There is rich irony in the fuss being made over the re-release of two Josephine Baker films-”Princess Tam Tam” (1935) and ”Zouzou” (1934)-which open this Sunday for a week`s run in the Music Box Theatre. Eagerly greeted by New York critics in February, the new, 35-mm. prints are being marketed as
”rediscovered French classics of the 1930s.”
Indeed, they are good-but not great-works by two of the decade`s better French directors, Edmond Greville and Marc Allegret. It is their star who is the classic, and the irony is that film was her worst medium-but it is all that is left of the talent that propelled her remarkable life.
Judging from these movies, Baker had a mischievous, manic, Liza Minnelli quality. While her co-stars move on camera at a blithe, comfortable pace, Baker seems about to burst from the screen, all arms and legs and kinetic energy. This was the verve that captivated her nightclub audiences. What the movies cannot show us is the flamboyance that capitivated them offstage as well.
There was Baker strolling down the Champs Elysees with a panther and a monkey on leashes. (Later, she had a cheetah as well.) There was Baker stealing off to have an affair with the future king of Sweden. There was Baker recovering from cyanide poisoning at the hands of Hermann Goering. And, through it all, there was Baker the woman of style, a walking advertisement for the great couture houses and jewelers of Paris.
Hers was the classic American rags-to-riches story, only America didn`t-couldn`t-make it happen. Born illegitimate in St. Louis in 1906, witness to savage race riots at age 11, she ran away at 13 to be Bessie Smith`s maid, or so she told her friend and posthumous biographer, Steven Papich.
Gradually, she worked her way onto the stage as a kind of chorine-comedienne, and by her mid-teens she was performing in Harlem and in road shows with Eubie Blake. In 1925, she auditioned in New York for a show called Revue Negre, unaware that its intended destination was Paris. In France, the revue soon folded, but Josephine Baker landed a perch at the spectacular Folies Bergere, where she quickly became a star.
While America lived out the wild `20s and settled into its Great Depression, Baker was becoming a woman of wealth and playful notoriety. She took to the stage clad only in bananas. She brought her cheetah to the cinema. She was courted by a sheik who lavished jewels on her. Europe found her unconventionality enchanting. America remained unconvinced.
In 1935, she returned to New York to star in the Ziegfield Follies and to reacquaint herself with the straitjacket of segregation. The experience sent her right back to France, where she promptly took out citizenship.
She was married, divorced and, as World War II gained momentum, she was inducted into the French Resistance, assigned to mingle with high-ranking Nazis to gather information. None other than Hermann Goering requisitioned her townhouse for his headquarters.
According to Papich`s book, when the Nazis discovered Baker`s true purpose, they issued a command invitation for her to dine with Goering at her own house. The Resistance warned her that her fish course would be poisoned with cyanide. She devised a plan of escape via a hidden laundry chute to the basement, where allies would spirit her away. She made it to the laundry chute but was forced to eat the fish first and was half dead by the time she landed in friendly hands. Whether or not the story is accurate, it`s the best movie she never was in.
After the war, Josephine Baker suffered what might today be termed a midlife crisis. In the early `50s, she retired from the stage to pour time and money into her chateau in the French countryside. There she built what she liked to think of as a little city of brotherhood, a home for 12 children from countries around the world, whom she adopted. Her plan was to raise them together as an example of inter-racial harmony. The community, she thought, would become a tourist attraction.
Unfortunately, practicality was not Baker`s strength: She lacked both the business acumen and the childraising experience to accomplish the task. In 1968, she went bankrupt. She returned to work and had just opened in a hit Paris nightclub revue when she died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 69.
In ”Zouzou,” Baker plays the title character, an orphan raised as a French girl. Her ”brother” is another orphan, played by Jean Gabin. As the two grow to adulthood and find themselves in Paris-she laboring in a laundry, he as a stagehand in a music hall-Zouzou falls passionately and unrequitedly in love with Jean.
The story meanders down a path of cliches-how Jean falls in love with Zouzou`s best friend; how the star of the music hall runs away, opening the door for Zouzou`s big chance; how Jean witnesses a murder of which he is accused; how Zouzou tries to save him-as the film builds up to the star`s big production numbers. These include ”Haiti,” her favorite song from her nightclub act.
The movie portrays Baker throughout as an impulsive child of nature-kind to stray dogs and prone to releasing caged birds-and when she sings ”Haiti,” she is swinging on a trapeze in a giant birdcage, bits of feathers plastered to her breasts and arranged bikini-fashion around her hips. She is, apparently, only a bird in the gilded cage of the French imagination.
”Princess Tam-Tam” is much more racially self-conscious and even condescending, though it is plainly intended as a sendup of the French upper- class mores of the time. The film`s hero, Max, is a wellknown novelist struggling with writer`s block after separating from his socialite wife. Accompanied by a sidekick, he escapes to a villa in Morocco, where he sees Alwina (Baker), a hoydenish Bedouin, stealing some oranges. He is tickled by her raw energy and decides it might be fun-and the source of a good novel-to take her home and try to civilize her. She comes to live in the villa, where she meets Dar, a Moorish servant given to such nobly savage proclamations as
”African flowers aren`t meant for parlors.”
Unobtrusively, then, the film slips from the real story to the story within a story, one being concocted in Max`s imagination. In this tale, Max`s wife, Lucie, scandalizes society by seeming to take a maharajah for her lover. To get even, Max brings forth his African princess, Tam-Tam, a.k.a. Alwina. Lucie contrives to disgrace the princess by getting her to ”go native” at a society ball.
The plan backfires, of course, because the princess` provocative dancing is a big hit. The logic of the movie is such that this causes Max to reconcile with Lucie, while the princess, who has developed a crush on Max, is advised by the maharajah to turn her back on the West and return to the East, where her true love, Dar, awaits.
Softening this blow to good sense is an epilogue in which we return to
”reality” in Morocco, where Max, grateful to Alwina for inspiring his now-completed novel, gives her the deed to his villa. She and Dar soon fill it with children and animals and the final frame shows one such-a donkey-chomping contentedly on a book that the camera reveals to be Max`s novel.
Both movies` production numbers are small-scale copies of Hollywood`s lavish `30s musical extravaganzas. In ”Zouzou,” there is even a dance director barking out instructions in English. The choreography features cinematic conceits, such as a dancers` formation that looks like the closing of a giant aperture.
And there are Busby Berkeley-like abstract patterns, but with a Gallic touch, as when the chorus girls arise as one from a giant bed when the covers are peeled off. Much has been said and written about French racial tolerance. ”Princess Tam-Tam” and ”Zouzou,” in addition to being vehicles for ”La Bak-hair,” are interesting documents as to the nature of that tolerance in the `30s, suggesting that the French saw blacks through a veil of
Rousseauistic enchantment, as charming naifs, childlike and pure.
As manifestoes of interracial love, the films compromise themselves-the French were, after all, still colonizing countries in Africa and Asia. But these movies were way ahead of what was happening on this side of the Atlantic, where they could not even be shown. Their implicit attitude may have been patronizing, but it wasn`t ugly.
