Yet as often happened with Micheaux’s most provocative films, what bothered the censors also upset some critics and audiences. Preachers in other cities denounced Body and Soul for its unflattering portrait of their calling. Once again, Micheaux was castigated for sprinkling his intertitles with the n-word. And on top of that, the film had boozing, gambling, borderline nudity, ugly violence—something to offend everyone. (A letter to the editor published in the Chicago Defender summed it up in one word: “filth”).
But it was also an undeniably gripping, unusually powerful movie. Micheaux’s colorful character types were culled from real life. His frank depiction of religiosity and hypocritical church leaders resonated with black America. And in most places where Body and Soul was shown, the black press showered it with superlatives.
“Beautifully photographed, extraordinarily original,” declared the reviewer for the New York Amsterdam News, “one of the most tragic yet sympathetic stories ever filmed.”
“A magnificent combination of Negro brains and art,” proclaimed The Afro-American in Baltimore.
“Oh boy!” Maybelle Crew enthused in her show business column in the same newspaper. “If some of the Reverends could see how Micheaux pictures the harm done by that Jack-Leg Preacher, but of course, they wouldn’t go near that den of iniquity, a theater.” Micheaux’s latest picture demonstrated “great emotional appeal,” Crew continued, adding, “If in the end it had not proved to be a dream I know the audience couldn’t have stood it. In fact, some of them were talking out loud to the picture, tearfully and wrathfully.”
An ending that proved “a dream”: Some reviews, puzzling over discrepancies in the storyline, suggest that Body and Soul lost many censorship battles outside of New York. Censors in Maryland, Chicago, Kansas, Virginia, and other places hacked pieces out of it. Often the censors took possession of a print and kept the “eliminations”; Micheaux was always complaining about lost or destroyed footage after receiving his returned prints.
The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, has preserved an eight-reel version of the 1925 film, however, even restoring some of the censored material; and contemporary audiences still find it mesmerizing. Today, Body and Soul is the Micheaux picture most likely to be revived in festival screenings, and arguably the closest to an intact original among his surviving films. To those audiences and to most Micheaux enthusiasts, Body and Soul holds up as “an extraordinary film,” in the words of scholar Charles Musser.
Firstly, it’s an anthropological treasure, with Micheaux recreating the public and private spaces of a lost world overlooked by Hollywood. It’s a grassroots vision of black America, and the 1920s wardrobe alone would make a fascinating museum exhibit; with one entire wing devoted to hats, and a separate room for the ornate church hats alone.
Cinematically, Body and Soul confirms Micheaux’s technical mastery. The storm sequence, with the Preacher (Robeson) and Isabelle (Julia Theresa Russell) whipped about by violent winds and drenched by cascading rain, is especially thrilling. The daring scene that follows, with the Preacher stealing into a room in which Isabelle, huddled in front of a fire, has been coaxed into removing her wet garments, is achieved with erotic seminudity, slant lighting, and the intercutting of advancing footsteps—a passage worthy of early Hitchcock.
The protracted church sequence in which the evil Preacher interrupts his flamboyant, revivalist sermon (“Dry Bones—in the Valley”) with furtive sips of booze, while the congregation listening to him rocks back and forth, shouting out in mounting ecstasy, is at once dramatically riveting and riotously funny.
Robeson delivers a transcendent performance, his full genius on display. “To my mind, at least,” Musser has written, Robeson’s acting for Micheaux is “far more inventive and impressive than his work in the film version of The Emperor Jones [his first Hollywood movie, eight years later]. It may well be his best screen performance.”
After finishing his run in The Emperor Jones on the London stage, Robeson had gone to France, and that is where he was vacationing when Body and Soul was released in the United States. If he ever saw his first film, made under Micheaux’s direction, what he himself thought of his motion picture debut—a blip in a long, magnificent career in which screen roles competed with so many other interests—his opinion has not been recorded.
Way back in 1913, Chicago pioneer William Foster had described race pictures as “a feeble infant, scarcely able to nurse its bottle.” In 1924 Micheaux would use the same metaphor, calling race pictures a “newborn babe who must be fondled.” In a sense race pictures were always—and destined to remain—a weak child.
The novelty of all-colored films had created a boomlet in the early 1920s, but the “gold rush” years were long past. The insuperable problem was the number of theaters controlled by black capital. Even in Harlem white theater owners predominated; and they preferred the slick, glossy Hollywood assembly-line films featuring black menials, over race pictures of inconsistent, flea-budget quality.
Even the best films of Micheaux—a one-man low-cost corporation, a lone wolf in an otherwise heavily collaborative industry—inevitably lagged behind the technically polished ones being churned out by his peers in white Hollywood.
Even in Harlem (perhaps especially in Harlem) there were prominent members of the black press who found race pictures as “passé” as the phrase “all-colored.” They never cut Micheaux any slack.
In December 1925, on the heels of Body and Soul, one of his greatest pictures, Micheaux again found himself under ferocious attack from a journalist of his own race. Romeo L. Dougherty of the New York Amsterdam News devoted an entire column to Micheaux’s body of work, comparing his movies unfavorably to Hollywood’s, while approvingly quoting the white manager of the Lincoln Theatre, who said he refused to book Micheaux productions “because they are so far beneath what he has to offer from studios fully equipped and with high-paid writers furnishing the scenarios.”
There were still a handful of white theater managers in Harlem willing to book Micheaux’s pictures, Dougherty continued, but they did so “more from a mistaken idea of a sentiment which they feel they should exhibit in a colored community, than because of the worth of the pictures…it is hard to expect colored people to accept these Mischeaux [sic] pictures here in Greater New York and Northern New Jersey, and they don’t.”
Black theater owners valued Micheaux films more, but there were precious few in New York City, and never more than two in Harlem. The biggest theaters—the Lincoln, the Lafayette, the Odeon on 145th Street, and the thousand-seat Roosevelt on Seventh Avenue near 145th—were operated by two white Jewish businessmen, Leo Brecher and Frank Schiffman. Only the nine-hundred-seat Renaissance, on Seventh and 137th, had been built by colored capital, challenging the Brecher-Schiffman monopoly of major theaters north of 125th. As Micheaux actor Lorenzo Tucker later quipped, one or two black theaters in Harlem didn’t amount to “a pimple on a bedbug’s hindparts.”
Black-owned theaters were scarce all across America, and the tiny number that existed were always changing hands or going “temporarily” out of business. Losing even one major outlet was a blow to Micheaux, and inevitably the replacements were iffy. Longtime gadfly Sylvester Russell, relishing the race-picture producer’s misfortunes, noted in his column that Micheaux, who once boasted his films wouldn’t be screened below Forty-seventh Street in Chicago, was “now showing the poor pictures at the smaller houses all over the district.”*
Defections from the East and Midwest couldn’t be offset by the South. Southern all-black theaters were smaller and spread out. Big cities in the Southwest lagged even farther behind. “In Houston, [Texas],” reported the Pittsburgh Courier, “are two theaters run by white people for colored, and one other colored theater. Also are white theaters which permit colored people to enter by the back and side door.”
Micheaux’s runs in less populous areas were for one or two days, booked on percentages and slashed ticket prices. Especially in t
he South, summer heat waves chronically affected attendance. Air conditioning was spreading through the industry, but slowly and only among the biggest, best white theaters showing Hollywood pictures.
Body and Soul was undeniably a hit, and it brought another momentary infusion of revenue to Micheaux’s company. But that wasn’t enough for a man averaging two pictures a year, and once again the race-picture pioneer was forced to retrench for some emergency revamping.
In late December 1925, the news swept through Chicago like a chill wind: Swan Micheaux was shutting down the local office to take charge of the “New Oscar Micheaux Film Exchange” in New York City. “Another straw that shows the blowing of the wind,” reported the Baltimore Afro-American, “is the removal of the general offices from Roanoke, Va., to New York City” and “a complete reorganization of the sales force.”
The Roanoke experiment was over, and Micheaux needed help in Harlem. Ira McGowan, his chief lieutenant, had sued the boss for back wages and won a judgment against Micheaux in court; now McGowan was moving to the West Coast to join a fledgling race-picture company spearheaded by white director Harry Gant and a group of Lincoln Motion Picture Company alumni. (Lincoln had been swept under by hard times in 1923.) George P. Johnson had also moved to Hollywood, hoping to revive the Lincoln dream with his brother Noble. But the brothers became estranged, and George lost contact with both Noble and Micheaux.
That rift between brothers would have an eerie echo in Micheaux’s own life. The race-picture producer had grown to doubt Swan’s honesty as well as his ability, and bringing him to New York was one way to keep an eye on him.
In spite of this crisis and flux—or perhaps because of it, such was his resolute nature—Micheaux continued to sketch his air castles. Through a regular stream of news items, and the titles listed on his ever-evolving letterhead, Micheaux left a record of an ambitious future agenda. It was a time of intellectual and creative ferment in black America, and as race leaders debated their common values and goals, Micheaux planned a series of new films that would explore the full spectrum of that debate.
He laid the groundwork for a project called “Marcus Garland” or “Black Magic,” a story patterned after the life of Marcus Garvey and intended to star one of the best-known black actors of the age: Clarence Muse, a onetime Lafayette Player now spotted frequently in Hollywood movies. Muse eventually dropped out of “Marcus Garland” in favor of higher-paid Hollywood parts, but no matter: Salem Tutt Whitney was penciled in.*
Another project was filming a play by Mary White Ovington, a prominent white activist and author in New York, who had helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Micheaux also contemplated adapting the W. E. B. DuBois novel Dark Princess, whose story elements aligned with his own ideas. The novel concerned a young Negro medical student who suffers racial discrimination, sails for Europe, and in Berlin falls for a beautiful colored woman who is plotting an uprising of American blacks. Returning to the States, the ex-student becomes a leader of a fanatical organization—organizing a strike of Pullman porters, witnessing a lynching, planning a train wreck of Ku Klux Klan members.
Also on Micheaux’s expandable list was a screen adaptation of a Zora Neale Hurston short story called “Vanity,” and another story called “Deadline at Eleven” written by Louis DeBulger, who had played Lem Hawkins in The Gunsaulus Mystery.* He announced these and other titles as he traveled around the country, closing his Southern offices at last and moving all his business to New York. In Harlem his brother would watch over a shrinking staff, and he would watch his brother. More than ever the Micheaux enterprise was a one-man show, with Oscar counting pennies and guarding every transaction.
As far as is known, the beautiful Julia Theresa Russell, the amateur thespian who had the privilege of acting opposite Paul Robeson in Body and Soul, never again emoted on the stage or screen. But the New Jersey schoolteacher would assume a much greater significance for Micheaux, for it was she who introduced him to her older sister, Alice.
Also a teacher, Alice B. Russell lived with her family in Montclair, New Jersey, a community northwest of Newark. The Russells had come to New Jersey from the dirt-poor backwater of Maxton in Robeson County, North Carolina, after the head of the household, Robert Burton Russell, died abruptly in Maxton around 1900.
Alice’s father could have been the exemplar of a Micheaux film. Russell had owned his own home in Maxton by the late 1800s, and served on the town board at a time when few blacks in the South ascended to government office. Before the turn of the century he edited and published one Robeson County newspaper, the Maxton Blade, while owning shares in another, the Scottish Chief. Though the Blade reported mainly on the black community, it aspired to broader coverage as a means of increasing circulation; Russell attended services every Sunday at a local white Presbyterian church, sitting discreetly in the balcony and taking down every word of the long-winded sermon in shorthand, publishing the transcript in the Tuesday edition.
The circumstances of Russell’s sudden death are elusive. But the Russells were devastated by the tragedy, and the settlement of the estate—the house and newspapers were sold off to relieve the family’s debt—left them poor. The family headed north to New Jersey, where the Russells turn up in Essex County records first in 1904, living with Mrs. Russell’s parents. Eventually the family settled in a large house at 55 Greenwood Avenue in Montclair.
Mrs. Russell was Mary Malloy Russell, part of an old Maxton family. Though uneducated herself, Mrs. Russell raised her five children in the Booker T. Washington tradition; all her sons and daughters graduated from high school and landed decent jobs, adopting their parents’ creed of hard work and faith in God. Mrs. Russell supported her family by working, first as a laundress for private households, and later as a public school custodian. She was a self-sacrificing mother.
The middle Russell child of five was Julia Theresa, who was twenty-seven when she appeared in Body and Soul. There were two boys: Robert Jr. (b. 1893) and Albert (b. 1898). The youngest Russell was Blanche, born in 1899, shortly before her father passed away. Alice B., whose middle name Burton was in honor of her father (a family name passed on to the eldest), was the oldest of the Russell children, born in June 1889.*
As the oldest child, Alice B. Russell likely stepped in to help her mother after her father’s untimely death, filling in with household and maternal duties, nurturing her younger siblings. After graduating from high school in Montclair, she went on to study music in college. Her obituaries, which her younger sister Blanche—her only surviving sibling at the time of her death—helped prepare, state that Alice graduated from Columbia University, but there is no record of her enrollment at Columbia in New York, or any other Columbia, as far as can be determined. Blanche, who was ten years younger than her sister, may have been mistaken about the details. But Alice was well read and, like her father, a good writer. Her erudition and refined diction were obvious markers of education. “Alice was so damn polished that you thought you were talking to a dictionary,” recalled Carlton Moss, a family friend from nearby Newark who acted in two Micheaux films in the early 1930s.
Like her sister Julia, Alice earned a living as a teacher, giving private voice and music lessons in the Montclair area. She sang at church occasions, and at least one account suggests she gave community recitals. All the Russell girls were “pretty and charming,” remembered Hortense Tate, a Montclair activist who knew the family; and Alice was the prettiest, the most charming. Five years younger than Micheaux, Alice turned thirty-seven in 1926. She was tall and light-skinned, womanly rather than girlish, with dignity and manners: an elegant lady with a smile as persistent, as enigmatic, and as endlessly adaptable, as her husband-to-be’s.
Montclair had a close-knit black population, and the Russells were prominent in church and civic activities, especially the (colored) YWCA. The family’s Greenwood Avenue home was one hub of black Montclair’s social—and political—whirl:
When Edwin Barclay, the Liberian foreign minister and secretary of state, made an official visit to the United States in 1925, for example, the Russells hosted the local reception for him there.
In his Pullman porter days, Micheaux had been a ladies’ man, and he seemed to have a woman at every port of call. Since the death of his first wife, however (and the abandonment, perhaps, of his second), he had kept his distance from women. Truth be told, he hadn’t had much free time to pursue romance. And although the “casting couch” was already a notorious practice in show business, Micheaux was that rarity among motion picture producers, known for behaving in fatherly or gentlemanly fashion toward the many actresses he knew. “I liked his approach,” recalled the sexy Bee Freeman, who met Micheaux in the early 1930s, when he was casting a new film. “He was very businesslike—didn’t make a pass, which was surprising. I didn’t know whether to be insulted.”
Micheaux was drawn to the Russells, a family of hard workers and achievers like himself. He was drawn especially to Alice, and as he quietly courted the music teacher throughout 1925 and early 1926, their mutual affection grew. Micheaux was welcomed into the Russell household; he became a frequent guest at Sunday supper and was made to feel at home. Indeed, Montclair would become his real second home, more a refuge and sanctuary for him than anywhere else; Mrs. Mary Russell would become a kind of second, surrogate mother.
Their romance reached fruition on Saturday, March 20, 1926, when Oscar Micheaux and Alice B. Russell exchanged vows in the living room of 55 Greenwood Avenue. A Baptist minister presided. Alice’s sisters were maids of honor. The marriage of black America’s most famous filmmaker was reported in the black press from coast to coast. “It was quite a social event and was attended by hundreds,” according to the Chicago Defender.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 27