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

Playing like a midnight car accident between the Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish existential comedy, Wonder Bar was one of the last films to sneak by the Joe Breen production code and it all but dares the censors to cross the line backwards in pursuit, like a bunch of ball-snipping nihilists after the Dude. Occurring almost in real time, over one evening at the titular Parisian nightspot owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the movie aims for a 'cavalcade of stars' vibe ala Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, or Paramount's  International House but it lands on a roof all its own. Onstage: Busby Berkeley-directed dance numbers including one spectacularly offensive cavalcade of black stereotypes savaging the folksy decency of the (then still just a hit play) The Green Pastures. Offstage, a savagery of future Breen no-nos: unpunished murders, endorsed suicide, gambling, unpunished extramarital trysts, and even homosexuality. If there's no W.C. Fields autogyro to lift you out of this dark madness, well, just walk home as nonchalantly as you can. It's Paris, after all --even the forbidden is permitted.. for now... but Nazism im der Winde kommt! 

There are several interwoven stories and emotions too strange not to unweave and examine separately:

1. The chilling exhilaration displayed by the Russian gambler who lost his fortune gambling the night before, so is planning to to kill himself tonight. Clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about the ways he might do it, his merriment in the face of being broke nonetheless recalls Dostoevsky's famous line, "a real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion." As he gives away his watch and remaining rubles to the scantily-clad chorus girls, they don't bat a single eyelash over his suicide threats (if they took him seriously, after all, they might feel obligated to give him his stuff back).

2. The love quintanglement between the ballroom dancing couple of 'The Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him- at the time it still meant one of the professional male dance partners that used to be for rent at upscale ballrooms) played by Ricardo Cortez, his partner Dolores del Rio, and a whole slew of their former lovers, past, present, and future angling for a spin. There's the rich married woman (Kay Francis) after Cortez; and after Dolores, the bandstand crooner Dick Powell and, most masochistically self-abasing of them all, emcee Jolson (Powell 'knew' her first). But no one is going home happy tonight because Dolores is way to obsessive over her Gigolo. To the point, perhaps, of murder. A crime which Jolson is all too eager to cover up in a bid to win her over. 

Seriously, the way these people crawl and scrape shamelessly after each other is almost Carson McCullers-level degrading; Jolson's level of bootlick self-pity, especially, is just way too adult for the future era of the code and too self-pitying for our jaded age.

3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two 'party' girls while their matronly spouses look on in shocked disapproval (Guy laments: "there out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris"). But-- in the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the evening--the ladies too find matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos. There's some amusingly drunk interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, but it's dispiriting to see the weird Gold Digger three-way romance of the 1933 film reduced to slovenly old midwesterners drunkenly drooling over mercenary French hustlers. 

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography and surreal camera movements seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round. Showing perhaps a less Gold Diggers-level budget, forced to rely too heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. And more than in the past, Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism: our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns first as people and then as abstract patterns, then back again, in a way that's truly relevant to the film's uneasy sense of self-loathing and dehumanized alienation. 

5. The cast's freaky 'otherness' is played up even as they are meant to be identifiable as certain types, i.e. the foolishly-smitten with her young gigolo trophy wife, the jealous Latina firebrand, The hood-eyed Latin playa, the bug-eyed Jewish golem, the hick tourists from Indiana, etc. There's no sense of connection or belonging, just humanity slipping in and out dehumanized abstraction. Only the suicidal Russian seems to be all the way human --no Wonder this Bar is making him suicidal.

5.  Al Jolson singing "Going to Heaven on Mule," in blackface.
Yikes, here we go...

Grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through an array of offensive stereotype postures, cavorting and twisting his blackened face into hideous leering grimaces, Jolson's blackface is truly a shocking sight to see. Meant as a homage-cloaked xenophobic satire of the then-popular stage play, Green Pastures, one "wonders" how this or any aspect of Al Jolson was ever popular. He does grow on one in a forgotten curio sort of way over the course of the film, but then this number kind of dispels any good vibes he might have generated. The shock of stumbling on this, buried deep in the rest of the film, is like overturning a rock in the the Museum of Radio and Television and finding a nest of hideous vermin.

Notes the Museum of Family History site, almost by way of apology-cum-rationalization:

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 'troll king' of early sound film, the golem who segued between evoking the lovesick deformed circus masochists of Lon Chaney-Tod Browning silents and the fast-talking toughs of the pre-code gangster boom. Unlike the Chaney freaks Jolson's was an inner deformity in his own mind, leading him to project a level of insecurity and self-loathing so intense it became its own grandstanding narcissistic opposite. A kind of slow motion downward death spiral down a Vitaphone crackle-and-hiss drain, it was 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 it got him. "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He's a "borscht belt Pagliachi... a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, more self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

Now there are some who think two wrongs don't make a right, but this ground zero of semitic self-loathing coupled to black-face racism has a train-wreck pull for others, such as myself. Does it help that Jolson was a big supporter of black entertainers and possibly felt a kinship with oppressed African Americans? (i.e. slave race ancestry?) A Jew who played up his own Jewishness, Jolson had to struggle with stereotypes himself in an age where clubs were openly 'restricted' and long before Gregory Peck made his Gentlemen's Agreement. Jews and blacks alike had to play humble, decent submissives who understood and respected Jim Crow and social restrictions as being for their own benefit, helping them hide their inferiority from their WASP overlords. 

As if cementing the similarity, behold the above picture: the archaic Yiddish characters on the newspaper providing a reverse under-halo to the sunrise of loose straw from Jolson's hat, framing a blackface golem beamed here through a stray TV signal from some uncanny nightmare dimension. 

The Green Pastures satire aspect is eerily soothing in this bizarro world context: the opiate promise of heading into the sunshine of eternal glory (anywhere but here) on a mule, just like the code had planned for us immediately following this last moment of a wanderin' in the pre-code valley of the shadow of libidinal freedom.

 Here's Jolson fan Glenn Kenny on the many questions surrounding Jolson's 'right' to blacken up:

"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 her comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context, noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. She's right that we'll never have an adequate grasp of the overall frequency of such a negative interpretation. 

B ut perhaps we can glean a rough idea from the post-WWI, pre-WWII Parisian setting.  

Paris had become a black musician expat refuge for two very good reasons: Parisians revered jazz and weren't as racist. There were no Jim Crow laws, or other humiliations (like not even being allowed to sit with the white folks at Harlem's Cotton Club). That treatment was more reserved for the French equivalent of the black person, the Arab. 

And yet (or maybe because of the lack of racism towards ex-pat African Americans) Paris nightclubs celebrated and overindulged in the spectacle of blackness, of difference, amplifying perceived traits to a state of almost avant garde shock value. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up in posters and set decor, band members changing from their usual tuxedoes into leopard skin for the film short. 

The exotica of Josephine Baker (left) made her a huge star (left), and let's not even go there with Sarah Baartman (i.e. 'the Black Venus).

And the connection between Jews and black musicians had always been vibrant, loving and reciprocal. During the Nazi occupation 'Zionists' were suspected of underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notes:

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 From the Barrelhouse piece on Django Reinhardt comes this excerpt from 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 with a five year-old's pre-racial mistrust at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons like Coal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television, even seeing Song of the South in the theater, and never thinking anything was wrong about it except that it was boring as fuck and I wanted to get on to Treasure of the Matacumbe, which came on after Song in a 1976 double feature revival, though that sucked too. I ended up throwing up in the lobby, while my mom and an usher hovered over me in deep concern. It wasn't because of the racism, it was just too boring.

More than anything now, in today's light, minstrelry is our shame, not Jolson's or anyone else's. It's a sad example of the white compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent underneath the skin of so much news channel rhetoric. And yet, at the same time... exaggeration and performed accentuation of difference is sometimes the gateway to tolerance.

Speaking of difference, a few words on the seemingly altered face of Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested Cortez. I know she's beautiful or whatever but her face creeps me out. The sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones, etc. She's like death incarnate... at least in this film. When the blunt cops in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL use the vile phrase 'cut' to describe plastic surgery (Kim Basinger plays a girl "cut to look like Veronica Lake"), I think of Del Rio, and vice versa.

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 callow 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. In a way he'd be ideal as the evil plastic surgeon in visage... slowly reducing his love's face to a featureless taut skin skull... "this time I'll burn all the animal out of her!"

This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and imperfections--bad teeth or big nose or wrinkles or thin lips--is mostly gone now. If someone wants surgery they have it, but we're intolerant of all hate crimes, even self-hate crimes... the bleaching and 'cutting' of Michael Jackson being a very public cautionary tale.

And the freak otherness doesn't even begin to end there: as the socialite craving the Gigolo, Kay Francis is at her most eerily caricature-like: that alabaster skin, triangle mouth and round fleshy head make her seem like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoon of herself or some drawing on the cover of a cigar box. 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 art deco cubist face, and the way it seems to signify all 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.

But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's still Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for both aberration and finger-pointing, for both freaks and gawkers, all races and some racists. When we see a pair of men dancing together, Jolson makes a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise (below), the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it ("Oh you kid!")  Jolson is, above all, a caricature himself, running around from table to table while emceeing and joking, his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a Nerf ball through the deep end of a pool, he's a freak among freaks. A user review on imdb sums his character up 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 Major Strasser with Joseph Breen and Vichy with his army of toady censors.

So that's it, last call. Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but it's still tonight here at the Wonder Bar, and like people getting as sloshed as possible the night before Prohibition goes into effect, all the soon-to-be-verboten tropes are assembled for one last hurrah. The most glaring example to even the pre-code novice will ben seeing SPOILER ALERT Jolson get away with covering up his lover's crime of passion by letting another man make good on his suicide threat, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so unconscionable it's shocking even for a pre-code, so shocking he mentions it to no one, as if he's getting away with something he doesn't want anyone even in the movie audience to notice, Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be able to play for almost 30 years? Even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow a draconian end to what used to be relatively harmless decadence--the Weimar era and the jazz age--and the arrival of corrupt, racist, sexist, colonialist  'morality' of the both the Nazis and The Production Code. Some joke, like when the bartender flicks the lights on at closing time and you realize you've been kissing an empty skull. If you're the type who can still laugh after that, get this movie.