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Rex Ingram: De Lawd
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Rex Ingram (October 20, 1895 - September 19, 1969) was an African American film and stage actor. Born near Cairo, Illinois on the Mississippi River (his father was a steamer fireman on the riverboat Robert E. Lee), he claimed to have obtained a medical degree from Northwestern University in 1919 and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, but this is not confirmed.
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Rex Ingram plays "De Lawd," the creator of everything on Earth in Marc Connelly and William Keighley's The Green Pastures. Based, like Cabin in the Sky, on a popular stage play, this one centers around a Sunday School meeting in which a preacher does his best to explain the history of the world to his students. At first, Heaven is nothing but a big fish fry with ten-cent cigars for everyone, until "De Lawd" decides to create the Earth, and with it, Adam and Eve, Noah, Cain and Abel and Moses (all black). Eddie "Rochester" Anderson co-stars as Noah, but without his trademark sandpaper voice. It's all ridiculous, of course, but in an open-hearted, naïve sort of way it's an oddly captivating achievement.
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If Rex Ingram was able to achieve relative success in struggling for dignity through his film roles, his stage roles afforded him much more room for expression. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson's review of Ingram's performance in a Federal Theater Project play was quoted in the paper's obituary for Ingram years later. The actor had played the leading role of Christophe, the Black Napolean, in the 1938 Federal Theater Project play Haiti, which depicted the black Haitian insurrection of 1802. Atkinson wrote, "Mr. Ingram has been a good actor for a long time. It is not very often... that he finds a heroic part like that of Christophe, the leader of a cause. Mr. Ingram gives a rattling good performance."
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Not to be confused with the African American actor of the same name, Irish-born actor/director Rex Ingram was a set designer and painter before entering films as a performer in 1914's Necklace of Rameses. Handsome enough to thrive as a film star, Ingram was more attracted to directing, making his debut in this capacity with the 1916 feature The Great Problem.
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Ingram died of a heart attack in September 1969, two months prior to the airing of that last television appearance. He is best remembered by the public for his role in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), while film and theater scholars know him best for The Green Pastures, and musical buffs know him for Cabin in the Sky. (The latter two movies aren't shown very often today and require some explanation, especially The Green Pastures -- due to their dated depictions of black characters -- whereas The Thief of Bagdad engenders no such questions.) ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
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Highly regarded by his peers, von Stroheim entrusted Ingram with the first substantial edit of Greed (1924) cutting the film from a monsterous length of 42 reels down to 18. Once established as a major director, his touch was golden. He elevated the status of every collaborator and attracted the finest talent. Cinematographer John Seitz literally developed a film processing technique with Ingram that became a standard for the vivid, richly toned and detailed look of all their films. The motion picture achieved its greatest success as an expression of visual narrative in the late nineteen twenties, due in no small part to the work of Rex Ingram.
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