With a Crooked Stick—The Films of Oscar Micheaux , livre ebook

With a Crooked Stick—The Films of Oscar Micheaux
J. RONALD GREEN
With a Crooked Stick—The Films of Oscar Micheaux
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, J. Ronald, date With a crooked stick—the films of Oscar Micheaux / J. Ronald Green p. cm.
Filmography: p. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Biographical backstory — 2. Within our gates (1920; second film) — 3. Symbol of the unconquered (1920; fourth film) — 4. Body and soul (1925; fourteenth film) — 5. The sound era: signifying with music — 6. The exile (1931; twenty-fourth film) — 7. The darktown revue (1931; twenty-fifth film) — 8. Veiled aristocrats (1932; twenty-sixth film) — 9. Ten minutes to live (1932; twenty-seventh film) — 10. The girl from Chicago (1932; twenty-eighth film) — 11. Murder in Harlem (1935; thirty-first film) — 12. Underworld (1937; thirty-third film) — 13. God’s step children (1938; thirty-fourth film) — 14. Birthright (1938–1939; thirty-fifth film)— 15. Swing! (1938; thirty-sixth film) — 16. Lying lips (1939; thirty-seventh film) — 17. The notorious Elinor Lee (1940; thirty-eighth film).
ISBN 0-253-34382-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21715-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Micheaux, Oscar, 1884–1951—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.M494G76 2004 791.43′02′33092—dc22 2003015584
1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04
To Gerald O’Grady with gratitude
While the “liberalism” of the trust bourgeoisie is directed invariably downward against the political and social demands of the laboring classes, the capitalistic middle class liberalism assumes at times the form of a gentle opposition directed upward against monopoly capital.
—Alfred Meusel, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1933)
 
“Oscar didn’t like controversy—he loved it,” [Marty] Keenan says. “He addressed corrupt preachers in the black community, interracial romance, crimes against blacks. He delighted in raising controversial issues ...”
 
“Micheaux is an inspiration to anyone—black or white—who has the courage to make their crazy dreams come true,” says Keenan. “The pioneer, writer, filmmaker and salesman was an American original.”
—Marti Attoun, “Oscar Micheaux: King of the Independent Filmmakers,” Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac: For the Use of Farmers, Planters, Mechanics, and All Families for the year of our Lord 2002 being the second after the bissextile, or leap year, and until the Fourth of July, the 226th year of American Independence (2002)
 
Some folks kin hit uh straight lick wid uh crooked stick.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
 
  1. Biographical Backstory
  2. Within Our Gates (1920; second film)
  3. Symbol of the Unconquered (1920; fourth film)
  4. Body and Soul (1925; fourteenth film)
  5. The Sound Era: Signifying with Music
  6. The Exile (1931; twenty-fourth film)
  7. The Darktown Revue (1931; twenty-fifth film)
  8. Veiled Aristocrats (1932; twenty-sixth film)
  9. Ten Minutes to Live (1932; twenty-seventh film)
10. The Girl from Chicago (1932; twenty-eighth film)
11. Murder in Harlem (1935; thirty-first film)
12. Underworld (1937; thirty-third film)
13. God’s Step Children (1938; thirty-fourth film)
14. Birthright (1938–1939; thirty-fifth film)
15. Swing! (1938; thirty-sixth film)
16. Lying Lips (1939; thirty-seventh film)
17. The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940; thirty-eighth film)
18. Conclusion
 
Appendix 1. A Short Filmography
Appendix 2. Jubilee: African-American Spirituals
Appendix 3. Sources for Obtaining Micheaux’s Films
Appendix 4. Comment on Selected Web Sites
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
My wife, Louisa Bertch Green, a scholar, writer, editor, and policy analyst, has been the most important supporter of this project.
Corey Creekmur at the University of Iowa gave the penultimate draft of this book an unusually close and helpful reading, providing pages of detailed suggestions that have improved the final version. He is credited often in the text, but not as often as he could have been.
Jane Gaines at Duke University continues to aid and abet, as she always does for so many efforts in film studies. I want to acknowledge the continuing encouragement of Charles Musser at Yale University; Marty Keenan in Great Bend, Kansas; and Richard Papousek and Alis Veren in Gregory, South Dakota. The mutual goodwill within the community of Micheaux scholars, which now includes many more than I have named, has been a continuing reward in its own right.
I have had significant institutional and financial support from the College of the Arts, the Department of History of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at the Ohio State University; the Ohio Arts Council; the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center; the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain; the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy; the Oscar Micheaux Film Festival in Gregory, South Dakota, supported by the South Dakota humanities and arts councils; and the Micheaux celebrations in Great Bend, Kansas, supported by the Kansas humanities and arts councils.
I would also like to honor the memory of two wonderful men whose paths I crossed because Micheaux crossed theirs: Oliver Hill, who was a child actor in an early Micheaux film and later a pioneering civil rights attorney who served on Thurgood Marshall’s team for Brown v. Board of Education; and Harley Robinson, a cousin of Micheaux’s who provided moral support and information to many Micheaux scholars and preservationists.
With a Crooked Stick—The Films of Oscar Micheaux
Introduction
My first book on Oscar Micheaux, Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux, made a case for the importance of Micheaux’s cinematic art, including his style and representational politics, both of which were characterized by wit, originality, resourcefulness, drive, self-analysis, intertextual “signifying,” inexpensive production values, oppositional attitude, critique of racial stereotyping, and progressive goals for African Americans. Micheaux’s forty-some black-produced, black-directed, black-cast, black-audience films were all devoted to class advancement for African Americans in a racist society. In pursuing uplift, Micheaux also established one of the significant beachheads of middle-class cinema, a rare and undervalued accomplishment in the history of film.
With a Crooked Stick is designed to complement Straight Lick but also to stand on its own; in spite of its self-sufficiency as a guide to Micheaux’s films, there is very little repetition of material from the first book. This second book fills in the outlines of the argument of the previous book by concentrating on textual and contextual analysis of all of Micheaux’s existing films.
With a Crooked Stick is also intended as a useful and suggestive resource for teaching and studying Micheaux’s individual films. All of Micheaux’s existing films are discussed, each film treated in chronological order in terms suggested by its own concerns and traits, but always with one eye on its relationship to Micheaux’s overriding goal of class advancement and on his concomitant formation of a coherent, successful middle-class film style to accomplish his goal. 1
Sorting Out Race and Class
The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.
—C. L. R. James, quoted in Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Both “race” and “class” are vexed terms. The slippery nature of the idea of class is discussed in several sections of Straight Lick, including Appendix 1, “On Class and the Classical.” Later in this introduction, Micheaux’s particular idea of class is provided with an articulated list of specific, though hardly definitive, characteristics drawn from Micheaux’s films.
The idea of race is assume