The Emperor Jones is a 1933 American pre-Code film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play of the same title, directed by iconoclast Dudley Murphy, written for the screen by playwright DuBose Heyward and starring Paul Robeson in the title role (a role he played onstage, both in the US and UK), and co-starring Dudley Digges, Frank H. Wilson, Fredi Washington and Ruby Elzy.
One boisterous crap game leads to a fight in which he inadvertently stabs Jeff, the man who had introduced him to the fast life and from whom he had stolen the affections of the beautiful Undine.
Making his way home, he briefly receives the assistance of his girlfriend Dolly before taking a job stoking coal on a steamer headed for the Caribbean.
Some critics assess the opening as representative of the "primitive" black world to which Brutus Jones will eventually revert, but some scholarly reviews reflect the relationship between the roots of the African-American church and the rhythmic chanting often seen in African religious practices.
Having just spent several years in Hollywood, he now craved the freedom to use musical forms as a way of translating O'Neill's stage experimentation into film.
[citation needed] O'Neill had based the character, down to some specific traits and use of language, on an African-American friend from the New England waterfront,[3] and felt that the use of the word was dramatically justified.
As the co-director of Ballet Mécanique—though Fernand Léger would become far more famous for the experimental film—Murphy had explored avant-garde film from its earliest days in Paris, and he wanted that creative freedom that New York symbolized to him.
They were apprehensive because they had added material by making new scenes from the stage monologues, but O'Neill gave the screenplay his blessing, saying that the group had "written a fine three-act play.
[citation needed] Emperor Jones also suffered at the hands of the Hays Office, whose Production Code was in place and had been since 1930, if only haphazardly enforced until the arrival of censor Joseph Breen the following year.
Black-on-white violence was strictly forbidden, so a scene in which Jones kills a sadistic white prison guard had to be removed, leaving a gap in the action.
A steamy scene between Robeson and Fredi Washington as a prostitute had to be reshot when the Hays Office decreed that she was too light-skinned and might be mistaken for a white woman.
The scenes depicting the hallucinations in the jungle of the slave ship and the auction were removed, undercutting the film's "dramatic resonance and doing a serious injustice to Eugene O'Neill's play," as Murphy's biographer wrote in 2005.