KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1937) *** I can't honestly recommend breaking up adventure flicks with musical interludes, but when you have Paul Robeson on the set you can't just let him sit there riding shotgun. Truth of the matter is, it works great. Robert Stevenson, who went on to direct most of the greatest children's films (Old Yeller, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, The Absent-Minded Professor, Mary Poppins, The Love Bug, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Island at the Top of the World) works everything he's got, and he's got plenty: treasure, Irish pikers, witch doctors, tribal wars, volcanoes, even an actor named Ecce Homo Toto; H. Rider Haggard's ideas are enough to impress even Edgar Rice Burroughs, though I should clarify that the actor was named by neither Haggard nor Nietzsche. Cedric Hardwicke isn't all that much of an Allan Quartermaine, no Indiana Jones or even Richard Chamberlain anyway, but he's functional, and with Paul Robeson around anyone was bound to be dwarfed. Anna Lee is a conniving and resourceful Irish lass of a particularly high order, her magic being just enough to impress or overcome (spectacular witch doctor) Sydney Fairbrother, I'm not sure which. Robeson demonstrates how to execute a musical coup, a trick later emulated with no small amount of success by Mick Jagger; and it must be said that unlike Sir Mick, Robeson never sold out, abdicated his throne or otherwise made a pathetic cartoon of himself. The stock footage of African tribal dances is awesome, funk may have been synthesized in urban America but it was cultivated, pure and raw, on the dark continent. Robeson's songs sound downright silly by comparison, the spontaneous ramblings of a school child, but the timbre and conviction with which he delivers is unparalleled in the history of recorded music.