Lydia Bailey is an interesting film, more interesting than expected, somewhat ahead of its time for 1952 even though, for the modern viewer, there are elements of it which stick in the throat.
The film is set during the French attempt to reconquer the island of San Domingue (the San Domingue expedition,1801-1803), which, since 1793, had been in the hands of slave rebels led by Toussaint Louverture.
Under the leadership of Louveture, the revolutionaries had ended slavery on the island, achieved semi-independence from metropolitan France, and seen off Spanish and British attempts to take over.
In the film, lawyer Albion Hamlin (played by Dale Robertson) is sent from Baltimore to San Domingue to secure the signature of Lydia Bailey (played by Anne Francis) so that her recently deceased American father’s legal affairs can be put in order.
The naive Hamlin is warned that his arrival on the island couldn’t have come at a worse time, with 30,000 French troops having just been despatched by Napoleon to end black emancipation and their self-rule experiment – ironically inspired by the ideas of the French revolution – and restore full colonial rule over the island.
With the arrival of French troops imminent, there is ferment among the white colonists, eager to restore their pre-revolution privileges, and among blacks, ready to fight tooth and nail to preserve their freedom.
Hamlin falls in with King Dick (the star of the film, played by William Marshall), a super-smart and brave Louveture loyalist, interested in the manoeuvrings of Lydia Bailey’s French fiancé, the slippery Colonel Gabriel D’Autremont (played by Adeline de Walt Reynolds). To survive in the febrile political and racial atmosphere, Hamlin has to pass off as a black man, while Lydia Bailey has to pass herself off as a black woman.
The film is generous to the plight of the black rebels led by Louverture – portrayed (by Ken Renard) as a dignified and intelligent statesman (there is reference to him as Haiti’s George Washington).
Even the more bloodthirsty Maroons, whose motivations are shown as less noble than the Louveture rebels, have their hatred of whites justified by Hamlin, when he remarks: ‘If I were a native today whose liberty was threatened by Napoleon’s cut-throats I’d kill every white man I could lay hands on.’
Not that it is inaccurate to inject into the Haitian revolution an element of race war.
In his classic Black Jacobins, CLR James notes that not only was Napoleon partly motivated by a hatred of blacks – ‘I am in favour of the whites because I am white’ – and outraged by the African rebels’ entreaties to be seen as having the same inalienable rights as Europeans; but also that the slave rebels carried out indiscriminate massacres of whites, both as blind acts of vengeance for the sadistic indignities the island’s white ruling class subjected them to during bondage and to make sure that the white dream of resurrecting the slave regime on the island could never materialise.
For the film, the villains are the French, portrayed as decadent, deceitful and depraved. It’s a typical Hollywood depiction of Europeans, though, of course, as we watch the film we can’t help but wonder at the hypocrisy of having an American – from Maryland, if you will, a quintessential plantation colony and slave society – joining a slave revolt and singing the praises of the rebels.
We assume director Jean Negulesco – a Romanian educated in France, (and responsible for some of the most notable film noirs, including The Mask of Dimitrios, Road House, Nobody Lives Forever) – had in mind during the making of the film American, not European attitudes towards race and racial justice but the brewing uprising of African Americans, whose struggles for rights and dignity was a continuation of the struggle Louveture epitomised 150 years earlier.
