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Star of the Month: Paul Robeson
TCM, beginning at 7 p.m.
Three more films starring acclaimed actor and singer Paul Robeson continue Turner Classic Movies’ Sunday night
Star of the Month celebration tonight. Robeson’s legendary bass-baritone singing voice is on display in the first film, Show Boat (pictured) (1936), the second film adaptation of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1927 stage musical, itself based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. Robeson isn’t a lead here, but he does give a definitive rendition of the song “Ol’ Man River,” delivering it with a world-weary yet determined beauty despite the ugliness of the composition’s sometimes racist lyrics
(the film has other racist elements in it, as well, including a blackface number). Robeson also sings, with costars Hattie McDaniel and Helen Morgan, another famous Show Boat number, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (a song that is problematic in its own right). The next film, Sanders of the River (1935), takes Robeson from Show Boat’s Mississippi River backdrop to an African river-set story, with the actor playing a literate and educated tribal chief in colonial Nigeria who is an ally to a white colonial district commissioner. The drama may be worth seeing for Robeson’s performance, but if the actor had had his way, it wouldn’t be seen in its current incarnation at all. Upon learning that the film’s message had been changed during editing — with a message now seeming to support continued colonial rule in Africa and with his character changed from a proud leader to a servile lackey of the colonial administration — a furious Robeson attempted to buy back all prints of the film to prevent it from being shown, but he was unsuccessful. Tonight’s last Robeson film — which again shows off his singing as well as his acting — is the TCM premiere of the 1937 British musical drama Big Fella. Based on Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay’s novel Banjo, it stars Robeson as Banjo, a streetwise and honest dockworker in Marseilles who struggles with issues of integrity and human values. —