Princesse Tam Tam (1935)
Directed by Edmond T. Gréville

Film Review

There are many things about Josephine Baker that now strike us as paradoxical.  One of the quirks of her remarkable career was that she had only the most fleeting of associations with the world of cinema - surely a monumental oversight given that she was the most famous and iconic performer of her generation.  A star of the Folies Bergère in Paris, Baker's celebrated 'Danse Sauvage' made her Europe's biggest cultural icon during the inter-war period, and when she made her screen debut - in the silent film Siren of the Tropics (1927) - she made history, becoming the first black woman to star in a major work of cinema.

It was another seven years before Josephine Baker returned to the big screen, this time in a Depression Era crowd-pleaser intended to showcase her talents as an actress and performer - starring alongside Jean Gabin in Marc Allégret's Zouzou (1934).  The immense success of this light-hearted but pretty vacuous piece of '30s ephemera quickly led to a second, more impressive Baker vehicle, Princesse Tam Tam (1935), helmed by a promising rookie filmmaker named Edmond T. Gréville.

Although Baker did lend her talents to one further film, Fausse alerte (1945), this was it as far as her screen career went.  Her dislike of America (the country she was glad to see the back of after being the victim of racial abuse) and Hollywood's antipathy for non-white actors may have dissuaded Baker from ever wanting to get back in front of the camera, although she did have other cats to whip (as the French say) - first playing an active role against the Nazis as an agent of the French Resistance during WWII; and later making her mark as an important civil rights activist.

Princesse Tam Tam may not have any claim to be held up as a great work of cinema, but as a means of preserving for posterity Josephine Baker's gob-smacking charisma and vivacity it is priceless.  The creaking comedy of manners plot (a lame reworking of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion) and glib concessions to the facile colonialist mindset of the time (East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet) date the film badly, but Baker's knockout presence and a truly spectacular glitz-laden finale (complete with Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers) more than make up for all that.  A generous amount of location footage (filmed in sun-drenched Tunisia) helps to break up the monotony of the stuffy interior scenes, as well as providing a good excuse to have Josephine Baker performing her primitive dance amid some Roman ruins - as potent a visual metaphor for the transience of civilisation as Shelley's poem Ozymandias.

Edmond T. Gréville is a filmmaker who probably deserves to be better known than he is.  After a short career in journalism, he first learn his craft as a director by working as an assistant in the early years of sound cinema, on such films as Augusto Genina's Prix de beauté (1931) and Abel Gance's La Fin du monde (1931).  His first films as a director made little impression on critics or audiences in the early '30s, and it was mostly down to the phenomenal success of Princesse Tam Tam that he was able to make a name for himself as an independent filmmaker in both the French and English-speaking worlds.  Two of Gréville's best known works are the memorably moody Erich von Stroheim vehicle Menaces (1939) and the enjoyable fantasy excursion The Hands of Orlac (1960) starring Mel Ferrer.

Despite being saddled with a sub-mediocre screenplay that is painfully mired in the social and moral conventions of the day, Princesse Tam Tam does exhibit a smattering of subversive daring in one or two places.  Baker's trademark erotic dances were enough to make the film hot viewing material for a mid-1930s cinema audience (as overt an exhibition of female sexuality as a French film producer ever dared to go), but the idea of a tender romance between a white man and black woman was patently too much for the Hollywood Censor, which blocked a nationwide release of the film in America after it premiered in New York.

The stilted, overly stereotypical dialogue does the film's star performer few favours and, as in her previous film for Marc Allégret, Baker shows only a modicum of ability as an actress.  Yet in spite of this, she manages to outclass all of her co-stars, even Albert Préjean, one of the biggest names in French cinema at the time.  The meticulously robed and coiffured Germaine Aussey appears insufferably dowdy compared with the effortlessly sensual 'Black Venus' who monopolises our attention from start to finish.  Of the male characters, only Jean Galland makes much of an impact, but charming and convincingly regal as his Maharajah is, it is hard to get beyond the fact that he is just a blacked-up Frenchman spouting French colonialist claptrap.  Baker's only real competition comes from the ever-sultry Viviane Romance, who (in what is little more than a walk-on part) suddenly bursts onto the screen, grabbing our attention with her siren-like aura of femme fatale viperishness.  What a film this might have been if Romance had been given the second female lead role...
 
For all its many failings, Princesse Tam Tam serves as a valuable celluloid time capsule that deserves its place in the Pantheon of popular film art, just as its lead actress deserves her place in the Paris Panthéon alongside France's other artistic luminaries.  Gréville's film - derivative and politically incorrect as it must now appear - both celebrates and revels in the raw talents of Josephine Baker.   How sad it is that this is the only occasion on which this remarkable woman, the supreme icon of the Jazz Age, was able to project her two greatest assets - her raging vitality and searing sexual potency - onto cinema.  Whether she is serenading us with her exquisitely poignant reductions of Sous le ciel d'Afrique and Le Chemin du bonheur, or else hurling herself into her dizzying muscular gyrations to become the embodiment of the untameable female spirit, Baker has us spellbound and gasping for more.

Film Synopsis

Max de Mirecourt is one of the most popular writers of his age, but, distracted by his wife Lucie's flirtatious behaviour, he is having difficulty coming up with ideas for his next best-selling novel.  Badly in need of inspiration, he leaves Paris and retreats to a quiet Tunisian villa, accompanied by his faithful ghost-writer Coton.  Max's creative block refuses to lift, however, until he encounters the beguiling Aouïna, an attractive native girl who survives by begging and stealing what she can.

Aware that his wife has taken advantage of his absence from Paris to start an amorous liaison with an Indian prince, the fabulously wealthy Maharaja of Datane, Max has no qualms over making Aouïna his protégée and introducing her to western customs.  Convinced that Max has fallen in love with her, Aouïna abandons her wild ways, which include tree climbing and erotic dancing, and allows herself to be civilised, thereby providing the writer with the plot of his next great novel.  Intent on making the most of his newly acquired asset, and also eager to get his own back for his wife's infidelity, Max takes Aouïna with him back to Paris, presenting this black pearl of Africa to his rich society friends as the Princess Tam-Tam.

Naturally, Lucie is outraged by her husband's attempts to publicly humiliate her.  Urged on by a friend, she contrives to have her revenge by getting Aouïna so drunk at a party hosted by the Maharaja that she will make an exhibition of herself by performing one of her wild dances.  The scheme backfires as the seductive African girl receives a rapturous applause from all the partygoers.  In a fit of pique, Lucie drives off, forcing Max to go off in pursuit to settle his differences with her.  Aouïna is left alone, persuaded by the Maharaja that she and Max belong to two different worlds...