Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (27 page)

Photographs of Alice B. Russell are exceptionally rare; there is no known photo of her with Micheaux. Here she is, ten years after their wedding, in her greatest role in one of her husband's films: the self-sacrificing seamstress of
God's Stepchildren.

Micheaux heroes had to be tall, handsome, with strong jaws and virtuous qualities. One of his longest-lasting leading men—perhaps Micheaux's favorite—was Lorenzo Tucker (seen here in a stage photograph in 1932), who was initially billed as “The Black Valentino.”

Micheaux's films drew from his own life experiences, and none was more audacious than 1929's
The Wages of Sin
, which dramatized the sins of his brother and the siblings' bitter breakup as partners. The dapper Lorenzo Tucker played the Micheaux figure, while the more sinister-looking William A. Clayton Jr., seen here seducing Katherine Noisette, played the Swan character.

Critics pilloried 1931's
A Daughter of the Congo
as shoddily made and cartoonish. This lobby card shows a scene with Salem Tutt Whitney (seated) and Lorenzo Tucker.

The quality of publicity materials improved with infusion of Schiffman-Brecher money. This was one poster for Micheaux's first “talkie”—and the first full-length sound “race picture”—
The Exile
.

Micheaux (at right) plays one of the detectives who, early in the story, arrests the wrong man for the murder at the heart of
Lem Hawkins' Confession
.

A scene that closely followed testimony in the actual Leo Frank case, with lowly worker Alex Lovejoy (left) forced to write confession notes for factory-owner Andrew Bishop.

Micheaux films sometimes acquired different titles for non-Harlem audiences, and
Lem Hawkins' Confession
was known as
Murder in Harlem
south of the Mason-Dixon Line. This poster features (left to right) the well-known Clarence Brooks, the former Lafayette Player Laura Bowman (the mother who implicates her son as the true villain), and Micheaux's newest leading lady, the sweetly earnest Dorothy Van Engle. Lem Hawkins himself (billed here as “Alec Lovejoy”) is not pictured.

In this lobby card from
Temptation,
Ethel Moses, playing a nude artist's model, shows the vavoom that brought police out to quell excited moviegoers when she made personal appearances on behalf of the Micheaux film. Risqué nudity spiced up many of his pictures, though he wasn't always able to sneak these scenes past the censors.

Lorenzo Tucker (seated) appraising artist's model Ethel Moses in a scene from
Temptation, one of the many Micheaux films “lost” today.

A poster for
Swing
, a musical piffle centered, like many Micheaux films of the mid-1930s, on a show full of beautiful chorus girls and revue acts.