The ace of hearts is high: “Cabin in the Sky” (1943)

By Scott Ross

Having as I do a predilection for the works of cinematic antiquity (i.e., movies older than an adolescent’s memory) I am continually confronted by the prevailing attitudes of other eras. All works of popular art are products of their time, of course, but few things date faster than movies, especially if or when they are reflections of their makers’ contemporaneity; aside from clothing, music and automobile styles, nothing betrays its age more, I suspect, than depictions of race. While this exceptionally tuneful musical fantasy preserves the work of a cast of black performers at the peak of their energy and ingenuity, it’s refracted through the prism of a white-created comic folk-fable whose contours strike many now (and struck a few at the time) as, at best, unconsciously insensitive and at worst, deliberately racist. The last thing the people behind Cabin in the Sky wanted or intended was to offend the entire black race, and staid old conservative MGM laid out a fair chunk of change to secure the rights to the 1940 Broadway musical, engage its star and employ a cast of first-rank black performers to bring it to vibrant life even though the studio knew its receipts for an all-black musical would be limited to the race or liberality of the ticket-buyer. Being gay, I am sensitive to how it feels confronting sexual bigotry in old motion pictures, which in the matter of ugly stereotype and vicious representation extends, following the fall of the Production Code’s censorship of American pictures, from the mid-’60s right up to Aughts. As a consequence I have, I believe, a certain empathy with any number of non-Caucasian Americans in the matter of their portrayal at the movies. One tries, always, when viewing these things to imagine how it feels watching them when you are a member of the race or ethnicity being depicted, and it’s often appalling to note what images of blacks in particular were routinely offered on the nation’s screens, usually for a laugh.

^{“Ain’ it the Truth?”: Lena Horne in her glory. “Cleopatra and Delilah had it way over Ruth”}

The characters in Cabin in the Sky, while they would certainly have been rendered with greater sensitivity in a musical written by black artists, never feel caricatured and I have always had a soft-spot for the picture and its marvelous score, Vernon Duke and John LaTouche augmented with the work of Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg. Further, it’s impossible not to love a cast comprised of Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Lena Horne, Rex Ingram, Butterfly McQueen, Bill Bailey, John W. Sublett (“Bubbles” of vaudeville fame, the first Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess), Kenneth Spencer, Oscar Polk, Mantan Moreland, Willie Best, Ernest Whitman and Louis Armstrong, even though the musical solo that would have justified his casting was cut before the movie’s release. That number was a reprise of the delicious Arlen-Harbug “Ain’t it the Truth?,” itself a victim of the editor’s scissors, apparently due to Hays Office pressure, and for reasons that remain murky. Lena Horne believed MGM couldn’t abide the sensuality of a black woman bathing (even in a concealing bubble-bath) while performing it, but in what would have been the subsequent scene and which now serves as her character’s introduction the singer is clearly (if briefly) seen wearing a revealing brassiere; if the exposure of black female flesh was at issue, why didn’t the Production Code offices demand Arthur Freed trim that image too? In any case, Freed’s biographer Hugh Fordin (The World of Entertainment: Hollywood’s Greatest Musicals, Doubleday, 1975) maintained that the producer was hectored by the censors until he cut Horne’s version of the song. You can see most of it (although, alas, not the Armstrong footage, which seems to have disappeared) in That’s Entertainment! III.

^{“Takin’ a Chance on Love”: Ethel Waters, Bill Bailey (brother of Pearl) and Eddie Anderson.}

One can argue endlessly about the dramatic content (churchly piety vs. earthy sin) of Cabin in the Sky but not, I don’t think, about the calibre of the songwriting by either team or the performances of the cast. Although by 1943 her 1920s soubriquet “Sweet Mama Stringbean” was but a distant memory, Waters displays both the pure tone of her ballad style and, when the script permits, the “hot” style she perfected in her youth. Anderson, no singer, still brazens his way through a witty Arlen-Harburg duet with Horne (“Life is Full of Consequence”) and gives what to my eyes seems a perfect characterization of a basically decent little everyman sorely tempted by vice, one worth saving, however you read the meaning of that word. I have heard ignoramuses, black and white, sneer that, on radio, “Rochester” was “merely” Jack Benny’s black sidekick or (as Frank Rich once wrote, “Benny’s servile house boy”) when a cursory familiarity with “The Jack Benny Program,” on radio or television, would remind the listener or viewer that “Rochester” was in no way subservient to Benny, or anyone else. He was Benny’s foil, and he always came out on top. It’s why the audience loved him: He gave it back to the vain, pinchpenny Benny character, the same as “Mary Livingstone” did. But to these educated idiots he was merely a white man’s servant, ergo a slave.*

^{That’s John W. Sublett over Lena Horne’s shoulder.}

Horne, looking impossibly beautiful as only she could, has her first important role in a movie and relishes playing the “bad girl” sent, like the temptress Lola in the later Damn Yankees, to lead “Little Joe” astray. If “Ain’t it the Truth?” got cut, Horne still got an incandescent “Honey in the Honeycomb” late in the picture (which Waters then takes a sexy crack at, pinning it to the mat).† While both Bailey and Sublett oversell their routines — Bailey in particular appears in his solo dance to the cleverly-conceived “Takin’ a Chance on Love” to be playing to the proverbial last row of the balcony — their sheer joy in performing becomes infectious: In his happy, sinuous rendition of the 1910 standard “Shine,” “Bubbles” gives a good indication of what his Sportin’ Life must have been like. (Busby Berkeley is said to have shot that sequence.) Ellington and his band contribute swinging versions of “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” and “Going Up,” and the Hall Johnson Choir provides the gospel singing (and the requisite Heavenly choruses.) Ingram, immortal in the Ross household for his sly trickster genie in the 1940 Thief of Bagdad, lends his distinctive vocal patterns and rich comedic presence to the role of Lucifer, Jr. and as his First Idea Man Mantan Moreland, given good material for a change, is funnier than ever. (The screenplay, adapted from Lynn Root’s original Broadway book, was by Joseph Schrank.)

^{Vincente Minnelli, Lena Horne and a visiting Melvyn Douglas on the set.}

Cabin in the Sky was Vincente Minnelli’s debut as a movie director, and not only is its black-and-white cinematography splendid-looking (the director of photography was Sidney Wagner) but Minnelli’s fluid dollying for purpose, almost a trademark with him, is in evidence from the extraordinary early sequence in church, where the camera moves through the pews toward the back where Waters sits, pausing as parishioners take up solo lines of the Arlen-Harburg “Little Black Sheep,” an effective faux-spiritual whose title may sound suspect but which in context (Little Joe’s perennial “backsliding”) is not. This is a complex shot, especially for a beginner, and while camera moves alone do not a director make, it rather gives lie to the notion, expressed for years in Hollywood (presumably due to Minnelli’s sexuality, an open secret) that he was, as Billy Wilder described him to his own biographer Maurice Zolotow, “just a designer.” There is only one questionable bit of legerdemain in the picture: When at the climax Horne stares out the plate-glass window at a tornado coming to destroy Whitman’s nightclub the special effect was borrowed from The Wizard of Oz, and no one thought to remove the Kansas foreground. Since the club is in the middle of a city block, the look of the effect is weirdly out of place.

Much as I resist offering praise to a corporation, my hat is still off to Warner Bros. for making pictures like Cabin in the Sky and items such as the unexpurgated Looney Tunes and Tex Avery cartoons available, however dated they may be in their humor or social attitudes. While we have to abide a typically chiding introductory scroll on the Warner Archive Blu-ray warning us against the very content of the disc on offer, at least the company does not self-censor, and allows its viewers to make up their own minds about their entertainment choices. That’s more than can be said of Disney, which has not merely locked away its copies of Song of the South; it has also removed all trace of the Joel Chandler Harris fable-figures, based on authentic (and verified) folk characters, from one of its venerable Disneyland attractions. Br’er Rabbit is a racist creation. Got it? It’s as if, in the corporation’s rush to condemn its own past, black American folk humor itself was being wiped from memory. Has anyone at the Disney Company considered the racial implications of that?

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*Thanks to Eliot M. Camarena for the Frank Rich quote.

†Arlen, Harburg and Horne later resurrected the song, in the score of their 1957 Broadway musical Jamaica.

Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross