Written and Directed by Oscar Micheaux, based on his story
Starring Lawrence Chenault, A.B. DeComathiere, Laura Bowman, Willow Lee Guilford, Tressie Mitchell and Charlotte Evans
USA, 1932
Here’s another talkie from Oscar Micheaux, a couple of cobbled together short stories of crime centered around a night club. The night club setting is convenient because it gives Micheaux a lot of chances to cut away from the action to linger on singing, dancing and comedy acts. These acts are a little more lively and entertaining than the ones in THE GIRL FROM CHICAGO, so if I had to choose a favorite between the two, I’d choose this one.
Like THE GIRL FROM CHICAGO, the night club acts that are superfluous to the plot(s) of this film are historically significant in their own right as, without this film, there would likely be no record of these acts at all. So, for all its faults, this movie represents a fleeting glimpse into an important part of culture that would otherwise be lost – for better or worse (the acts include a black face routine, unfortunately).
So, the stories here are sort of beside the point, but one of them involves a movie producer who wants to take advantage of a showgirl by telling her he’ll make her a star, and the other involves a woman who is mistakenly marked for death by a deaf escaped convict who is hunting her down.
Although I called this movie a talkie at the outset, there are long passages that were clearly filmed without sound and had sound added after the fact. Sort of like how all those 2D movies got transformed into 3D movies in post-production in the early 2000s, Micheaux must have done something similar here, starting out this project as a silent film and ending up with a sound one. Either that or it was just cheaper to shoot it silent and dub it later, though if that’s the case, it’d odd only certain sections of the movie are shot this way and not the whole thing.
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