Body and Soul

The Auteurs

By Jonathon Saia

Body and Soul (Micheaux Film, 1925) – Director: Oscar Micheaux. Writer: Oscar Micheaux (novel and s/p). Stars: Paul Robeson, Marshall Rogers, Lawrence Chenault, Chester A. Alexander, Walter Cornick, Lillian Johnson & Madame Robinson. B&W, 102 minutes.

“If I spent a million dollars to make a colored picture and if it was as good as the best picture ever made, I couldn’t play it anywhere except in what they call Negro theatres. Unless I could persuade one of the major companies to release it, and they’re not interested that much in Negroes…” - Oscar Micheaux

I.

Oscar Micheaux wrote, directed, and produced 38 feature length films between 1919-1947; a break neck speed on par with esteemed Hollywood directors of the period such as Cecil B. DeMille, Raoul Walsh, and John Ford. Yet Oscar Micheaux is a name you have probably never heard. He won no awards (nor nominations), was ignored in the mainstream press, and his films weren’t played on television; the repository for classic cinema since its inception. He didn’t make his films in Los Angeles so there is no Hollywood lore nor scandal to be disseminated. Only 15 of his films have existing prints – a visual aid to the importance of preservation – and even these films are jumbled truncations of their original forms. And there is a reason: Oscar Micheaux was African-American. 

The history of African-Americans in the earliest days of cinema is sparse at best and non-existent at worst. Like every facet of American life, black people were relegated to the sidelines of filmmaking: no writers, no producers, and certainly no directors. Even black actors were scarce in Hollywood films. Since the inception of cinema in 1896, black characters had mostly been played by white actors in blackface; a long-held tradition from minstrel shows, Broadway plays, and other varieties of “legitimate” theatre. In 1915, two major exceptions came on the scene: Madame Sul-Te-Wan and Noble Johnson.

Madame Sul-Te-Wan appeared in front of the cameras ironically for D.W. Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915) – cinema’s technical watershed, yet one of its most unapologetically racist tomes. She plays an aristocratic woman who spits in the face of a prominent white character. This moment is lost to history (like so much of Micheaux’s oeuvre) because the censors forced Griffith to remove the scene. Also like Micheaux’s battles with the censorship board, the censors green-lighting Griffith’s opus refused to allow white people to be disrespected by a black person on screen. Sul-Te-Wan does appear in Griffith’s follow-up apologetic, Intolerance (1916) and films by Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim. However, her roles, like all non-white actors of the time, consisted primarily of maids, slaves, prisoners, and “natives”; or what historian Donald Bogle refers to as “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks.”  

Noble Johnson got his start around the same time as a stunt double at Universal, playing a variety of mostly cowboys and Indians. Tall, good-looking, and very light-skinned, he was billed as “the only Ethiopian motion picture star in the World.” But Johnson was not content to just play what white men thought he could – and should – be playing. Johnson had dreams of fair representation and a desire to make films for African-Americans by African-Americans starring African-Americans; what would be dubbed “race films.”

The concept and execution of race films had been carried out a few years prior by William Foster, an African-American writer and press agent for the famed vaudevillian, Bert Williams. Foster founded The Foster Photoplay Company and from 1910-1913 made four short films, including The Railroad Porter (1912), presumably America’s first film directed by a person of color; sixteen years after the medium’s invention.

Noble Johnson – having studied the various aspects of filmmaking from the sidelines of his day jobs – formed Lincoln Motion Picture Company with his brother, George. Between 1916-1920, the Johnsons produced four shorts of their own, including the aptly titled The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916). 

Unfortunately, no prints are known to survive for any of these eight, groundbreaking films and are considered “lost.” 

The first film directed by an African-American to survive is Within Our Gates (1920), a blistering indictment of The Birth of a Nation, racism, and the KKK; the second film by Oscar Micheaux. Besides Micheaux’s The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920) and Body and Soul (1925), the only other silent films directed by African-Americans to survive their era are Eleven P.M. (1929) by Richard D. Maurice, Hell Bound Train (1930) by James and Eloyce Gist, and the ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston. A few silent race films made by white producers, which defeats some of their very purpose (The Flying Ace, 1926; Ten Nights in a Bar Room, 1926; The Scar of Shame, 1929) also survive.  

In a world of digital media, Blu-Rays, and the world at the swipe of our fingertips, it may be confusing how a film may be “lost,” at all. Movies back then were struck on celluloid silver nitrate, a highly flammable, highly brittle material. Film preservation and the study of film as an art form were not widely valued or accepted practices until the 1960s when the auteur theory from Europe caught on in coastal cities in America. But by then, many silent films had already disappeared forever. During WWI, films were melted down so the silver could be used for the war effort; others simply decomposed; some were lost in library fires; and most troubling, others were intentionally discarded by the studios when sound came into fashion in 1927, seeing no reason to save films they could no longer market. It is estimated that 90% of all American silent films made before 1929 and 50% of American sound films before 1950 are gone. The films that have survived long enough to be preserved beat the odds by either being highly profitable or prestigious enough to keep; were found by happenstance in an international archive, as two of the three remaining Micheaux silents were; or, like Chaplin, protected in the personal effects of the artists themselves.

In the case of Oscar Micheaux, his films suffered three additional hurdles: poverty, segregation, and censorship. At the time of his first film, The Homesteader (1919), an average Hollywood film would strike 35-65 prints. These prints would then travel around the country from theatre to theatre with additional prints being made if the road print was damaged enough (and the film profitable enough) to warrant more prints. Micheaux could only afford to strike four prints of The Homesteader and once these prints suffered enough damage, they were “lost”. Due to his budgetary problems and the lack of respect for race films in general, many of his films suffered a similar fate. 

The segregation and censorship of his films go hand in hand and contributed to his poverty. Movie houses, like everything else in America, were segregated. In most theatres, black people sat in the balcony; colloquially called “N-gger Heaven.” In some of the larger cities like Harlem and Chicago (places Micheaux would thrive and fold), there were all-black theatres. The average ticket price for a Hollywood film in the early days of Micheaux was between $1-3. Micheaux’s films, however, (along with other race films of the silent era) charged between 10-50 cents. The low prices coupled with the dearth of theatres that would even allow race pictures to be shown (roughly 2%) were fatal for most race producers. Compounding this dire statistic was Micheaux’s ban from a number of theatres. Some theatre managers refused to show his films because they thought the quality was too poor; other managers, many of them white (or “Jews with Money,” as Micheaux called them), refused to show his films because Micheaux had done them personal injury. This was certainly the case with Leo Brecher and Frank Schiffman, Micheaux’s business partners in the early 1930s. After skipping town with the profits of their four films from 1932 (Ten Minutes to Live, The Girl From Chicago, Veiled Aristocrats, and Harlem After Midnight), Brecher and Schiffman not only sued Micheaux, but banned his films from their theatre chain, which comprised all of Harlem: the largest district that screened race films. 

Censorship (fueled by racism) contributed greatly to Micheaux’s lack of dissemination and the destruction of his negatives; therefore his legacy. The censorship boards were local committees that besides screening for the usual things that flagged the moral “outrage” of the modern day MPAA, these all white panels were especially attuned to anything that would disrupt the racial order of the day: 

• Within Our Gates was censored in various markets due to its third act flashback of a lynch mob. Censors were concerned it would offend white people because Micheaux dared to criticize lynchings and the attempted rape of a black woman at the hands of a white man; a direct commentary and reversal of The Birth of a Nation
• The Brute (1920) was censored because a black boxer triumphed over a white boxer
• The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920) had any denegration of the KKK removed and the lynching scene that survives is heavily truncated and lacks all the satire that Micheaux intended
• The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), a real life murder involving a Jew and an African-American, was banned in Atlanta for being too close to the facts (and somewhat anti-Semitic)
• Deceit (1923), a film about a black director whose work is constantly censored by an all-white board, was banned in toto for obvious reasons
• A Son of Satan (1925) lampooned the KKK and was either banned outright in various districts or heavily censored.
• The House Behind the Cedars (1925) was edited and banned for fear of race riots over the presumed interracial relationship the board believed would “insult” black people (when of course it was the white people who were insulted). Micheaux’s response: “There has been but one picture that incited the colored people to riot and that still does. That picture is The Birth of a Nation.”

Other films were censored for traditional reasons:

• Birthright (1924) showed gambling 
• The Exile (1931) featured scantily clad dancers
• The Betrayal (1947) ran over 3 hours

To counter these attacks, Micheaux would get prominent black members of the communities to petition the censorship boards on his behalf. However, sometimes it was the black community itself that ordered cuts or criticized him in their press. They wanted Micheaux to make films that lifted up the black community, not “denigrated” them. And they hated his persistent use of the “n” word in his inter-titles:

• The Homesteader and Body and Soul (1925) were critical of the black church
• The Brute showed black people in a negative light (i.e. gambling, drinking, etc.)
• God’s Stepchildren (1937) was boycotted by The Harlem Communists because they thought it pitted light skinned and dark skinned people against each other

All of this censorship resulted in heavily altered – or all together lost – versions of his films when various theatres would dispose of the trims or rearrange the scenes as they saw fit. This makes Oscar Micheaux’s legacy and, frankly, his talent hard to define since the films that have survived are either incomplete or weighed down by budgetary and creative restraints. His biography is even hard to know for certain since it has been ascertained by scholars mostly through his autobiographical novels.

According to these sources, Oscar Micheaux was born in 1884 on the Illinois/Kentucky border, the son of former slaves. His father was an illiterate farmer, his mother a deeply religious woman who instilled in him Booker T. Washington’s vision of an upwardly mobile black people. Washington would serve as a lifelong inspiration for Micheaux and his portrait is featured prominently in many of his films. His family moved upwardly themselves; his father owning some eighty acres and their mother dedicated to getting Oscar and his brothers the best education possible. Micheaux helped the family by selling fruit in town (discovering his natural propensity for salesmanship) before hopping a train and forging out on his own in Chicago. He sold newspapers, shoveled coal, shined shoes, and became a Pullman Porter. It was on board a variety of trains he would gain the trust and respect of wealthy white people, see the world (including South America), and save enough money to buy a homestead in South Dakota. These life experiences led to his first book, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), bankrolled by white contacts he had met while working as a porter. 

As he would with his films, Micheaux went door to door selling his book, publishing it anonymously; he felt it awkward to be selling one’s own book to a potential buyer. He would write this experience into his film Murder in Harlem (1935). Using shoe leather and Barnum like pizazz, Micheaux built a successful network of buyers, many of whom were white. 

Oscar Micheaux became a director/producer of race films by way of (and in spite of) the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Noble and George Johnson’s newly formed production house. Micheaux’s third novel The Homesteader (1917) had caught the attention of George Johnson who  wanted it to be their next project. He courted Micheaux – an avid filmgoer and astute businessman –  and Micheaux agreed to an adapation, knowing that the medium could give his message of showing African-Americans as they are (and his life story) the distribution he desired. They spoke of a long term partnership, teaming Micheaux’s book publications with Lincoln films. The brothers were intrigued and excited about the prospect of making a feature length film from a successful book, but leery given Micheaux’s naivete when it came to the all white censorship boards and the challenges of segregated markets. Micheaux shrugged these concerns away because like the distribution of his book, he had planned to market – and sell – the film not only to black audiences, but white. 

Perhaps Micheaux’s intention was to produce the film himself all along. He certainly demanded enough provisos where that could be the interpretation: he wanted to supervise the filming (a large request from the screenwriter of a film), play a supporting role, and retain exclusive rights to all publishing and film sales in “white territories”; further proof to Micheaux’s ignorance of film distribution in a segregated industry. But his main demand was that Noble Johnson must play the lead. He was the only black actor with esteem in Hollywood and this would give the film its needed gravitas and respectability. However, Johnson’s bosses at Universal forced him to choose between his contract and the continuation of starring in films for his own company. Unable to afford losing his contract, he relinquished all starring roles in Lincoln Motion Pictures. This was Micheaux’s cue to branch out on his own. 

The Micheaux Book and Film Company produced The Homesteader in 1919 – the first feature length film made by an African-American – for $15000, less than one-tenth of the budget for The Birth of a Nation. He raised capital by selling shares in his newly formed company to various investors; many of them from the list of book buyers he had cultivated during his door-to-door sales.

As he would throughout his career, Micheaux worked dirt cheap. He would “steal” shots, filming various locations without permits while on tour with one film, that would be banked for undetermined, future films. For the most part, he distributed his movies, cutting out the middle man in the process (or stole from his business partners, in the case of Brecher and Schiffman). He wrote his own films, which cut the cost of a writer (or in the case of Charles W. Chestnutt, not only didn’t pay him for the rights to film The House Behind the Cedars, but later plagiarized the book in his own novel, The Masquerade, 1947). He repurposed sets for various scenarios by rearranging the furniture or removing pictures from the walls, hired theatre actors or amateurs for below scale (or again, just didn’t pay them), juggled payments, did a very limited amount of takes, and most unfortunately, struck a very limited never of prints. All of this allowed him to eek by from film to film as he skirted creditors and poverty, and dodged (and lost) lawsuits. 

But for Oscar Micheaux it was worth it. His mission was to hold the mirror up to American society. To show how unfairly black people were treated, he dealt with segregated housing in The Dungeon (1922) and lynchings and the KKK in the aforementioned films. To give black people hope, and as a stark contrast to Hollywood’s version of the black experience, his characters were entrepreneurs, inventors, land owners, teachers, detectives, authors, judges, and film directors. 

But he also wanted to show black people their faults. In Marcus Garland (1925), he parodied the Back to Africa Movement; in God’s Stepchildren, he dealt with black self-hatred and the idea of “passing,” easily his most consistent obsession (a direct response to his own ill-fated love affair with a white woman that he exorcised on film by making her doppelgangers turn out to be light skinned black women in the final reels); in numerous films he disapproved of gambling, heavy drinking, prostitution, and wasting energy on crime and laziness instead of education; and in Body and Soul, he gave his most scathing indictment of the corruption of faith and the pitfalls of the black church.

Body and Soul – the story of a nefarious man posing as a preacher and the effect he has on a devout mother and her suspicious daughter – has its origins in two plays about black life (both written, incidentally, by white people): Roseanne by Nan Bagby Stephens and The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill; faithfully following the plot of the former and the themes of the latter. Both plays starred Paul Robeson, a lawyer turned actor turned social activist who would become most famous for his definitive performance of Joe in Show Boat and his great baritone voice, recording the show’s iconic, “Ol’ Man River.” Robeson made his screen debut in Body and Soul.

The film’s themes could also have been drawn from Micheaux’s own life. Micheaux’s first father-in-law, the Reverend McCracken, was a preacher who put on airs of sophistication and education, but had neither. He remained willfully ignorant when it came to racial matters, believing that “the Negro had no fault, nor could he do any wrong, or make any mistake.” Everything in life was the white man’s fault. The Reverend believed in segregation because interracial schools would be “managed in a way to keep the colored people down.” Micheaux’s wife, Orlean – his daughter and a school teacher, to boot – sided with her father. Following the death of Micheaux and Orlean’s baby, the Reverend convinced Orlean to move back home and she and Micheaux remained estranged until her death in 1917, which ironically occurred en route to a church function. The Reverend further interfered with his son-in-law’s affairs when he petitioned the censorship board screening The Homesteader because it had an unfavorable view of clergy; namely, of him. Micheaux’s contempt, or at the very least caution, for religious fervor and those who claimed to spout it were on full effect in his 14th feature; the fifth he had made in 1925.

II.

The first title card reads, “The Rt. Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins, alias, ‘Jeremiah, The Deliverer’ – still posing as a man of God.” This introduction was mandatory from the censor board. In order to get approval for release, Jenkins (Robeson) could not be a real preacher, but only someone pretending to be one (further meddling from the Rev. McCracken?). 

Jenkins arrives at the local bar. He and the proprietor (Marshall Rogers) are clearly chummy. He gives the Reverend a full bottle of whiskey, free of charge, as a sign of friendship. The proprietor speaks in a low class vernacular, Micheaux’s commentary on the degrading caste of bootleggers and those who participate in shady dealings; later, we will see this character swindle another criminal out of money. Jenkins then blackmails him into titheing on the spot, promising to preach against liquor in this week’s sermon if he doesn’t. Immediately, Micheaux has established our preacher as a greedy drunk with dubious morals. The next shot is our “hero” staggering home, heavily intoxicated.

Without an introduction of a title card (the first evidence of missing footage), we briefly meet Martha Jane (Mercedes Gilbert) and Isabelle (Julia Theresa Russell); our pious fan of the scamming Reverend and her daughter who knows more than she is letting on, respectively. While Isabelle heads to bed, Martha Jane sits up in her rocking chair, clutching her money and her Bible. 

Meanwhile, Yellow Curly (Micheaux stalwart, Lawrence Chenault) arrives to town on an afternoon train. This lapse in chronology could be a sign of missing footage; however, it could also be a purposeful disorientation of space and time, which given the ending of the film, is plausible. 

Isabelle awakens in the middle of the night. We see that her walls are covered with portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, and Booker T. Washington; Micheaux’s own heroes. She shakes Martha Jane from “a terrible dream,” which she does not explain. Poor writing? Or brilliant structure? We shall see…Martha Jane places her money – where? – in her Bible of course, tucks it into her dresser for safe keeping, and heads to bed. 

In town to find ladies for his “Cotton Blossom’s Shoulder Shakers” (dance hall or whorehouse?), Yellow Curly has found his way to the bar; criminal minds have a way of finding each other. The proprietor tells him he sells liquor and runs a crap game, all with the approval of the Reverend who lives upstairs. He invites Curly to attend church services the next day to meet him. 

Micheaux’s slam on the church intensifies as we see Jenkins awakening with a giant hang over, the deacon asleep at the altar, and the parishioners worked into a frenzy of Pentecostalism. From the front row of the crowd, Jenkins spots Curly. Micheaux employs one of the film’s many flashbacks (a favorite technique of his) to show they have met before: as cellmates in prison. After services, Jenkins continues to gain favor with Martha Jane by showering her and Isabelle with attention and introducing them to his friend, clearly redacting the details of their relationship.  

In Jenkins’ parlor, the old friends reminisce and Curly confesses his attraction to Isabelle. This inspires Jenkins. Flashback to “Tatesville – other fish in the sea,” where he rides in a buggy with another woman. Jenkins begins to formulate a plan he has inevitably enacted on numerous women in numerous towns.

At the same time, Isabelle is trying to convince Martha Jane to let her marry Sylvester, a struggling inventor (incidentally, he is Jenkins’ twin brother, also played by Robeson). 

“What’s that niggah got to marry on?”

“Don’t say niggah, Mother. It’s vulgar.”

Micheaux infuses his politics here, encouraging African-Americans to elevate their standing by treating each other with respect. He also has Martha Jane speak in a heavy dialect to highlight her ignorance, mired in religion; a jab at his father-in-law. 

“An all de money I been savin is tu buy de home which I’se gwine gib you when you becomes de wife ob my pastuh.” 

Martha Jane is set on Isabelle marrying her upstanding Jenkins; Micheaux intercuts this scene with her “pastuh” getting drunk. Isabelle tries to tell her mother that Jenkins is no good, but she is not hearing any of it. She shoves her daughter in the head, knocking her backwards, while she clutches her hair in disbelief and indignation. 

Later, Isabelle and Sylvester go on a romantic picnic while Martha Jane and her church friends entertain Jenkins. She even goes to the extent of kneeling at his feet. The women blur the line of religious devotion and sexual desire for the handsome young preacher. Upon Isabelle’s return, she is clearly uncomfortable with the Reverend’s presence in her home. But why? Jenkins encourages everyone else to leave so he can “save her soul” from the “worldly” education his no good brother has given her. This comment is filled with ironic  foreshadowing as we shall see. 

Immediately, Jenkins’ mood changes and he strong arms her. What are his intentions? And why is she is uncomfortable to be left alone with him? 

Upon Martha Jane’s return, Jenkins confesses that it was a great struggle, but “The Lord’s will be done.” But Isabelle’s demeanor is clearly troubled. Thinking she is just hungry, Martha Jane heads out to the store for food. 

While she is gone, Isabelle packs her bags and writes her mother a letter. Walking out of frame, we presume she is placing the letter inside of her Bible – and stealing the money inside of it. Micheaux builds suspense by leaving this to our own assumption and reasonable doubt. The title card gives the film its name: she is “Crushed – body and soul.” As she runs across the train tracks, Jenkins watches from the distance and laughs. 

Curly catches up to him to relay that his friend, the proprietor, has swindled him out of money in a crap game. He threatens to expose him as a fraud if he doesn’t help him get it back so the two men advance on the barkeep and steal more than they are owed. 

Martha Jane returns home with her groceries to find an absent daughter. Soon after, her church friends arrive. To show off for them, she is eager to count the money she has saved for Isabelle and Jenkins. She cannot wait any longer for Isabelle to return from wherever she has gone to. But upon opening the Bible, the money has been replaced with a letter:

“Dear Mama, I have taken your money and am running away. Don’t attempt to follow for I shall hide. Please try to forget your heartbroken daughter. Isabelle.”

Cut to Atlanta, months later. Isabelle has been living in squalor. Somehow, Martha Jane finds her and learns the harrowing truth in a riveting, 20 minute flashback:

Many months ago, while out on a date with Jenkins (one that Martha Jane presumably arranged), the two are caught in a severe storm and stumble upon a deserted cabin (echoes of Foolish Wives?). With the Abraham Lincoln portrait eskew, the Reverend starts a fire and agrees to go to the next room while she undresses and dries her clothes. However, she is not alone for long. In a von Stroheim style montage, Micheaux shows Jenkins’ shoes entering in shadow; the Reverend’s wicked grin; Isabelle wrapped in a towel, cowering in a corner; and a fade to black. “A half hour later,” we return to Jenkins’ shadowy shoes leaving the room. Jenkins – Martha Jane’s paragon of goodness – raped her daughter; clearly it was Jenkins, not Sylvester who first introduced Isabelle to “worldly” things. 

Fearing pregnancy, Isabelle convinces Sylvester to marry her and raise the baby as his own. Presumably, as Jenkins’ twin brother, the genetics would match enough to obscure suspicion in the days before DNA testing. Micheaux reminds us of Martha Jane’s disapproval by flashing to this scene. 

Isabelle then recounts the fateful day she was left alone again with him. The edited pieces of this scene are now shown: Jenkins manhandles her until she agrees to give him Martha Jane’s money; how he knew about it is somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps Martha Jane told him at some point in a moment of pride. He laughs at the irony of hiding money in the Bible for protection (yet another Micheaux dig at faith). In the most Expressionistic sequence in his surviving oeuvre, Micheaux cross fades the money in Jenkins’ hand to a woman ironing and back, followed by hands picking cotton and a final shot of the money; showing the ways in which Martha Jane (and African-Americans in general) struggled to make this “Blood Money.” 

The Reverend reminds her that she won’t be believed so she may as well write a letter and run away to Atlanta. He gives her $10 (from the money he just stole) for her troubles. Just then Martha Jane reenters and the flashback is complete. Martha Jane has a flashback of her own and remembers the Reverend getting into a car with a wad of money. She finally believes Isabelle. They cry and she puts her to sleep. 

Back at the pulpit, Jenkins is drunk and collecting tithes, whipping his congregation up into a frenzy. Suddenly, Martha Jane bursts in and calls him out as a liar, a fraud, and a murderer. Isabelle has died. The town goes crazy and he sneaks out the back. A man hunt ensues and Jenkins murders a man in a rainstorm (presumably the “Black Carl” detective mentioned in a newspaper clipping at the beginning, yet this is unclear due to missing footage or Micheaux’s intentional dream scape finale).

Martha Jane awakens in her chair to find Jenkins at her door begging forgiveness and shelter from the mob. She agrees to hide him and awakens from yet another dream. This second dream is the unexplained “terrible dream” from the first quarter of the film. Everything that followed – Isabelle’s rape, disappearance, and death; Jenkins’ chicanery and theft – were all but a dream. 

Sylvester and Isabelle enter to announce that his discovery has been accepted by a scientific foundation and is to be paid $3000; money they will use for their wedding and new home. However, shocked by her dream, Martha Jane has a change of heart. She gives them the money she has been saving and they all live happily ever after together in a newer, much fancier residence. The Reverend Jenkins is never mentioned again. Was he ever real? Or just Martha Jane’s projection of fears for the unknown Sylvester? 

This was not the original plot. As previously mentioned, the censors demanded that Jenkins be a con-man outright and not a nefarious man of the cloth. They also insisted further cuts, trimming drinking and gambling scenes (which may attest to why the storyline with Curly is underdeveloped). The downbeat ending also had to go because someone portraying the clergy –  fraudulently or not – could not be insinuated in crimes such as rape. So Micheaux tacked on the dream ending.

Before Body and Soul was even released, Micheaux had to do damage control with the critics. His previous film Birthright was lambasted by the black press for its “negative” (Micheaux would argue realistic) portrayals of African-Americans, his liberal use of “n-gger” in the intertitles, and his unwitting disobedience with the censors when he “accidentally” (purposefully) released the uncensored version. New York critics, most of whom sneered at all Micheaux’s films and race films in general, responded in kind to Body and Soul as “passe.” And with Harlem containing the lion’s share of the race market, the film fell by the wayside with Micheaux’s other box office failures.  

When in truth, Body and Soul is Oscar Micheaux’s masterpiece and most shining achievement, standing shoulder to shoulder with other films of the period; films whose directors had exponentially more funding, more industry support, and the prestige of history on their side. While it is difficult to assess whether Oscar Micheaux’s career should really be compared to Chaplin’s or von Stroheim’s or Dorothy Arzner’s, on its own, Body and Soul is an extraordinary piece of art against all odds that deserves recognition.

Afterword

Unlike other race film producers – or even some white, silent directors – Oscar Micheaux made the transition to sound and then some, producing 16 sound films. The Exile (1931) – the first all-talking film directed by an African-American – was a remake of The Homesteader. Micheaux remade many of his silent films as sound features:

• The Gunsaulus Mystery as Murder in Harlem
• The House Behind the Cedars as Veiled Aristocrats 
• Birthright
• The Spider’s Web (1927) as The Girl from Chicago

It would be naive to say that Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s had evolved in its treatment of African-Americans on screen since the days of Madame Sul-Te-Wan and Noble Johnson; most characters of color were still denegrated to the background in secondary roles and the first African-American to win an Academy Award, Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind, won for playing a slave and had to walk all the way from the back of the theatre where her segregated table was placed. However, black people and black characters were becoming more visible as Hollywood realized there was a market to be tapped with black consumers itching for quality content. But while high profile films with black stars like Hallelujah! (1929), The Emperor Jones(1933), Imitation of Life (1934), The Green Pastures (1936), Pinky (1947), Stormy Weather (1947), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Carmen Jones (1954), the remake of Imitation of Life (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1957) netted black actors juicy roles, big box office returns, and Oscar nominations, most of “The Golden Age of Hollywood” was still populated by the Bill Robinsons, Mantan Morelands, Stepin Fetchits, and Willie Bests forced to shuck and jive for their moment in a white person’s shadow. One of, if not the only, black man working behind the scenes in Hollywood was Spencer Williams and he didn’t get his turn in the directors’ chair until he produced his own films outside of the studio system (The Blood of Jesus, 1941; Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A, 1946; etc.). 

Oscar Micheaux, however, never made it in Hollywood, never shot a film in Los Angeles, and only visited once when he came to convince contract player Clarence Brooks to star in Murder in Harlem; the only one of Micheaux’s 30 some odd films to ever play in the heart of the movie industry. In fact, it would take until 1969 for an African-American to helm a major studio film: the Gordon Parks directed, The Giving Tree. 

Micheaux spent the ‘30s and ‘40s struggling to make ends meet. He and his third wife Alice B. Russell produced six films with Brecher & Schiffman (until their lawsuit ended the partnership); a handful with Sack Amusement Enterprises (more “Jews with Money” who also produced Spencer Williams’ films); tried to team up with the famous black aviator, Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, on a biopic; filed for bankruptcy in 1932, a year he released four films and was embroiled in numerous court cases; returned to writing books; and in 1947, made his swan song, The Betrayal, based on his novel The Wind from Nowhere. This final outing was the one and only time he was ever reviewed in The New York Times, who called it “confusing,” “gauche,” and “consistently amateurish.” He died in 1951 at the age of 67 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Kansas. Devastated by the lack of respect her husband and his work received in life, Russell was committed to no one having the final word in his death. And in one of film history’s most egregious errors, she set fire to his production papers, posters, and film memorabilia, including the remaining prints of his films. 

The legacy of Oscar Micheaux first began in the late 1960s when historians in South Dakota began to write articles about his out of print novels and a print of Body and Soul was discovered at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, 40 years after its premiere. The black activism of the 1970s brought a revived interest in race films and Micheaux’s place in its pantheon; film scholars started interviewing surviving actors and those who knew Micheaux for posterity. In 1979, Within Our Gates was discovered in the Cinetec Nacional in Madrid, Spain; in 1983, Murder in Harlem was found in a warehouse in Texas; and The Symbol of the Unconquered surfaced at the Cinematique Royal in Brussels in the late 90s. Family members raised money to finally get him a headstone and republish his novels.

Hollywood finally came around to posthumously honor Oscar Micheaux. In 1986, the DGA awarded him with a Golden Jubilee Special Lifetime Achievement Award; in 1987, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; and in 1996, the PGA established an Oscar Micheaux Award for filmmakers who complete their films against all odds. Now, there are over a dozen books on Micheaux’s life and the history of race films; The Criterion Collection has released Body and Soul as part of a four-disc package on Paul Robeson’s career; and most importantly, Kino Lorber has packaged and preserved over 20 race films in their extraordinary five-disc release Pioneers of African-American Cinema, including Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, The Symbol of the Unconquered, Body and Soul, The Exile, The Darktown Revue, Ten Minutes to Live, Veiled Aristocrats, Birthright, and God’s Stepchildren. 

“I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life – to view the colored heart from close range…I am too much imbued with the spirit of Booker T. Washington to engraft false virtues upon ourselves that which we are not. Nothing could be a greater blow to our own progress.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Sources include the books Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan; Oscar Micheaux & His Circle edited by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser; and Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams by Donald Bogle.

While Oscar Micheaux’s films are not what I would consider for the most part entertaining, to not know his work or to give him his place in film history would be misguided. In addition to the three silent films that survive in sadly expurgated formats, I would recommend The Exile and God’s Stepchildren. Later in the year, I will be covering Spencer Williams in his own essay. Stay tuned!

What are your favorite race films and why? Let us know in the comments below. And please join my mailing list at www.jonathonsaia.com where you’ll find links to my own films and other essays.