Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (32 page)

“Beautifully photographed, extraordinarily original,” declared the reviewer for the
New York Amsterdam News,
“one of the most tragic yet sympathetic stories ever filmed.”

“A magnificent combination of Negro brains and art,” proclaimed
The Afro-American
in Baltimore.

“Oh boy!” Maybelle Crew enthused in her show business column in the same newspaper. “If some of the Reverends could see how Micheaux pictures the harm done by that Jack-Leg Preacher, but of course, they wouldn't go near that den of iniquity, a theater.” Micheaux's latest picture demonstrated “great emotional appeal,” Crew continued, adding, “If in the end it had not proved to be a dream I know the audience couldn't have stood it. In fact, some of them were talking out loud to the picture, tearfully and wrathfully.”

An ending that proved “a dream”: Some reviews, puzzling over discrepancies in the storyline, suggest that
Body and Soul
lost many censorship battles outside of New York. Censors in Maryland, Chicago, Kansas, Virginia, and other places hacked pieces out of it. Often the censors took possession of a print and kept the “eliminations”; Micheaux was always complaining about lost or destroyed footage after receiving his returned prints.

The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, has preserved an eight-reel version of the 1925 film, however, even restoring some of the censored material; and contemporary audiences still find it mesmerizing. Today,
Body and Soul
is the Micheaux picture most likely to be revived in festival screenings, and arguably the closest to an intact original among his surviving films. To those audiences and to most Micheaux enthusiasts,
Body and Soul
holds up as “an extraordinary film,” in the words of scholar Charles Musser.

Firstly, it's an anthropological treasure, with Micheaux recreating the public and private spaces of a lost world overlooked by Hollywood. It's a grassroots vision of black America, and the 1920s wardrobe alone would make a fascinating museum exhibit; with one entire wing devoted to hats, and a separate room for the ornate church hats alone.

Cinematically,
Body and Soul
confirms Micheaux's technical mastery. The storm sequence, with the Preacher (Robeson) and Isabelle (Julia Theresa Russell) whipped about by violent winds and drenched by cas
cading rain, is especially thrilling. The daring scene that follows, with the Preacher stealing into a room in which Isabelle, huddled in front of a fire, has been coaxed into removing her wet garments, is achieved with erotic seminudity, slant lighting, and the intercutting of advancing footsteps—a passage worthy of early Hitchcock.

The protracted church sequence in which the evil Preacher interrupts his flamboyant, revivalist sermon (“Dry Bones—in the Valley”) with furtive sips of booze, while the congregation listening to him rocks back and forth, shouting out in mounting ecstasy, is at once dramatically riveting and riotously funny.

Robeson delivers a transcendent performance, his full genius on display. “To my mind, at least,” Musser has written, Robeson's acting for Micheaux is “far more inventive and impressive than his work in the film version of
The Emperor Jones
[his first Hollywood movie, eight years later]. It may well be his best screen performance.”

After finishing his run in
The Emperor Jones
on the London stage, Robeson had gone to France, and that is where he was vacationing when
Body and Soul
was released in the United States. If he ever saw his first film, made under Micheaux's direction, what he himself thought of his motion picture debut—a blip in a long, magnificent career in which screen roles competed with so many other interests—his opinion has not been recorded.

 

Way back in 1913, Chicago pioneer William Foster had described race pictures as “a feeble infant, scarcely able to nurse its bottle.” In 1924 Micheaux would use the same metaphor, calling race pictures a “newborn babe who must be fondled.” In a sense race pictures were always—and destined to remain—a weak child.

The novelty of all-colored films had created a boomlet in the early 1920s, but the “gold rush” years were long past. The insuperable problem was the number of theaters controlled by black capital. Even in Harlem white theater owners predominated; and they preferred the slick, glossy Hollywood assembly-line films featuring black menials, over race pictures of inconsistent, flea-budget quality.

Even the best films of Micheaux—a one-man low-cost corporation, a
lone wolf in an otherwise heavily collaborative industry—inevitably lagged behind the technically polished ones being churned out by his peers in white Hollywood.

Even in Harlem (perhaps
especially
in Harlem) there were prominent members of the black press who found race pictures as “passé” as the phrase “all-colored.” They never cut Micheaux any slack.

In December 1925, on the heels of
Body and Soul,
one of his greatest pictures, Micheaux again found himself under ferocious attack from a journalist of his own race. Romeo L. Dougherty of the
New York Amsterdam News
devoted an entire column to Micheaux's body of work, comparing his movies unfavorably to Hollywood's, while approvingly quoting the white manager of the Lincoln Theatre, who said he refused to book Micheaux productions “because they are so far beneath what he has to offer from studios fully equipped and with high-paid writers furnishing the scenarios.”

There were still a handful of white theater managers in Harlem willing to book Micheaux's pictures, Dougherty continued, but they did so “more from a mistaken idea of a sentiment which they feel they should exhibit in a colored community, than because of the worth of the pictures…it is hard to expect colored people to accept these Mischeaux [sic] pictures here in Greater New York and Northern New Jersey, and they don't.”

Black theater owners valued Micheaux films more, but there were precious few in New York City, and never more than two in Harlem. The biggest theaters—the Lincoln, the Lafayette, the Odeon on 145th Street, and the thousand-seat Roosevelt on Seventh Avenue near 145th—were operated by two white Jewish businessmen, Leo Brecher and Frank Schiffman. Only the nine-hundred-seat Renaissance, on Seventh and 137th, had been built by colored capital, challenging the Brecher-Schiffman monopoly of major theaters north of 125th. As Micheaux actor Lorenzo Tucker later quipped, one or two black theaters in Harlem didn't amount to “a pimple on a bedbug's hindparts.”

Black-owned theaters were scarce all across America, and the tiny number that existed were always changing hands or going “temporarily” out of business. Losing even one major outlet was a blow to Micheaux, and inevitably the replacements were iffy. Longtime gadfly Sylvester Russell, relishing the race-picture producer's misfortunes, noted in his col
umn that Micheaux, who once boasted his films wouldn't be screened below Forty-seventh Street in Chicago, was “now showing the poor pictures at the smaller houses all over the district.”
*

Defections from the East and Midwest couldn't be offset by the South. Southern all-black theaters were smaller and spread out. Big cities in the Southwest lagged even farther behind. “In Houston, [Texas],” reported the
Pittsburgh Courier,
“are two theaters run by white people for colored, and one other colored theater. Also are white theaters which permit colored people to enter by the back and side door.”

Micheaux's runs in less populous areas were for one or two days, booked on percentages and slashed ticket prices. Especially in the South, summer heat waves chronically affected attendance. Air conditioning was spreading through the industry, but slowly and only among the biggest, best white theaters showing Hollywood pictures.

 

Body and Soul
was undeniably a hit, and it brought another momentary infusion of revenue to Micheaux's company. But that wasn't enough for a man averaging two pictures a year, and once again the race-picture pioneer was forced to retrench for some emergency revamping.

In late December 1925, the news swept through Chicago like a chill wind: Swan Micheaux was shutting down the local office to take charge of the “New Oscar Micheaux Film Exchange” in New York City. “Another straw that shows the blowing of the wind,” reported the
Baltimore Afro-American,
“is the removal of the general offices from Roanoke, Va., to New York City” and “a complete reorganization of the sales force.”

The Roanoke experiment was over, and Micheaux needed help in Harlem. Ira McGowan, his chief lieutenant, had sued the boss for back wages and won a judgment against Micheaux in court; now McGowan was moving to the West Coast to join a fledgling race-picture company
spearheaded by white director Harry Gant and a group of Lincoln Motion Picture Company alumni. (Lincoln had been swept under by hard times in 1923.) George P. Johnson had also moved to Hollywood, hoping to revive the Lincoln dream with his brother Noble. But the brothers became estranged, and George lost contact with both Noble and Micheaux.

That rift between brothers would have an eerie echo in Micheaux's own life. The race-picture producer had grown to doubt Swan's honesty as well as his ability, and bringing him to New York was one way to keep an eye on him.

In spite of this crisis and flux—or perhaps because of it, such was his resolute nature—Micheaux continued to sketch his air castles. Through a regular stream of news items, and the titles listed on his ever-evolving letterhead, Micheaux left a record of an ambitious future agenda. It was a time of intellectual and creative ferment in black America, and as race leaders debated their common values and goals, Micheaux planned a series of new films that would explore the full spectrum of that debate.

He laid the groundwork for a project called “Marcus Garland” or “Black Magic,” a story patterned after the life of Marcus Garvey and intended to star one of the best-known black actors of the age: Clarence Muse, a onetime Lafayette Player now spotted frequently in Hollywood movies. Muse eventually dropped out of “Marcus Garland” in favor of higher-paid Hollywood parts, but no matter: Salem Tutt Whitney was penciled in.
*

Another project was filming a play by Mary White Ovington, a prominent white activist and author in New York, who had helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Micheaux also contemplated adapting the W. E. B. DuBois novel
Dark Princess,
whose story elements aligned with his own ideas. The novel concerned a young Negro medical student who suffers racial discrimination, sails for Europe, and in Berlin falls for a beautiful colored woman who is plotting an uprising of American blacks. Returning to the States, the ex-student becomes a leader of a fanatical organization—organizing a strike of Pullman porters, witnessing a lynching, planning a train wreck of Ku Klux Klan members.

Also on Micheaux's expandable list was a screen adaptation of a Zora
Neale Hurston short story called “Vanity,” and another story called “Deadline at Eleven” written by Louis DeBulger, who had played Lem Hawkins in
The Gunsaulus Mystery.
*
He announced these and other titles as he traveled around the country, closing his Southern offices at last and moving all his business to New York. In Harlem his brother would watch over a shrinking staff, and he would watch his brother. More than ever the Micheaux enterprise was a one-man show, with Oscar counting pennies and guarding every transaction.

 

As far as is known, the beautiful Julia Theresa Russell, the amateur thespian who had the privilege of acting opposite Paul Robeson in
Body and Soul,
never again emoted on the stage or screen. But the New Jersey schoolteacher would assume a much greater significance for Micheaux, for it was she who introduced him to her older sister, Alice.

Also a teacher, Alice B. Russell lived with her family in Montclair, New Jersey, a community northwest of Newark. The Russells had come to New Jersey from the dirt-poor backwater of Maxton in Robeson County, North Carolina, after the head of the household, Robert Burton Russell, died abruptly in Maxton around 1900.

Alice's father could have been the exemplar of a Micheaux film. Russell had owned his own home in Maxton by the late 1800s, and served on the town board at a time when few blacks in the South ascended to government office. Before the turn of the century he edited and published one Robeson County newspaper, the
Maxton Blade,
while owning shares in another, the
Scottish Chief.
Though the
Blade
reported mainly on the black community, it aspired to broader coverage as a means of increasing circulation; Russell attended services every Sunday at a local white Presbyterian church, sitting discreetly in the balcony and taking down every word of the long-winded sermon in shorthand, publishing the transcript in the Tuesday edition.

The circumstances of Russell's sudden death are elusive. But the Russells were devastated by the tragedy, and the settlement of the estate—the house and newspapers were sold off to relieve the family's debt—left
them poor. The family headed north to New Jersey, where the Russells turn up in Essex County records first in 1904, living with Mrs. Russell's parents. Eventually the family settled in a large house at 55 Greenwood Avenue in Montclair.

Mrs. Russell was Mary Malloy Russell, part of an old Maxton family. Though uneducated herself, Mrs. Russell raised her five children in the Booker T. Washington tradition; all her sons and daughters graduated from high school and landed decent jobs, adopting their parents' creed of hard work and faith in God. Mrs. Russell supported her family by working, first as a laundress for private households, and later as a public school custodian. She was a self-sacrificing mother.