The Black Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)

One of my favorite movies is the Paramount musical-comedy from 1933, International House,a giddy sort of Grand Hotel-meets-Asian Exotica--meets WC Fields comedy. It was lightning in a 'hic'' bottle (my review here) and in its haunted way, Wonder Bar (1934) works as a sad, slightly melancholy and twistedly haunted version of International House, like if the quarantine on the hotel was legit and everyone died of yellow fever and now once a year they all come back from the grave and party in its long-closed spaces.

Occurring almost in real time over one evening at the Parisian nightspot, Wonder Bar, owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the film leaves many of its entwined stories unresolved in a manner quite realistic with real bar attendance, wherein the night ends before you've even begun to figure out what mischief you're up for. So murders go unpunished, trysts are planned but never executed; it all leaves the film with afleeting, transitory feel, like a midnight car accident between a drunk entry in Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish horror film as they were racing for the last train out of town before the Joseph Breen jackboots arrived (Wonder Bar was one of the last pre-code films before the 'real' code took effect).

The 'wrong' elements include:

1. The chilling exhilaration of the Russian gambler who lost his shirt gambling the night before, so he's going to kill himself after the bar closes, and the finality of it in his mind has made him giddy--though he's clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about it and serious suicides keep it on the DL. Still, his courage in the face of being broke recalls Dostoevsky's famous line "A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about." As he gives away his watch and remaining moneys to the scantily-clad chorus girls they don't seem too troubled about it either. If they took his suicide babble seriously, after all, they might have to give his stuff back.

2. The love quintanglement between the stars of the show-within-a-show, the ballroom dancing pair of 'the Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him, as if there's one in every bar in Paris) played by Ricardo Cortez, and his partner, Dolores Del Rio, and a whole slew of lovers, ex, present, and would-be future: Rich married woman Kay Francis is after Cortez; smitten songwriter Dick Powell, and the club owner Al Wonder are both in Del Rio (Powell 'knew' her first); the way these people crawl and scrape after each other is a little worrisome, but realistic and way too adult for the code to come. 


3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert play randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two party girls, but their matronly spouses are in tow ("There out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris"). But the ladies too find their matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos. It's the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the whole thing, aside from the amusingly smashed interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, and the way the wives slowly get in on the game with their own rentboy interests.

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round, forced to rely heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. God knows what kind of dizzy vertigo Busby put these girls through to get such precision on a constantly rotating turntable stage, but what's amazing is the way his patterns are still so formally flawless they trick the eye into seeing it all as animation, abstract patterns ala Fantasia rather than people all struggling to not have to do another take. Berkeley's invisible hand mirrors that of the unseen puppet master, the robot girls in his thrall.. there's also whips, knives, and double entendres but what lingers most is how Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism and its inverse - our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns a people and then as abstract patterns, back and forth in a way that's truly relevant to a dialogue about abjectification; for that is what's going on with the cast too - their freak otherness is played up even as they are meant to be human, identifiable. There's no sense of connection or belonging here, just humanity slipping in and out abstraction, which in and of itself, is sublime.... but...


There are fewer things that now in our modern age seem quite as horrifying, as wrongly abject, as Jolson in blackface, grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through these offensive stereotype settings; he more than overdoes it, cavorting and twisting his face into hideous leering grimaces. One wonders how this was ever popular, though Jolson does grow on you in a trainwreck nostalgia kind of way, through his sheer exuberance. Notes the Museum of Family History site:

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors performing in blackface were more accepted by the general public, though Jolson was the first comedian to use blackface. He did this with a great deal of energy and spirit; he felt freer and more spontaneous behind the burnt cork than he ever did in 'whiteface.' As time went on, though others may have used burnt cork, it was obvious that no one could do blackface like Jolson.

  In his book Dangerous Men, Mick LaSalle describes Jolson as the weird ogre king of early sound film, the golem who segued between the handsome, effeminate lovers of the silents and the fast-talking toughs that took over in the wake of the gangster boom. Jolson was neither lover nor tough; he was insecure and caught in a narcissistic spiral, as if being the first person to speak and sing on film had left him permanently self-conscious yet tickled to a childlike fit of jouissance over the attention: "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He was, at heart, "a borscht belt Pagliachi"  and "a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, most self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

The salient feature of the film, finally, is its ultimate musical number, the notorious "Going To Heaven On A Mule." A few scenes prior to this, the heady ethnic stew from which Jolson concocted his varied performing personae is underscored in a bit where he exchanged patter with "Russian count" Michael Dalmatoff before launching into a quite credible (that is, suitably schmaltzy) rendition of "Ochi chyornye" ("Dark Eyes"). For "Mule," Jolson's in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren's least infectious tunes... But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see's Jolson's blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward.

One of the comments on the post, from 'Karen':

And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you've emphasized: the moment that Jolson's grinning face rises over the edge of the Forvert, like the White Queen's face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it's because I'm a Jew myself--or maybe just because I'm a human being--his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it's well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he's aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile.

I like the comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. On some level I can't agree, though of course she's right; we don't have an adequate grasp of contextual objection. However, for my money the Parisian context helps - for Paris became home to expat black jazz musicians for a reason: racism was largely absent there -- no Jim Crow-- and yet the spectacle of blackness, of difference, seemed heightened for an avant garde shock value. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up, or the exotica of Josephine Baker (left), particularly during the Nazi occupation where the Zionists were suspected as being underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notees:

Jolson was a Russian Jew and knew something about discrimination and could draw a parallel between the suffering of blacks and his own people. He grew up in the minstrel tradition of vaudeville and used his blackface as a way of bringing black music to white audiences. It was also a way for him to immerse himself in the characterization. It’s been said Jolson used the technique as a metaphor for human suffering.


In an excellent piece on Django Reinhart in the 1940s, From the Barrelhouse quotes a tract on 'Nazifying Jazz' -

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.” -- Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s Bass Saxophone

None of this forgives the litany of stereotypes, even to me who grew up gazing mistrustfully at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons likeCoal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television. Racist and ethnic jokes were common and accepted in the school yard, and no one thought twice about any of it, that is until Roots came out. Perhaps abjectification precedes awareness, but it forgives nothing. More than anything now, minstrelry is our shame, the white man, no one else should feel anything by it except disgusted pity for the White-Christian compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent in so much Fox News rhetoric.



A word on Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested gigolo Ricardo Cortez, who always makes even the most reprehensible womanizing swine sympathetic--something about her beautiful but weirdly taut face creeps me out: the sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones. She's like death incarnate.


In fact, and I hope the photo above bears me out, she's halfway to looking like Allida Valli in Les yeux sans visage (below). And the very fact that Jolson is still clinging to this hoary old Lon Chaney-style masochist cinema, where the ugly deformed performer sacrifices himself so the plasticine dish can run away with the spoon shows a terminal example of self-directed racism that's an illuminating mirror into the self-hatred of one's own image as 'other' even as one clings to it like a life raft (he arranges to cover up her crimes and the Gigolo's, but backs off his proposal the minute she mentions she's going out with Dick --not a word of thanks on her part or outrage on his). This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and/or bad teeth is so hard to imagine in today's light, where we've seen the end game of racial and religious intolerance writ so foul and bloody on the firing squad wall in the 40s-60s, then been subject to the firing squad wall ourselves if we act racist or religiously intolerant in the 80s-present, that we're constantly vigilant now, intolerant of even self-hate crimes... even and especially in comedy.


Thus we need to watch the veiled racial hierarchy of whiteness with a grain of tolerance here in 1934, a decade or so before the founding of the State of Israel and 30 odd years before the death of Martin Luther King. Here we have whiter-than-white Dick Powell winning the Mexican beauty while the best Jolson's Russian Jewishness can do is eliminate Cortez's Latin lover and then step nobly aside, just as Del Rio would do with a convenient volcano at the end of her 1932 break-out, Bird of Paradise (so Joel McRae could go back home to his white fiancee and his family fortune), Jolson dives in one so she can go off with Dick Powell.

And the freak otherness doesn't begin to end there, for in addition to Del Rio's oddly skeletal features there's Kay Francis at her most soft-with-baby-fat; her alabaster skin, weirdly pointy mouth and round fleshy head making her seem like nightmare cigarette ad cartoon. I don't mean that as a jab either (I'm a huge Francis fan), but just trying to corral all the jarring elements of this extraordinarily bizarre melange, trying to nail down the amorphous wrongness floating through the film, the International House anti-matter, the feeling that the foundations of Hollywood personae are crumbling right and left as Breen's brown-shirt inquisitors are kicking down the door, makes me long for a familiar face, and hers here is not. What the hell is going on? What kind of weird shit were they smoking? She looks like the baby sister of the girl who starred in one of my favorite pre-codes, Mandalay, which came out the same year (bottom), or a Max Fleischer cartoon.


But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for aberration that might not have been okay if Wonder Bar was set in the states. For example we see a pair of men dancing, with Jolson making a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise which again like so much of Jolson's schtick seems to mock the very act of mocking. His little pucker of an expression is almost a bow to any lingering need to be exhibitionist on the part of the gay dancers, as if to say 'oh you kid!' the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it, so she could giggle and blush and leave him a nice tip. Jolson is, above all, a caricature of his own self, running around from table to table his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a nerf ball through the deep end. A user review on imdb, sums his character up best, as a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else...) I would add a metatextual furtherance to his comparison--just replace Nazis with Joseph Breen and his Catholic Legions of Decency, and viola!


Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but for tonight, all these things that the code would put an end to are here at the Wonder Bar, assembled here as if by a mysterious blackmail letter, to get them out of someone's system. The most glaring even to the novice will be how Jolson gets away with covering up a crime by letting another man make good on his suicide threats, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so slippery it's shocking even for a pre-code. Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be abe to play for almost 30 years? That sense of it being the last day before the end is really omnipresent; even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow an end to what used to be mere innocent decadence, the Weimar era and the jazz age, and the arrival of the forces of pure evil, ala Cabaret.  Here for one more movie, one more night, these freaks live free of fascist intolerance. See them grab at the pins of taboo like an opium addict, filling his veins to the limit before being hauled off to his lengthy stint in the cooler.

But even in a prohibition-and-racism-free city like Paris, subversion and excess will only get you so far... there's still always a tomorrow morning yet to face, alone, hung-over, shivering from withdrawal, paranoid, melancholy, and craving the warmth of narcotic spotlight like it's the everlovin' arms... of Mammy, Mammy, don't ya know me? 

She doesn't.