Artifacts of a Lost Culture

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A Texas find quickens interest in black film history

They paused for only a moment, most of them, in those dim, drafty, primitively equipped studios on the far fringes of the motion-picture industry. They did their gigs, these black performers, without hope that they might somehow break through to the great white audience or achieve the dream of immortality. Their pressing concern was whether the producer's minuscule check was going to bounce. They passed into history not as indelible screen images but as fond, fading, sometimes discomfiting memories shared by a minority audience or, in a few cases, as distant rumors of great talent whispered in the ear of the unheeding American majority.

Bessie Smith sang for those cameras, and Josephine Baker danced for them. Dizzy Gillespie bopped there, and the novelist Richard Wright played his own creation, Bigger Thomas, in the film version of Native Son. Taken together, this body of film is a priceless record of the styles and manners, aspirations and attitudes of black America between 1920 and 1950, when these little pictures (they usually cost about $20,000) made their way along the circuit of more than 600 theaters, segregated either formally or de facto, that served the black community.

The world of black cinema is a virtually lost one, ignored by both film historians and black-culture researchers. That is why such intense scholarly and media attention is being paid to a stack of old film cans found in a Tyler, Texas, warehouse and acquired by G. William Jones, director of Southern Methodist University's Southwest Film/Video Archives. Not yet fully examined or catalogued, the collection may not be quite the "treasure trove" that it was originally thought to be, but it contains upwards of 20 "race movies" (as they were once called), including some "lost" films and excellent prints and negatives of other movies that will give scholars and the public a chance to see them fresh, free of the murk of age and bad dupes. In addition, Jones has ambitious hopes for circulating the pictures, perhaps even on television.

Though most of the films were designed as escapist fare, they still carry moral and intellectual values that may trouble blacks today when they are exposed to films made for earlier generations. Like their Hollywood counterparts, these movies often traffic heavily in racial stereotypes--Big Mommas ruling their matriarchies with flying skillets, lazy males shuffling off to drink and gamble away the rent money, tight-skirted temptresses with whiplash hips luring the pious into evil ways.

There are other problems. Black movies tended to imitate the white genres, right down to westerns with such unlikely titles as Bronze Buckaroo. They were almost all without militancy, and at every turn of the plot endorsed the go-along-to-get-ahead values of the black bourgeoisie of that time, including its color caste system. The hero and heroine tend to be lightskinned, the villain and the comic relief darker. Says William Greaves, a film maker who began his career as a stage actor who worked in black films: "The Hollywood films were an environmental factor; they created certain expectations in the audience that black film makers felt they had to fulfill."

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.

Thomas Cripps, one of black cinema's leading historians, notes that anachronism must be avoided in approaching black films. "Miracle in Harlem was about free enterprise, which for economically deprived blacks was an almost revolutionary goal," says Cripps. "Bourgeois values are not necessarily at odds with social progress."

Miracle in Harlem premiered on unsegregated Broadway. At the same time, the first Hollywood movies that gingerly took up racial themes (Pinky, Lost Boundaries--also featuring Greaves--Home of the Brave) began to appear, effectively pre-empting the black cinema on its home turf. By the late '40s, black production had fallen victim to the economic shrinkage imposed on the entire business by television. Still, black pictures should not be forgotten. Especially in the rural South, where they routinely played in schools and church basements, "they showed the kids something in a world where there was nothing," as Cripps puts it. It is a point seconded by Greaves:

"They gave people a chance to laugh and to dream and to take their minds off the social pressures." Above all, he adds, by portraying an all-black society, where no white man intruded from above, they offered "a feeling of dignity that flows out of the sense that it is your world and you can control it." --By Richard Schickel