James Earl Jones Was Best Known For His Booming Voice, But His Power Came From His Keen Ability To Listen Intently

Before I spoke a word of English, I knew the timbre of his voice. It was a thing bubbling from my imagination, emerging from my nightmares in search of a beautiful princess on a councilor ship without an ambassador. My dad always had a particular affection for James Earl Jones. I didn’t know why until much later. He recognized the voice immediately and he nudged me there in the dark of my first ever movie experience, transfixed before George Lucas’ Star Wars — “that,” he said, “is a great man.” I thought he meant Darth Vader but I didn’t dwell on it.

When I was a kid, I developed a terrible stutter as I was learning English. I couldn’t really communicate at all. The hardest thing for me to say was my own name. I felt alone a lot, and I fed that loneliness with books, television, records and movies. I caught a screening of John Berry’s Claudine one Saturday afternoon and I asked my dad if the garbageman was the voice of Darth Vader and he said it was. “He’s a great man,” my dad said, and I thought he meant the garbageman, a big, good-natured guy named Roop. Claudine is a melodrama about a woman raising six kids on her own at the edge of poverty who is in love with a dead-ender doing his best to inhabit the ill-fitting role of role model. I was too young to understand the progressive social consciousness of Claudine , but I got Roop’s essential decency, his indomitable good nature and in long, melancholy moments, his quiet disappointment with himself. Ending in a raucous marriage set against a city block erupting in protests and police violence, Roop comes into his own at last as the entire family plus minister are ferried away on a paddy wagon. As shorthand for hope under occupation in the United States for minority populations, it’s poetry and there’s James Earl Jones, lanky and beautiful, keeping his righteous balance in the middle of all of that turbulence.

R.I.P. James Earl Jones: Hollywood Mourns ‘The Lion King’ Star After His Death At 93

I didn’t think of the film for a couple years until I found the soundtrack for it while digging through a few crates of old records at rummage some time in 1985. I was going into the sixth grade. As a kid, I was always allowed to buy books and records at garage sales and thrift. Part of my drills to understand spoken English came from transcribing the songs on the records I collected. I still know every word of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Mr. Welfare Man” written by Curtis Mayfield for the film. Their “On and On” is still a staple in my daily rotation. In a way, Claudine was a portal for me into any number of worlds — but of course you don’t see the shape of your journey at the beginning of it. I watched it again today for the first time in at least 20 years upon learning of James Earl Jones’ death and found myself transfixed by Diahann Carroll’s effervescence and uncompromising intelligence — and by Jones’ overwhelming charisma that fills every crack and corner in the film like his honeyed voice reverberating through a concert hall. Watch when Claudine playfully bats Roop’s hands away at the door to his bathroom as she prepares to take a bath, and how he makes a show of tiptoeing away, chastened, and immediately starts setting traps to slow the encroachments of the rats infesting his apartment. He is life lived in absolute gratefulness. “Why’d you settle on garbage man? You’re too smart for that,” Claudine says, and Roop laughs and says “I’ve been too smart for all my jobs.” Claudine could be asking herself the same question. If it wasn’t Jones playing said garbage man, it’d be a lot tougher to understand why someone as obviously desirable as Claudine would choose him.

I watched John Sayles’ exquisite Matewan again today, too, just to luxuriate in the saturated period tones of Haskell Wexler’s cinematography and the palpable decency of James Earl Jones’ performance as “Few Clothes” Johnson, de facto leader and spokesman for a group of Black miners brought into the tiny mining town of Matewan to disrupt labor organization. I imagine nearly everything written to memorialize Jones will be about his voice — and for good reason, his is a voice of all-time — but about an hour-and-a-half into Matewan , organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), around a campfire and to a chorus of crickets, tells Few Clothes about how a corporation once tried to break up a union by torturing its workers and Few Clothes doesn’t say a word. Sayles keeps cutting back to him, but all Few Clothes has to say is written in his eyes and the careful set of his jaw. When Kenehan finishes his tale, he leaves the fire and, after a moment, Few Clothes loads his gun. Jones is a deep well of gravity: a reservoir in this instance of the memory of an entire people’s mistreatment. Kenehan’s story of men being beaten and humiliated while in chains, their flesh swelling and bruising around the tight pressure of iron cuffs around ankles and wrists, isn’t a new story for Few Clothes. Jones stopped talking for a while when he was a kid. He stuttered so badly he said that he just gave up and learned the value of listening. When you watch him in this scene, you discover how loud silence can be when it’s attended by a sharp, piercing mind attached to an overwhelming presence. He is the embodiment of the idea of potential energy. It’s part of what made him so effective as the kind of character actor brought in to anchor the entire feeling of a piece, generally in less then ten minutes of screentime.

Nathan Lane Says Elton John Was “Mortified” By The Idea Of “The Warthog And The Meerkat” Singing His ‘Lion King’ Hit “Can You Feel The Love Tonight”

The entire matinee of my movie watching experience is illuminated by appearances by James Earl Jones. I can’t tell you how often I think of him as Deputy Director of the CIA James Greer in John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October who, after bringing an analyst into a high level meeting to give his opinion on a missing Russian submarine, settles him down by quietly placing his hand on his impetuous young friend’s wrist. Watch him listen. Watch his eyes sparkle. Watch him as legendary Civil Rights author Terrence Mann in Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams , a man who reluctantly joins a possible madman back to the cornfield he’s converted into a baseball diamond; watch how he mixes bemusement (“you got a whole team of doctors, don’t you?”) with sarcasm. When he decides to go see a game with this lunatic, Robinson rests on Jones’ face, those expressive, light-hued eyes processing, processing, processing. Who else could convince at this crucial moment early in the film that his approval would be vital for the film to continue? Who else but James Earl Jones’ benediction would be enough to sell the magical realism of this improbable piece?

When Mann finally meets the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), Jones leans in close to get a better look, bent a little at his middle, and says “pleased to meet you.” He is. I believe that completely. And of course it’s James Earl Jones who’s given the key monologue in the picture, espousing the romance of baseball and childhood. “It’ll be as though they’ve dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.” No one could say these lines but Jones. I mean, they could say them, but they wouldn’t make me cry.

CLICK HERE TO GET EMAILS FROM DECIDER

He often played kings and judges because he was magisterial without anything that looked like effort. He is the authoritative force resolving Robinson’s delightful Sneakers as NSA muckety-muck Bernard Abbott who must suffer the mad extortions of Robert Redford’s team of ex-felons who have him over the barrel. “I want a winnebago,” Dan Aykroyd’s batty hacker demands and Abbott says “WHAT?” in exactly the only way James Earl Jones can say it…clipped, explosive like he’s punching a hole through a wall with just the force of his outrage.

He won Tony Awards, an Emmy, a Grammy and finally an Oscar. He was the voice of CNN when the notion of a twenty-four hour news cycle was still in its infancy. And for all of that when I think of him, I think of two things, both personal though one more than the other. I think of the perverse beauty of his Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian : warlock and cult leader and murderer of Conan the Barbarian’s entire village. I was asked to write about John Milius’ adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s extraordinary stories recently and all I could do was rave on about James Earl Jones’ strange conception of honeyed evil: omniscient, all-powerful, sexy, chthonic. Unknowable, wicked, he doesn’t speak until well into the film because Milius understood that at least half, maybe more, of Jones’ power is his oneiric stillness — that amazing capacity to listen deep and well.

And the other thing I think of is how in sixth grade, not long after I started transcribing all the songs on that Claudine soundtrack, I wrote an essay about my difficult time in elementary school and was chosen, the stuttering Chinese kid who didn’t know English when he started six years ago, to read it in front of class by a caring, kind teacher whom I’ll never forget. I was terrified. I read it and the applause is still in my heart. A few days later, my dad asked me if I knew who James Earl Jones was and of course I did. He said that before I was born he saw him on a late night television show where he shared with the host how he stuttered as a child and how reading and reciting poetry had helped him to overcome it. My father said that given his own background, he had not expected to see such a large, powerful man sharing something so private and painful — nor a solution to a problem that was so gentle. He asked me if I had noticed that I hadn’t stuttered since I delivered my speech. It’s been forty years and I still haven’t. What I know now is that my dad’s fears for me were lightened by Jones’ vulnerability, by his willingness to share the story of his life.

James Earl Jones was 93 when he passed on September 9, 2024.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net . His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.

For more entertainment news and streaming recommendations, visit decider.com