Film Festival: Divine Divas Lena Horne plays the leading lady in Stormy Weather, a film legacy of her expressive voice and luminous beauty. One of America’s divine divas, she came to our attention as a chorine at Harlem’s famed Cotton Club and made her way to Hollywood to become the first black woman to sign…
black films
Lisa’s Home Bijou: Zou Zou
Film Festival: Divine Divas Zou Zou, made in 1934, is one of the few performances of the woman lovingly known as “La Baker” preserved on film; a showcase for Josephine Baker’s comedic persona and her emotional singing. A child of the streets of St. Louis, she made her way to New York and into show…
Lisa’s Home Bijou: Carmen Jones
Film Festival: Divine Divas The fire and spice of Dorothy Dandridge is preserved for us in Carmen Jones (1954), a modernization of Bizet’s opera. Carmen Jones moves Bizet’s story of Carmen from a cigarette factory in Spain to a parachute factory in the southern United States. Otto Preminger directed the all-black cast, with Bizet’s music…
Lisa’s Home Bijou: Cabin in the Sky
Film Festival: Divine Divas ETHEL WATERS was one of the first black divas to cross-over and successfully sing pop tunes. In Cabin in the Sky, the 1943 film version of the hit Broadway musical by Lynn Root, John Latouche, and Vernon Duke, Waters recreates her stage role on film accompanied by a stellar cast. Waters…