On Stage

...Cap'n Dan, a character who bears some slight resemblance to John L. Sullivan, says this makes him feel "like the world's got a shadow across it...

...For all this kind of speechifying and Jefferson's wise cracks (most of them not particularly hilarious), I really did have the impression that The Great White Hope is the latest Tom-show...

...it is not only difficult to understand but leads to a monotonous vocal pattern...

...Here it distracts from some of the weaker scenes...

...All these states were clearly marked, and yet there was an even, graceful flow to her performance...

...They have him convicted on Mann Act charges, and after he jumps bail they pursue him through Europe and Latin America—until he is morally and physically crushed, and defeated by a "white hope...

...He is first exiled, then hunted the wide world over by cruel white men until he is forced to give up both his crown and his lady...

...Jane Alexander as his white mistress has one very fine scene in which she is worked over by a nasty-minded district attorney...

...It also seemed to me that the audience at the Alvin was composed of the same people I saw across town giggling at Bruce J. Friedman's scurrilous remarks about Negroes in Scuba Duba...

...That's not the half of it...

...He is further hobbled by his garbled Southern accent...

...Jefferson, who enlivens the proceedings with various salty remarks on the racial situation, in some respects resembles Cassius Clay...

...An almost incomprehensible Mexican cop, who nearly shoots Jefferson, nevertheless sympathizes with him and give us to understand that he is only cooperating with the gringos so that he can get a little money to develop his country...

...There are pictures of Johnson shielding his eyes from the sun while the referee counts...

...The essence of a Tom is that he is the kind of black man that white man want...

...Then the white hope is carried on in triumph, his face a grotesque mask of blood, a living picture of the well-known brutalizing effects of our culture...

...He comes across as a sort of precursor of black power, and this feeling is reinforced by several other characters...

...I have seen this incident several times on television as part of a beer commercial, never tire of it, and consider it ample testimony to man's unconquerable spirit, a thousand times more heartwarming than Sackler's noble savage...

...Finally Mrs...

...The director, Edwin Sherin, has been rightly praised for his skill in managing crowds, but there is a slightly specious agility to his touch that diverts attention from the dramatic situation by unusual groupings of actors...

...His former wife occasionally remonstrates with him about some peccadillo or other, but when Jones declares his love for the white girl in the second scene ("Ah done fool round plenny . . . she know it too, she know it all, but Ah ain't fooling roun now, unner-stand"), he is speaking the simple By Henry A. Zeiger Separate but Nervous truth about the character we see on stage...

...Johnson poleaxed him with several fast punches and Ketchel went bye-bye...

...One of them, Scipio, got up in a rather strange costume, addresses the audience several times on the subject, telling us that it is "Time again to make us a big new wise proud dark man's world...

...They were on their feet applauding and bravoing when the performance was over...

...We like simple black men so that we won't have to understand the actual complex article...

...Walter Kerr has told the cockeyed world the play is "thrilling," that it lands "body blows that take an audience's breath away...

...I just happen to find reality more interesting...

...I wondered how this could be...

...Perhaps the answer is that since we have done black men great injustices, we feel it is only right for them to hate us...

...As for nobility, the real Johnson once fought Stanley Ketchel, the celebrated white middleweight...

...The great travail in our nation has filled the theaters with supposedly funny remarks about how we are all just kidding ourselves when we pretend to get along...

...Since Jefferson's character is distinctly at odds with the usual conception of a Tom, and in fact deliberately parodies it on several occasions, it may seem that I am being rather perverse in my terminology, but I don't think so...

...Kerr certainly does go on when he's in one of his ecstatic fits...

...Because these are recognizable human emotions, they were doubly welcome as a badly needed relief from the surrounding sea of great-hearted courage and love resounding...

...Howard Sackler, the author, is a clever enough fellow who can always be calculated to hit us with a cheap shot...

...If black men hate us, it's then ok for us to go right on hating and exploiting them...

...The plot concerns a great black prince, played by James Earl Jones, deeply and truly in love with the white girl next door...

...Its leading actor has had his picture on the cover of Newsweek, which proclaimed him a "very big star...

...If they don't, they get us all confused...

...At the end of Sackler's account of these trials and tribulations, Jefferson and the white hope fight a brutal battle, hysterically related to us by several white goons on top of a stepladder...

...Of course, this style is endemic to American productions of epic plays (epic as in Cecil B. De Mille, not Bertolt Brecht...

...Johnson gave Jack the high sign, Willard tapped him with two light lefts, swung a right upper-cut and Jack sat down...

...Paralleling the career of pre-World War I heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, the play opens as Jack Jefferson (Johnson's anagram) wins the crown...

...How nice and simple life would be if the fellow who wanted to move in next door was always James Earl Jones—a black prince, courageous and true...

...In the somewhat flashier part of Jefferson's former black common-law wife, Marlene Warfield is able to display bitterness, anger, and a hard-headed devotion to Jefferson as a valuable piece of property...

...Despite scattered references to various drinking bouts and carryings-on, we are never shocked with an unseemly display of this side of the leading character...

...Even when he is down and out in Paris, Belgrade and points East, she keeps her faith in him, and when he finally rejects her, she jumps into the Rio Grande, breaks her neck and expires...

...A fine actor, Jame's Earl Jones' continuous display of the nobler virtues leaves him with few opportunities...

...She parries his leading questions adroitly, starts to cry, then curses him heartily...

...There was a mix-up about the matter or an attempted double cross, and as a result the fight dragged on tamely for over 20 rounds, with neither tiger landing many solid blows...

...Jack Johnson's version of this affair was that he agreed to throw the fight to Willard, but only after his wife had his share of the gate receipts tucked firmly in her purse...

...For one thing, the pattern of the play is really that of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which good, kindly Tom and Little Eva (with whom Tom happens to be sleeping) are chased through the world by such Simon Legrees as Cap'n Dan and representatives of the law...

...The only decent white American in the play is Goldie, Jefferson's Jewish manager, who is a man apart because of his religion and his accent...

...The women generally have the better of the going...

...The implied solution is that we should stay separate but nervous...

...Later he says that "dat boy [Jefferson] juss a shadow," and that black men now alive will live to see the end of the white man's domination...

...Just as Jefferson is a prince, his light of love is a sweet and perfect lady, without spot or blemish...

...There is no question that the audience at the Alvin Theater likes James Earl Jones...

...When Jefferson further enrages the white world by living openly with a white woman, Cap'n Dan and others go after him by fair means or foul (mostly foul...

...Like any workaday pageant hero, the prince is unremittingly noble, kind, gentle, and brave...

...Even slightly nice people have accents...

...in a drama of more substance he would have to get down to cases more often...

...When it is over, Jefferson comes out with a puffed face, apparently beaten (although it is not made clear whether or not he threw the fight...

...But the problems between the races have little to do with getting along with such extremely fine fellows, and everything to do with trying to get along with the ordinary run of humanity...

...Though he somehow has gotten into a sordid profession, and he speaks in the accents of the unlettered South, there is no doubting his aristocratic nature...

...There are other elements in this display...

...The world of the play is composed of very bad white men foaming over with racial hatred, and various dialect comedians with their hearts always in the right place...

...His effects are obvious, but well calculated in the tradition of simple-minded melodrama...

...Johnson thought it was to be a respectable exhibition to no decision when Ketchel suddenly popped him a right on the chin that sent him reeling...

...Sherin must also share part of the blame for the extremely ordinary vocal style of most members of the company, who bawled their lines in the manner of a stationmaster calling stops on the 20th Century Limited...

...He got up, seemingly dazed, and Ketchel closed in, dreaming of the big kill...