Film’s black visionary pioneer

“BLACK show business was the most delicious layer cake white America never tasted,” film biographer Patrick McGilligan remarks in “Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only.” As this detailed work makes clear, Micheaux is one of the tartest layers. Only 15 of more than 40 feature films he made survive. Considering that 90% of silent cinema is lost, along with many pre-1950 talkies, it’s a miracle that anything remains of this work from the ragged margins of early small-time independent film production. But films as ambitious as “Within Our Gates” (1920) and as bizarre as “Ten Minutes to Live” (1932) have fascinated film scholars and black historians over the last three decades of rediscovery, and Micheaux, who died in 1951, has reemerged as a touchstone of African American culture.

“Reemerged,” is the operative term: Micheaux was famous long before he entered the picture business. Born in 1884 in southern Illinois, he worked in an automobile plant, bailed water in a coal mine, served as a Pullman porter and farmed before becoming a novelist and finally, in 1919, a filmmaker. In short, he’s a representative figure of black America in the 20th century.

As McGilligan observes, “the precise place where Micheaux was born remains elusive. Nor does anyone know the exact circumstances of his death.” His marriages and the children he may have fathered are also subject to dispute. The only aspects on which all agree are his imposing height and ingratiating verbal skills. “A big man who loomed over people, he had a salesman’s ebullience that won people over,” McGilligan notes. “He was surely not ebony-complected, yet he was dark enough that he could never have ‘passed’ for white.”

Passing for white and the class conflicts between dark- and light-skinned African Americans are themes that run throughout Micheaux’s work. His first film, his adaptation of his novel “The Homesteader” (1919), featured an unconsummated interracial romance, probably based on an incident in the filmmaker’s life. But as McGilligan shows, what was most important to Micheaux was African American self-sufficiency, in which farming played a key role. On March 19, 1910, the Chicago Defender, the country’s leading African American newspaper, published on its front page “Where the Negro Fails,” an editorial in which Micheaux promotes farming in the West as a way out of the murderously racist South and the segregated North -- a call to arms like those later made by such leaders as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King and Malcom X.

Where his unstoppable drive came from is hard to say, for Micheaux, like all blacks in the Illinois of his time, received a sub-standard, segregated education. Chicago’s teeming black district, known as “The Stroll,” clearly figured in his decision to make films for what he saw as an increasingly sophisticated black public, who were not only barred from most entertainments but also had never seen their own lives portrayed realistically on film.

He was savvy enough to arrange “The Homesteader’s” premiere as a “roadshow”-style attraction -- 2 1/2 hours long with full orchestral accompaniment, like the D.W. Griffith films it was designed to counter in presenting black life through black eyes.

Still, there would be protests from his community -- particularly the church, since, as McGilligan notes, his films “routinely mocked organized religion and hypocritical preachers.” “God’s Stepchildren” (1938) raised the hackles of Harlem Communists: “His characters were comfortable in gin joints and flophouses. They gambled and drank to excess and smoked reefer. The women wore sexy underwear or less, sometimes cohabitating with abusive men who had no intention of marrying them.”

This heady mixture of pulp and uplift, conveyed with storytelling flair, was often popular with black audiences, yet Micheaux made and lost money with his projects over and over again. “Within Our Gates,” his rebuke to “The Birth of a Nation,” depicted lynching “with a luridness and savagery rare in the American cinema,” but it was not a box office success. He bounced back with “The Brute” (1920), a boxing melodrama involving an actual bout. “If Micheaux had one inarguable genius it was for using the world around him as his rent-free set,” McGilligan writes. Many of the melodramas were shot in Harlem nightclubs.

Micheaux was in Atlanta when Leo Frank, a Georgia Jew convicted of the rape and murder of a young white woman, was lynched. A black janitor was his principal accuser, and Micheaux, who was obsessed with lynching, appears to have been torn in his feelings about the case. He responded with “Lem Hawkins’ Confession” (also released as “Murder in Harlem”) and “The Gunsaulus Mystery,” both films evidencing an ambivalence about Jews that, McGilligan feels, “borders” on anti-Semitism.

McGilligan suggests that there was something of the con man in Micheaux, who regularly fought with collaborators over finances and screen credit. For all his talk of creating black opportunity (he made minor stars of Evelyn Preer and Lorenzo Tucker; Paul Robeson appeared in 1925’s “Body and Soul”), he would often hire whites as crew. In the end, the Hollywood he defied overtook him with “race pictures” of its own, MGM even hiring his discovery Juano Hernandez for “Intruder in the Dust.” Micheaux’s last film, “The Betrayal” (1948) met with terrible reviews (much like “The Struggle,” the last effort of his great antagonist Griffith). When he died at age 67, he was largely a forgotten man.

As Micheaux’s films have been unearthed in such far-flung places as Brussels and Tyler, Texas, it is hoped that more may be discovered. For now, we have this book, with its compelling perspective on his life and career.

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David Ehrenstein is the author of “Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000.”