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And, he observes, at least 50% of the producers were white and the majority of the theaters where the black movies played were owned by whites; both factors deeply influenced content. Phyllis Klotman, director of the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, the only repository devoted exclusively to black film, reports that when she shows some of her collection to young black audiences, they tell her, "It's hard to believe black directors would make movies like that."
Technically, too, the films are limited.
Often working far from the major production centers if money could be found in Chicago or Dallas, producers routinely drew supporting casts from local little-theater groups and hired whatever technicians they could find. Microphones dangle from the top of some frames, cables snake across the bottom. Lean budgets offered scant hope for reshooting a blown line or changing angles within a scene.
But a certain authenticity, even sometimes a sort of raffish charm, arises from these ineptitudes.
Take, for example, Murder in Harlem (1935), written, directed and hustled into existence by the legendary Oscar Micheaux. He was a dreadful director but an inspired promoter ("If he had been white he would have been running a studio," says Greaves), who survived on a shoestring for a quarter of a century. The narration—a black janitor wrongfully accused of murder—is botched but he movie is full of shrewd observations of black life in the Depression. Micheaux has, for example, a black novelist pedling his own books door to door but refusing to put his name on them because "dicty" (middleclass) people are too snobbish to believe a black can write as well as a white.
Or take the work of Spencer Williams, a true "black auteur," as Klotman describes him. He was to gain dubious crossover fame as Andy in the TV version of Amos 'n 'Andy, but before that he created a rich and varied body of work as a screenwriter-director-actor. Dirty Gertie from Harlem, USA (1946), a sassy reworking of Rain, was one of his; so was Juke Joint (1947), an amiable comedy about ambitions thwarted and rewarded on sound moral principles. He also made movies about the black religious experience, segregated Army life and Gillespie's performance film Jivin' in Bebop (1946).
It is a film starring Greaves that offers the clearest rationale for reclaiming the black cinema. As slickly made as any Hollywood movie of its time (1947), Miracle in Harlem is the tale of a well-educated, forward-looking young man trying to turn his aunt's kitchen candy business into a major enterprise while fighting off some murderous competition. Stepin Fetchit (Lincoln Peary) is on hand doing his slo-mo routine, but so are black policemen, a black minister and even the Juanita Hall Choir. They provide a lively community cross section and they make an interesting point: in a cast of attractive, intelligent blacks, Fetchit seems to be more an agreeable eccentric, less an ugly stereotype than he was as the sole black in a Hollywood picture.