James Earl Jones Was at His Peak in This Trailblazing Drama

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James Earl Jones

By Daniel Cruse

Published Sep 10, 2024

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Image via 20th Century Studios

The world lost a performer of truly titanic proportions with the passing of James Earl Jones. Jones had a storied, prolific career which included two of the most iconic vocal performances of all time, Darth Vader in Star Wars, and Mufasa in The Lion King. These will be the roles he's most remembered for, and they inform our understanding of Jones as a commanding presence in all of his work. His voice commands respect and attention, and that makes him well suited to playing an intimidating, all-powerful villain, or a person of royalty, as he did in both The Lion King and Coming to America. But Jones had more dimensions as an actor, and one of his greatest performances is also one of his most down-to-earth.

In 1974, Jones co-starred in Claudine alongside Diahann Carroll. The film is a blend of domestic drama and romantic comedy, where Jones plays a working-class man whose demeanor and general characterization is far different from the larger-than-life roles that he's renowned for. Despite showcasing a completely different side of his acting talents in Claudine, Jones still remains a gravitational force in the movie, an undeniably magnetic presence. Claudine was a major step forward for an industry that was opening its mind to telling more Black stories, and Jones gives his most endearing performance in the movie.

'Claudine' Was Groundbreaking in Its Approach to Telling Black Stories on the Big Screen

Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones in bed in 'Claudine' — Image via 20th Century Studios

The 1970s saw a sharp rise in interest in Black stories on the silver screen. The distinction is that many of these stories were genre pictures. The Blaxploitation genre exploded around this time, thanks to the critical reception of work from Melvin Van Peebles and the major success of Gordon Parks' Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree. These movies broke barriers in how Black stories were told, because they positioned Black characters as central to their narratives. They were bold, political, provocative, but entertaining enough to appeal to a wide audience.

But the popularity of Blaxploitation also opened the industry up to accept new types of Black stories. Claudine is a major example of this in the early 1970s, a movie that follows a single mother in Harlem, Claudine (Carroll) who begins a romantic relationship with a garbage collector, Rupert (Jones). The film is simple in structure and presentation, a funny, heartwarming, compelling dramatic comedy about day-to-day life and romance in 1970s Harlem. Claudine depicts real people living lives that are more relatable to the ordinary human experience. They're struggling with love, poverty, working themselves to exhaustion, trying to make it through the day like everybody else. It seems foolish that the industry even needed a film like Claudine, but the slice-of-life domestic drama of Claudine emphasized that Black stories are American stories, that there's a rich interiority to the lives of every person in every community across the country.

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That is not to say Claudine didn't tackle relevant social issues. Telling a story of life in 1970s Harlem means telling a story of the real struggles of poverty and race relations that informed the Black experience at the time, and still to this day. Claudine is political, but it is political in the sense that it places viewers from different backgrounds in a position of empathizing and growing to love and relate to characters who are dealing with these problems. This was an uncommon type of movie to be led by Black actors at the time, and the performances of Carroll and Jones are absolutely pivotal to the film's success.

James Earl Jones Shows a Gentler Side in 'Claudine'

The most striking thing about watching Claudine in a modern context is that you get to see Jones perform in a completely different light than what we tend to associate with his largest performances. Whether in his cinematic work as kings or powerful villains, or his rapturous, Tony Award-winning performance as the fiery, complicated father figure in August Wilson's Fences, Jones' characters tend to lean on a booming presence. Fences shares similarities to Claudine in the sense that both tell the story of a Black family's domestic life and struggles with poverty, but Jones is giving two radically different performances in these works.

In Claudine, Jones is a gentle, warm inclusion throughout most of the story. He is kindly, down-to-earth, and often funny. Rupert is still a complicated character, and he makes a few mistakes in the film that lead to some of its most powerful moments of tension and conflict, but his defining characteristic is that he loves Claudine and wants to make her happy. Jones gets to be playful, funny, and charming in Claudine. It's fascinating to see Jones deliver such a stripped-down, human performance if you primarily associate him with his more popular roles. Claudine also stands out in his filmography because it is an overtly romantic film, and the tender relationship between Claudine and Rupert is the central focus of the narrative. Jones and Carroll have great chemistry, their love feels real and tangible and incredibly endearing.

To see a Black performer with such gravitas be granted the opportunity, in a film released by a studio as major as 20th Century Fox, to play a character as richly textured, endearing, and full of love as Rupert is nothing short of remarkable, and Jones delivers a quietly powerful performance that deserves every ounce of praise that he received for his more commercially successful roles. Claudine is an underseen movie in the modern context, it has been lost to many audiences. The Criterion Collection released a new addition of the film in 2020, which is the best way to see the movie at this time. We can assume you've already seen his villainous voice work in Star Wars, or his deadpan comedic chops in Coming to America, so if there's one performance you absolutely need to see to get the full breadth of his unbelievable talents as an actor, Claudine should be at the top of your watch-list.