An Oscar for Micheaux

I think of Micheaux as the Black Pioneer of American film — not just because he was a black man, or because in his youth he pioneered the American West, or because he was the greatest figure in “race” movies and an unjustly ignored force in early American cinema. Micheaux is America’s Black Pioneer in the way that André Breton was Surrealism’s Black Pope. His movies throw our history and movies into an alien and startling disarray. — J. Hoberman in “Bad Movies,” reprinted in Gilbert Adair’s collection “Movies”

Haskell Wexler is a man of many distinctions. He wrote, directed and photographed the 1969 “Medium Cool,” a ficto-realist movie (made during the Chicago Democratic Convention) that still sears with its craft and anger. His documentaries include “The Bus,” the Fonda-Hayden “Introduction to the Enemy” and “Underground” (the Weathermen). His career as a cinematographer includes crucial collaborations with Norman Jewison (“In the Heat of the Night”), Hal Ashby (“Bound for Glory”), Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven”) and John Sayles (“Limbo”). He has worked with everyone from Mike Nichols (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”) to Michael Moore (“Canadian Bacon”). And if over the past 35 years a director needed someone to shoot concert footage (“Gimme Shelter”) or second-unit stuff on a low-budget lefty feature (Ken Loach’s “Bread and Roses”), this eye artist has been the go-to guy. Wexler is 80 now, still full of vitality and vinegar.

Back in 1938, as a 16-year-old in Chicago, he worked as a camera loader on an Oscar Micheaux movie. There wasn’t that much film to load, since the ever-scrimping director had to work with “short ends” (the unexposed bits of film left over from reels shot by a production company, then collected and sold to cheaper outfits). Wexler — one of the small team of white men acting as technicians for the black director — was there one day when Micheaux shot a scene, then finished it. The next scene was set in a different room. There was no question of erecting a new set or installing other furniture; Micheaux would have to use what he had. “Just put different curtains up,” he declared.

Wexler couldn’t remember the name of the movie, if indeed it had one during production. We do know that Micheaux released four films in 1938-39. Could this one have been “Swing” or “Lying Lips”? But those two seem to be set in Harlem. “Birthright”? Haven’t seen it; can’t say. So there’s just the chance that Wexler was present for Micheaux’s masterpiece, “God’s Step Children.” I confess I get a tingle even typing this. It’s as if I knew someone who had walked into the Sistine Chapel in 1509 and seen a fellow up on the scaffolding, painting God’s hand.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Faithful readers may think I lie, since I did spend my last That Old Feeling column itemizing Micheaux’s failure to master the rudiments of film vocabulary. But his movies exert a strange, not entirely unhealthy fascination on me; why else would I burden you with 6,000 words on their enduring power to astound?

O.M. and D.W.

I’m also impressed by the sheer determination of the man. Compare, for a moment, Micheaux (born in 1884 in Metropolis, Ill., on the Kentucky border) with that of another pioneer, D.W. Griffith (born nine years earlier and 250 miles east in La Grange, Ky.). In his short films, and then in the epochal features “The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance,” Griffith did more than any other individual to define the visual and narrative lexicon of movies; in an alternate universe he would be called the white Micheaux. Yet Griffith’s career spanned only 24 years and 30-some feature films. After “The Struggle,” his last film as director, he was kaput in Hollywood while in his mid-50s. The town considered him a silent-film anachronism — a Victorian relic due for attic consignment in the Depression. To those affronted by the contemptuous portrait of blacks in “Birth of a Nation,” he was an embarrassment to his medium and his race.

Many progressive blacks had a similar opinion of Micheaux. They decried the director’s favoring of light-skinned actors; for most of his “colored” players, the color was off-white. They abominated his stern view of working-class blacks. (What they thought of the dramatic and technical gaffes in his films is not on the record.) The “darkie” stereotype activities of shooting craps and betting on numbers, properly criticized for their use in so many white-made Hollywood films, Micheaux freely used as well. His films also played on the notion of black women who want a whuppin’ from their men. In the 1932 “The Girl from Chicago,” the vixen Liza revs into a purple patch of passion when she tells her beau, “I can only seem to love you, and feel it, when you beat me. Wade, why don’t ya take your fists and smack me in the mouth? Go ahead, Wade! Smack me in the mouth with your fists so I can love ya!” (Just wondering: how do you smack someone with your fists?)

Yet Micheaux was either deaf to criticism or spurred on by it. Of course, he had not Griffith’s great height to fall from; any descent for Micheaux would have been from the curb to the street. He kept working that street, a near-anonymous peddler hawking exotic wares, finally exceeding Griffith in number of feature films (about 40 to about 35) and years as a director (30 to 23).

When they were young, Griffith and Micheaux had both aspired to be novelists. Micheaux did in fact write a half-dozen or so novels while he was a South Dakota homesteader, selling them to his white neighbors. In “Murder in Harlem” (a/k/a “Lem Hawkins’ Confession”), a Micheaux surrogate played by Clarence Brooks does the same to his black neighbors, peddling “a fine new novel by a Negro author… Of course everyone is ordering a copy, and why shouldn’t they? A work like this by one of our group is something to order… Will you take one?” Oh yes, a young woman replies, “If for no other reason than that it’s by a colored author.” Then Brooks, expressing what must have been the dank residue of Micheaux’s disappointment in his own door-to-door days, adds: “We belong to a not very appreciative group [blacks] when it comes to any achievement by each other, especially if they are privileged to meet that person ordinarily.”

Like Griffith, Micheaux was both a 19th century preacher and a 20th century filmmaker; he used modern technology to impart lessons of traditional morality. It happens that Griffith was a brilliant film artist, Micheaux an at-best muddled craftsman. The political postures of the two men were out of fashion even when their stories and films found public favor. Both men ended their careers failures; both won educated devotees after their deaths.

The weird fact is that, today, at least as social artifacts, Micheaux’s films (available from the folks at Facets Multimedia) are the more watchable. That may be due to the slumming, so-bad-it’s-good mentality of contemporary film scholarship and film cultism. It helps explain why, to take two directors from the 50s, the movies of world’s-worst-director Edward D. Wood are rented and written about more than those of the social realist Stanley Kramer, who was among the most honored filmmakers of his time while Wood was reviled by the few who even knew he existed. Critics as well as moviegoers are always in the mood for a good giggle, “Mystery Science Theater”-style, at the detritus of more innocent decades.

HOWL

Micheaux’s films are, on their solemn face, unintentional howlers. They are full of tendentious speeches and would-be-hot repartee (someone, please explain this vamping come-on: “You can park your chewing gum on my instep”). In “The Girl from Chicago,” Liza threatens to snitch on the man she’s two-timing Wade with; he shoots her; she screams, but as if she’d heard the shot, not been hit by one; only then does she grab her chest and fall. Later in the film, actor Carl Mahon announces himself as a Secret Service agent and begins to open his jacket as if ready to flash his badge. But someone must have forgotten the prop, so Micheaux cuts to a shock reaction from another actor, then back to Mahon buttoning his jacket.

Mahon, for one, knew how to ad-lib when working for a director whose first take is also his last. When an important word in actress Star Calloway’s dialogue is drowned out by a car horn in an outdoor scene in “Chicago,” Mahon simply repeats it. But often the actor stares out at the camera, frantic for guidance. One nightclub scene cuts to Mahon and Calloway after a song; he turns to her and freezes up. From off-camera we hear Micheaux’s voice, prompting. “You gotta give it to her.” Mahon then repeats brightly, “Well, you gotta give it to her.” The oddest thing about this moment is that it occurs at the beginning of the scene. Micheaux could have excised his cue, but he left it in. At times, I suppose, those short ends just weren’t short enough.

Why didn’t Micheaux hire more top black actors? Perhaps because they’d seen his work. Good actors may have thought they could not look good in his films. They saw veterans of the Lafayette Players and other stage stalwarts often defeated by Micheaux’s graceless dialogue, his necessarily brief shooting schedules and his sub-par directing of actors. Faced with the dilemma of either playing small, demeaning parts in Hollywood films or collaborating with the only black filmmaker around — if that filmmaker was Oscar Micheaux — they chose Hollywood, the stage or anonymity.

The shooting schedule was typically fast and furtive. Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, authors of a very sympathetic study titled “Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences,” offer this making-of anecdote: “Shingzie Howard recalled that they once went to a white neighborhood early in the morning and, with no one at home, quickly shot her at the door of an elegant house.” How does an actor prepare for this? To appear in a Micheaux movie, then, was to be glimpsed in a documentary of whatever he happened to catch in that moment when the film was properly loaded the camera was running. In the harsh light of Micheaux’s artlessness, the amateurs are exposed and the professionals shine.

Paul Robeson is, naturally, a revelation as the libidinous preacher in “Body and Soul”; how much more startling must it have been to see his film debut back in 1925. Of the actors in Micheaux sound films, I especially like Bee Freeman, who had been discovered by Eubie Blake for the “Shuffle Along” revue that also featured Fredi Washington and Josephine Baker. As a cat-house madam in “Murder in Harlem,” she shames the competition with her lively line deliveries and ease before the camera. She has dimples, big expressive eyes, good humor and a sexual knowingness that would have shame Mae West. She also possessed an insouciance that Micheaux could have used more of in his films. A half-century later, in a tape that can be heard on the invaluable Jazz History website, Freeman recalled: “I always loved black — not as a color to be called, but something to wear.”

AH LUB’S DAT MAN

Some of Micheaux’s talkies are innocuous backstage musicals. “Swing!” has a plot lifted from “42nd St.”: the star of a New York revue is injured and the ingénue, Cora Green, takes her place. (Micheaux liked to inject melodrama into even his breeziest scenarios: when the star breaks her leg falling down some stairs, she screams bloody murder, as if she’d been taken on a ride by the whole Ku Klux Klan.) Sure enough, they hire Green because “She’s got just what this show needs. Swing!” So what does she sing? The Yiddish tune “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” (That’s not as weird as it seems. Sammy Cahn, who helped write the tune’s English lyrics, first heard it sung by a black duo at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.) A white promoter is so smitten by Cora’s talent, he promises to put the show on Broadway. “My only stipulation,” he says, in an unnecessary racial slur that is pure Micheaux, “is that the show be called ‘Ah Lub’s Dat Man.’ ”

If you watch enough of these movies, you may gradually enter the auteur’s world and world-view — a take on black life in the 30s that, if it’s not appealing today, is at least coherent. Micheaux’s mission was to “uplift the race” (his phrase, later borrowed by Spike Lee as the motto for his film “School Daze”). His method was by scolding and cajoling people — white and black. In the sort-of-murder-mystery “Lying Lips,” a black man (Newsome) managing a night club for two white gangsters tells off his employers: “If you had any respect for the unfortunate members of my race, especially the girls who are forced to work here, you wouldn’t try to make them do ugly things. But since you haven’t… I quit. Good day!” Later, the singer he lost his job over (Edna Mae Harris) later sits in her bathtub and fondly soliloquizes: “I’d like to see some other colored man give up his job on account of any girl. Why, he’d throw at anybody that’d show him 50 cents, I’m sorry to say.”

Say this for Micheaux’s transgressive talkies: despite or because of all the loopiness, the over-ardent acting and primitive mise-en-scene, they are never boring.

Here, then, for connoisseurs and scoffers alike, are three unmissable Micheauxes:

TEN MINUTES TO LIVE (1932)
For enthralling incomprehensibility, the prize among extant Micheaux films must go to this early talkie. From the start, it’s a mystery movie. The first title card announces that the film is based on “three short stories.” A few moments later a “Producers Note” (Producer’s Note; or maybe Micheaux and his partners were proud sirs) amends that to say it’s based on two stories: “The Faker” and “The Killer.”

“Ten Minutes” would be a fine introduction to the Micheaux milieu; novices could play Spot the Goofs — or, as the scholars would put it, narrative dislocations. Here’s one, from “Writing Himself into History”: “There is a sequence of a woman getting into a taxi cab at Pennsylvania Station in New York City … but the shots of her traveling through the city show her in an open touring car.”

Like so many other race talkies, “Ten Minutes” expends much of its running time on night-club and vaudeville acts, which it photographs, uncut and with an unmoving camera. First, eight chorines tap on a stage the size of Micheaux’s directorial talent. Then Galle de Gaston and George Williams, a comedy duo in blackface (white lips, the whole deal), get off some political zingers they may have found in a Karl Marx joke book: “Gimme less liberty and more food than a whole lotta freedom and starvin’ to death!” There are numbers by a strong-voiced chanteuse (I’m guessing it’s Tressie Mitchell) and a startlingly cute singer-dancer (Mabel Garrett). Garrett has an inchoate charisma that could have made her a black Britney, if any mogul of the 30s had looked even half as hard for Afro-American stars as they did for Caucasians.

In between these acts, a couple is shown chatting, ostensibly at a table in the night club but having no spatial relation to the stage. Tressie and Mabel come over to chat with another patron. All this irrelevant bustle leaves about five minutes of the first 30 for the actual plot of “The Faker.” It goes like this: a man and a woman argue; she pulls a gun, and when he says “What’re you gonna do with that thing?” she replies, evenly, “I’m going to kill — a rat”; the struggle, a few shots are fired and he survives; another woman finds him in the night club and shoots him dead.

So far, so Micheaux: a primitive talking picture with fervid melodrama, extravagant acting and lots of musical filler. But in its second half, “The Killer,” the picture goes nuts enough to place it in a class with those Surrealist masterpieces “Blood of the Poet (by Jean Cocteau) and “Un Chien andalou” (Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel).

The film now has virtually no dialogue, except when Mahon speaks with his native West Indian accent (in other scenes, Micheaux replaced Mahon’s voice with his own). Most plot information is conveyed through telegrams, letters and news clippings. The action is scored to program music chosen seemingly at random: Latin music, hot jazz, the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth and, to accompany the chorus girls going native in “jungle” costumes, a hopped-up klezmer song. (Micheaux must have loved that Yiddish music.)

The “Killer” story, such as it is, involves a note that a mysterious man instructs a waiter to deliver to a woman sitting with Mahon at the night club; it tells her she has “ten minutes to live,” and that when the next note arrives, she will be killed. This sequence, in ten shots, runs about a minute and a half. And then… the whole sequence is repeated! Now, this could be the error or caprice of a projectionist in one of the theaters where the movie was exhibited. The 59-min. copy of the film I saw, distributed by Something Weird Video, has been plenty battered in 70 years. But it jibes with Micheaux’s policy of trying anything, especially if it doesn’t work.

A flashback leads us to a train, where the threatened woman is being watched by her menacer, and to the bedroom of another woman (the menacer’s accomplice) who slips in and out of her slip for no discernible reason other than to keep the customers awake. The scene shifts jarringly to the night club for a few seconds, then back to the woman’s bedroom, where a telegram warns the bad guy that the “house is surrounded.” He looks out the window to see one man standing watch; he immediately looks down the street in another direction and sees the same man in a different place. The baddie then strangles the woman, forcing her down to the floor. The camera pans to catch the action, but its view is partially blocked by a box that someone forgot to move out of the way.

At some point, a director’s mix of ambition and incompetence can spin so wildly that it soars into cinematic delirium. For Micheaux, the second half of “Ten Minutes to Live” is that point. Call it surrealism or dementia, but it’s a Guilty Pleasure worth treasuring.

THE VEILED ARISTOCRATS (1932)

At a elegant soiree for 12, with all the spiffily-dressed attendees facing the camera as if for a group portrait, one woman tells an anecdote. The others pay solemn attention. She arrives at the punch line and we hear a chorus of genial laughter, but her listeners’ faces remain frozen for two seconds before the actors throw their heads back in mirth, their mouths out of synch with the sound track’s laughter.

Did black audiences of the 30s laugh along with these risible scenes, or laugh at them? Or did they silently indulge them — sit them out? Perhaps they ignored a mistake like this one in “Aristocrats”: The phone rings in the home of our heroine, Rena (Lucille Lewis). Cut to out hero Frank (Mahon), hanging up the receiver as if he just finished a call. Cut back to Rena, who has her conversation with him! Cut back to the same shot of Frank hanging up the receiver! Did viewers not notice that, in the final scene, Mahon has a significant slice of his hair missing, as if he’d recently had cranial surgery? And weren’t they a tad miffed when Lawrence Chenault, the star billboarded on the opening credits, did not appear in the movie?

I refer to the extant 44-min. version of “Aristocrats.” As with “Ten Minutes to Live,” it may have been whittled to bits by censors, exhibitors, projectionists, angry patrons. (The longest Micheaux talkie I’ve seen is “Murder in Harlem,” at 1hr.38.) But what’s left of “Aristocrats” is choice: off-putting, unsettling, staggering toward emotional profundity.

It’s about a brother John (played by Lorenzo Tucker, “the black Valentino”) who returns home from school — after 20 years! — to be introduced to his sister Rena (Lucille Lewis). “Meet your brother,” their mother says to Rena. “He’s a great man. And pretty.” What light-skinned John learned at Rip Van Winkle U. was that he could pass for white. Now he is determined to marry his sister to a white socialite who doesn’t know John’s or Rena’s true color. As a title card notes: “It was silently understood that she, as had he, was to forget that she had a mother — or had ever belonged to the Negro race.”

He moves to a nicer part of town and hires three dark-skinned black servants (including the beguiling Mabel Garrett from “Ten Minutes to Live”). Their interest in the lord and lady of the manor constantly concerns John; “Oh Rena Rena, please hush,” he apostrophizes, “the servants might hear.” They do more than snoop: they take over the movie. At what should be the film’s climax, they decide to have a party. They call to a piano tuner who happens to be just off-camera. Then they perform “River, Stay Away from My Door” and a few other songs and dances. Seven of the film’s last 10 mins. (in its extant form) are devoted to specialty numbers.

John’s plans for gentrifying the family go awry when Rena hooks up with the dark-skinned Frank (Mahon). It’s none too persuasive, as Mahon looks distracted and the pretty Lewis turns in a heartbreakingly inept performance. It’s hard to tell whether Micheaux’s actors were victims or co-conspirators in their director’s cinematic self-sabotage. Yet one wonders if Katharine Hepburn in her vibrant young maturity could have given any persuasive spin to convoluted verbiage like this plaint: “Rest assured, that however and between whom I’m compelled to choose, they can never stop me from loving you.”

Acting skills Lewis may lack. But there’s truth, power and hurt — a hint of Emily Dickinson with a case of the emotional vapors — in Rena’s big speech about passing for white while with her fiancé and his friends: “I am constantly thinking of who I am, and who they are, and how they would hate and despise me if they knew the truth; how they would scorn and look at me, and point their fingers at me, and call me that unspeakable name.” When John says, “Sister sister, where on earth are you drifting to?”, Rena starkly replies: “God knows where, John. I only know that I am not a white girl, but a negress. And happy and sorry as only I know they can be. I know I could go on sharing their joys, their sorrows, their poverty, their — their everything.”

GOD’S STEP CHILDREN (1938)
Here it is, folks: synoptic Micheaux — everything to condemn and cherish in one 69-min. package. The film’s preview trailer offers refreshing truth in advertising, letting prospective viewers know which famous Hollywood films have been plagiarized: “A combination of events that shocked, but gripped and held you, in ‘Imitation of Life’ and ‘These Three.'”

In short, this decades-spanning story of pretty, rotten Naomi has taken the plot of a child’s slandering her teacher from Lillian Hellman’s “These Three” and the race-betrayal of passing for white from Fannie Hurst’s “Imitation of Life.” It tosses in a triangle love story, with the adult Naomi, whom her mother had left to be raised by a kindly neighbor, falling in love with the neighbor’s son Jimmie — the boy she had been raised to think of as her brother, and who is really in love with the teacher’s daughter. Slander! Passing! Semi-incest! Utter confusion by the reader trying to ingest all this plot in one paragraph!

Only Micheaux could decide that, in the same movie, two actresses would play one character (Naomi as a child, then an adult), while one actress would play two characters (Naomi’s teacher and, later, the teacher’s grown daughter Eva). Only Micheaux would figure that these two purloined plots were not enough for one short film. So besides the Naomi-Jimmie-Eva triangle, he adds a sub-subplot of her beau’s being asked to join a numbers racket. All this so Micheaux can inveigh, yet again, on the weakness of the lower-class (dark-skinned) black male.

“Why is it so,” Eva asks, “that many, most of our men, when they go into business, it’s got to be a crap game or a numbers bank or a policy shop. Why can’t they go into some kind of legitimate business like white people?” Jimmie responds that black men “seek the line of least resistance. The Negro hates to think. He’s a stranger to planning.” He then tells a friend who wants to bring him into a numbers bank, “I hate all these cheap rackets that have submerged the Negro into the helpless creatures they are. And so far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t be a party to it if it was possible to make a million dollars, all clear.”

The first half of the film is full of the child Naomi’s recriminations. She sneaks into a white school, is dragged back to the black one, trips a classmate and, when chastised by her teacher, spits at the woman. Many regretful spankings ensue, and Naomi is packed off to a convent school. She returns (for the film’s second half) a seemingly cleansed woman. But she now loves her brother and is crushed when he wants to marry her off to a sweet-natured but rude black farmer.

The plot mechanism from “The Veiled Aristocrats” is replayed here, but this time we are to sympathize with the matchmaking brother, because he wants her to stick with her kind. Micheaux is canny enough to see the pathos in Naomi’s plight; the film sympathizes a little with her passion, and the excellent performance by Gloria Press tilts the modern viewer’s feelings toward a troubled soul exiled from two worlds. In one sense, she is the noble sufferer so often played by Greta Garbo: the tortured woman who renounces happiness in obeisance to the social norm. Garbo was a goddess deigning to play by mortals’ rules; Press is a woman ostracized from two worlds — one that she doesn’t feel she belongs to, the other that won’t want her if they discover who, what, she is.

Naomi has two climactic speeches. One (punctuated by the intrusive dog?s barking; as usual, no time for Take Two) is to Jim, her almost-brother, would-be-lover. She speaks of following his advice and marrying Clyde the farmer as “this sublime sacrifice — for to marry a man I do not love is, to me, like committing suicide,” and begs him to declare his love for her. He doesn’t, she marries Clyde and a year later, makes her final, fatal decision. “I left him,” she tells the woman who raised her, “and I’m leaving the Negro race… I’m going away from all I ever knew, to the other side… If you see me, you don?t know me. Even if you pass me on the street, I am a stranger. You are a stranger…. Oh, I know it’s hard, but for me it’s the only way. One other is suicide. And I want to live, Mother, I want to live!”

Micheaux learned more from Victorian novels — from their teeming plots, principled masochism, highfalutin speechifyin’ — than he ever did from movies. (Well, he learned a bit from “Imitation of Life”: he lifted Naomi’s speech to her mother almost verbatim from Fredi Washington’s to Claudette Colbert, which doesn’t make the “God’s Step Children” scene any less poignant.) He ends the film with a sad echo of the beginning. Naomi stands outside the home to which her birth-mother had brought her, then looks inside. Jim and Eva now have five children, one of them the son Naomi left behind. All seem happy. Naomi is not; apparently her attempt to pass in the white world has failed. She walks away, to a nearby bridge, and drowns herself. The waters serve as her baptism and her last, absolving lover.

As Micheaux’s naked film style made good actors stand out in greater relief, so the twisted melodrama of his plots reveals the social anguish of his characters. In “The Veiled Aristocrats” and “God’s Step Children” these morose mulattos and would-be whites cry out across the decades. They make themselves heard, poignantly, above the distractions of “bad” film technique and naive acting styles. They reach out to those outsiders (outside in race and time) who may approach Micheaux films as unintended laff riots. We come to sneer, and there is much to sneer at; but if we have any capacity to be touched by a naked cry of pain from 70 years past, we leave in awe.

Coming this month in That Old Feeling:
Queen and Boy George on the London stage
Martin Scorsese’s “My Voyage to Italy”
100 Years of Richard Rodgers
Fred Astaire: That’s Dancing