Outstanding Film With Great Music, Well Worth a Look
The 1936 American film The Green Pastures is a unique viewing experience. It is notable for being one of only six feature films in the Hollywood Studio era featuring an all-black cast. It is set in rural Louisiana apparently some time from the early 1900s to the 1930s. It begins with a group of children starting out for a Sunday School lesson held at a church. As they listen to the preacher, one of the smaller girls visualizes Bible stories in terms of people and places familiar to her. In other words, the movie is told simply from a child’s point of view.
The Lord, known as “De Lawd,” played by Rex Ingram, is a dignified old man in preacher’s garb. The angels wear robes and have wings. The preacher relating the story says that Heaven, before God created the Earth, was one long fish fry with “ten-cent seegars” for the grown folks. The child incorporates all this into her vision of Heaven.
God ends up with a bit too much “firmament” and decides to create the Earth along with the Sun and Moon, and makes Adam in his own image. This is very interesting because Rex Ingram also plays Adam, and the makeup is great. Adam has thick black hair with a full hairline. De Lawd has thin white hair with a receding hairline. One has to be a wig but it’s impossible to tell which. Another impressive effect is that Rex Ingram as De Lawd talks to Adam in the same shot, and later with Hezdrel, who he also plays. Such camera tricks were available as early as the 1920s, when Buster Keaton appeared in The Playhouse in 1921 alongside himself as a nine-member band, and they are astonishingly well done here, as are the other special effects.
Most of the Biblical characters are dressed in what would be considered street clothes for the time portrayed. The story proceeds from the creation of Adam to God visiting Noah, played by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. The scene of loading the animals onto the Ark is cute.
Troubling scenes illustrate man’s sin and God’s unhappiness with it. Cain kills Abel with a rock, there is also a stabbing and a shooting, and some scenes of drinking, gambling, and various revelry inescapably embody unpleasant black stereotypes. With the “seegars” there is also smoking, not to mention someone is inevitably going to object to the variety of English used, with the characters talking as they really would in the rural early 20th Century South, although not everyone can speak like a white Northern college professor. One touch which may ruffle some feathers (ha) is De Lawd’s cleaning women, dressed in calico, with calico wing covers.
Incidents in the life of Moses, played by Frank Wilson, are dramatized. The movie is not exactly Biblically accurate. For instance, the Egyptians are still killing Hebrew babies when Moses is an adult, which actually occurred when he was an infant. Pharaoh, here spelled “Pharoah,” played by Ernest Whitman, does not recognize Moses although Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s household. Due to time constraints, the only miracles Moses performs are changing a wooden rod into a serpent and the death of the firstborn. The procession into the Promised Land is movingly done.
The last part of the story takes place with a character named Hezdrel defending Jerusalem. No dates are given for any of the events but this apparently refers to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD during the first Jewish-Roman War, in other words after New Testament events, and Hezdrel is a fictional character. The movie ends with an uplifting song about Jesus.
I posted this nine years ago on Internet Movie Database under my old username but it bears repeating: In the last scene, when Hezdrel is explaining to De Lawd that God is different, but the same, (that is from a wrathful Old Testament God to a loving and forgiving New Testament God) I flashed back to a remark I overheard when visiting a Catholic church. The priest was slinging some rather heavy Old Testament fire and brimstone wrath, and a five-year-old boy in front of me turned to his mother and said, "God used to be like that, but He's better now, huh?" I was laughing and crying at the same time recalling this! I wouldn't have been in that woman's place for anything--or missed the remark for anything either!
The film is altogether worthwhile, but is made incredible by the remarkable, almost unbelievably good talents of the Hall Johnson choir, which also performed in Song of the South. There is so much music the film may qualify as a musical although the individual characters don’t sing. The music is arguably the best thing in this great film. If there was a film of just a concert of this choir I would totally watch it! Recommended with reservations as somebody will be determined to be offended by something here.