Body & Soul

"Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America's First Great Black Filmmaker" (HarperCollins, 416 pages, $29.95) is a culminating work, the result of more than 35 years of scholarship intent on returning its subject to his rightful place in the history of American cinema. Micheaux (1884–1951) "deserves to be considered in the same breath as the sainted D. W. Griffith," argues Patrick McGilligan, who pays handsome tributes to the biographers and critics who have made his comprehensive biography possible.

But what made Micheaux great? Like Griffith, Micheaux's best work was state of the art, employ ing deft use of close-ups and mon tage, for example, but also taking on epic and controversial subjects Indeed, Griffith's heroic depiction of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and disparaging portrayal of blacks in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) so enraged Micheaux that he decided to present a counter argument in films that would match his rival's high aesthetic standards.

To call Griffith a rival, however, is misleading. Although Micheaux wanted to compete, his films never reached more than 300 theaters whereas between 1919 and 1951 (during which Micheaux made something like 45 films), Griffith and other Hollywood filmmakers had access to between 16,000 and 20,000 movie screens. As an independent filmmaker Micheaux never had access to the kind of production funding that even low-budget Hollywood films could count on. Hollywood was almost exclusively white, employing black actors, to be sure, but usually in minor, demeaning roles.

Micheaux persevered, seeking the backing not only of black entrepreneurs but also of a few Jewish theater owners, who ran his "race pictures" in venues ranging from Harlem to the Southwest. That Micheaux had only one subject, really — the ramifications of being "colored" — also limited his audience, not only among whites but even among blacks who felt his focus on the color line impeded the progress of the race or was simply passé.

The director constantly fell afoul of censors, who mutilated his films, forcing him to delete, for example, references to miscegenation and scenes that castigated religion. Although Micheaux had a popular following, he was criticized in the black press for not providing his audience with positive role models. He fought back, sometimes showing his films in uncensored form, or even attaching censors' seals of approval from earlier films to his new releases.

Micheaux was his own man. He began his career as a homesteader in South Dakota, writing about his experience in self-published novels and in the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, touting his success but also chastising blacks for not striking out on their own. As the only black homesteader in his part of South Dakota, Micheaux was at first a novelty tolerated by his white neighbors, and then a highly respected authority the whites came to for advice. He fell in love with a Swedish woman, sharing both an emotional and intellectual bond with her that he broke at painful cost to himself.

Deciding he must marry a black woman, he chose one in thrall to a pompous father, a corrupt preacher who eventually got hold of some of Micheaux's land, selling it for a pittance. Micheaux's disgust with his father-in-law fueled a distrust of established religion and black leadership that would make Micheaux a controversial figure in the black community and would lead to the production of one of his masterpieces, "Body and Soul," starring Paul Robeson.

The essential theme of Micheaux's fiction and films was how the black man could remain true to himself and his race while developing his full human potential. James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (1912) had a profound impact on Micheaux, who used the phenomenon of lightskinned blacks passing as white in many of his films. Micheaux sympathetically portrayed the temptations of passing as a way to assimilate into the majority culture, but ultimately his films show that blacks cannot deny their roots.

Micheaux did not politicize the issue of passing so much as present it as a psychological and ethical issue. He thought his race could rise only through individuals taking responsibility for their own fates. He distrusted movements and organizations, especially the Communist Party, which exploited black disenchantment and provided no encouragement for individual endeavor.

Micheaux's films do not discount the injustices blacks have suffered, but as Mr. McGilligan demonstrates, what makes Micheaux "the great and only" is his unswerving devotion to an art that explores his own characters' failings as well as their triumphs. This pioneering filmmaker, unbowed by criticism, censorship, and controversy, has finally been honored by a biography that does justice to his provocative and indispensable work.

Micheaux & Robeson

Although Patrick Gilligan estimates that Oscar Micheaux made something like 45 films, only 15 survive, and most of those are in terrible condition. Unlike Hollywood filmmakers, who would have 30 or more prints of a film available for distribution, Micheaux could afford only four, and those copies were lost in the distribution cycle. Censors chopped up his work, and he did not have the resources to restore it. His second wife made no effort to preserve his films and even destroyed many of his papers.

Of the 15 extant films only a few are available on DVD, such as "Lying Lips" (1941), a murder mystery set in Harlem. It is an awkward potboiler. The acting is atrocious. Clearly Micheaux thought he could make a quick buck by inserting nonsensical but crowd pleasing musical numbers that have only a tangential relation to the plot. The DVD is of poor quality: Images are blurry and lines of dialogue are lost in this scratched and patched print.

"Body and Soul" (1925), on the other hand, is available in a stunning restoration from the George Eastman House. Paul Robeson is mesmerizing in his screen debut. He plays an ex-convict who has recast himself as the Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins. Women adore him — especially Martha Jane, who is obsessed with the idea that her daughter Isabelle should marry Jenkins. Martha Jane tells her lady friends she is going to give all her savings to Jenkins when he marries Isabelle.

Robeson's portrayal of Jenkins's self-satisfied villainy is a tribute not only to his acting (without the aid of his superb voice), but also to Micheaux's script and direction. Jenkins is not sentimentalized as a lovable rascal or as a tormented sinner; he is an evil man who relishes his ruses. Micheaux's unforgiving and riveting portrait is intensified by Robeson's second role as Jenkins's twin, the meek Sylvester, who seeks to wrest Isabelle away from his nefarious brother.

But what truly elevates the film is Micheaux's portrayal of the mother, who is so besotted with Jenkins that she cannot bear to hear Isabelle's story. In a brilliantly conceived scene Jenkins rapes her, although only his huge shoes are shown as he advances toward his victim. Micheaux scholar Pearl Bowser, who supplies a commentary for the restoration of "Body and Soul," suggests that Martha Jane has sublimated her own sexual desire in offering Isabelle to Jenkins. Perhaps. Although Micheaux's point, it seems to me, is much larger: the blindness of the black community in failing to detect the hypocrisy and criminality of leaders who cloak themselves in the sanctity of the church.

crollyson@nysun.com