of people I'd grown up with, rough, tough, full of larceny towards strangers, but sentimental and loyal to their friends and co-workers."

She did not last long with them, though, and soon headed south to Atlanta, where she worked in the same club with Bessie Smith. Smith demanded that Waters not compete in singing blues opposite her. Waters conceded and sang ballads and popular songs. Around 1919, Waters moved to Harlem and there became a celebrity performer in the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. Recording contracts and countless concerts followed. In 1921, Waters became the fifth black woman to make a record, on the tiny Cardinal Records label. Fame and stardom followed Ethel Waters now, and as we always say the rest is music history...

PIONEERING BLACK ACTORS HELPED PAVE THE WAY

By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

It's been a long, difficult road for African Americans in achieving equality in all aspects of American life, and Hollywood is no exception.

Long relegated to stereotyped roles, black actors struggled for decades to get bigger and better parts that more honestly reflected the black experience. Such early actors helped pave the way for Oscar-winning performers like Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry and this year's Oscar nominees from "The Help," Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.

Three of those pioneers — Ethel Waters, James Baskett and James Edwards — created memorable characters despite being horribly confined by the racism of the industry at that time. With Black History Month kicking off this month, we look at these three breakthrough artists.

Ethel Waters (1896-1977)

The legendary jazz, blues and gospel singer had a difficult start in life. Her mother, Louise Anderson, was 13 when she gave birth to Ethel. Louise had been raped at knifepoint by Ethel's father. "I was never a child," Waters would later say. "I was never cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family."

At age 15, Waters sang at a club in Philadelphia on amateur night. She so impressed the management that she was given a job and billed as "Sweet Mama Stringbean." In 1921, she began recording and four years later became the main attraction at Sam Salvin's Plantation Club in Harlem, where she introduced one of her signature tunes, "Dinah."

By 1927, she was on Broadway, and in 1929, she appeared in the Warner Bros. early talkie "On With the Show!," where she performed "Am I Blue?" In 1933, she introduced the song "Stormy Weather" at the Cotton Club in Harlem. She was back on Broadway in 1933 in the musical "As Thousands Cheer," marking the first time a black performer worked with a white cast. Waters spread her wings on Broadway, going dramatic in 1939's"Mamba's Daughters." The following year, she appeared in the musical fantasy "Cabin in the Sky," which she reprised for the 1943 film version.

Waters became the second African American actress to earn a supporting Oscar nomination, for 1949's "Pinky," as the loving grandmother of a light-skinned woman passing for white. She earned raves as the maid in the 1950 Broadway drama, "The Member of the Wedding," which she reprised in the 1952 film version. She took on the role of the sassy maid in 1950 in the TV series "Beulah" but left because she despised how the series depicted blacks. Her last film was 1959's "The Sound and the Fury."

"I sang them [the blues] out of the depths of the private fire in which I was brought up," Waters said. "Only those who are being burned know what fire is like."

James Baskett (1904-48)

The actor, who introduced the Oscar-winning tune "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" in Disney's 1946 live action-animated "Song of the South," is the first African American male to win an Academy Award. He won an honorary award for "his able and heart-warming characterization of Uncle Remus, friend and storyteller to the children of the world." (Poitier was the first black male to win a competitive acting Oscar, for 1963's "Lilies of the Field.") He didn't attend the premiere in Atlanta because the city was racially segregated and he wouldn't have been able to participate in the events.

But he's all but forgotten because "Song of the South," based on the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, has not been available for several decades because of its portrayals of blacks, which later generations decried as stereotypical.

James Edwards (1918-70)

A year before Poitier made his film debut in 1950's "No Way Out," Edwards starred in the racially charged World War II drama "Home of the Brave," based on Arthur Laurents' play. Produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Mark Robson, the film revolved around the harsh prejudice that a young black private endures while serving with a white unit in the South Pacific.

The Indiana native earned a degree in drama from Northwestern but put acting on hold while serving in World War II. He received massive facial injuries during the war, and his face had to be reconstructed. It was suggested that he take elocution lessons to help with his speech after the surgery. The lessons renewed his love of acting.

The tall, handsome and athletic Edwards eventually ended up in New York, where he made his debut in 1945 in the play "Deep are the Roots," in which his character has an interracial love affair. He made his film debut in a small role in 1949's "The Set-Up" before "Home of the Brave."

Despite his presence and his dignified strong performances, Edwards never became a star. But he continued to get interesting roles with such stellar directors as Sam Fuller ("The Steel Helmet"), Fred Zinnemann ("The Member of the Wedding"), Stanley Kubrick ("The Killing"), John Frankenheimer ("The Manchurian Candidate") and Franklin Schaffner ("Patton").

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