Brecher and Schiffman, white and Jewish, were exactly the type of producers Micheaux had railed against for meddling in race pictures. But seen from another angle, they were logical saviors. Under Brecher’s principal ownership, Schiffman ran the Lafayette, the New Douglas, the Roosevelt, and the Odeon theaters, the four biggest movie houses in Harlem. (For years they had been trying to buy a fifth, the Renaissance). They invested in all-black stage shows that traveled outside New York and were thinking of branching into race-picture exhibition in other East Coast cities.
In one fell swoop, Micheaux was now able to boast “new capital” for production, and prime bookings in Harlem. He would use the new capital to bankroll the first true “race talkie.” “From now on the product will be all-talking pictures,” the company’s initial press release boasted, “and will be produced on a larger and more expensive scale.” The black press gave the news big coverage. “Due to lack of funds,” according to one account, “Micheaux has heretofore played a lone hand in the making of his pictures. The difficulties of creating talking pictures were so great, however, that he was hardly able to get started.” Now he planned to make “one or two each month.”
Fayette Pictures announced lofty if familiar ambitions: Micheaux’s first sound picture would have a “tryout on Broadway” before gracing Harlem theaters; the pioneer would produce “a couple of short subjects” to accompany the tryout; and the film’s general distribution would be preceded by “a special road show engagement in a large number of key cities.”
As though in tacit rebuttal to Theophilus Lewis, Micheaux made sure the new company’s press release pointedly mentioned two of the “Negro-conscious” Hollywood pictures the columnist had cited: Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah! Micheaux emphasized that his “talkies” wouldn’t indulge in nostalgia for the Old South, like the most recent Hollywood fare. Where Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah! “had their settings in the South and dealt with the Negro in his native state,” Micheaux intended to fill a void by setting his stories among modern blacks in the big Northern cities. “Micheaux contends that since there are more than 4,000,000 Negroes in the North, he feels that a public is in position to possibly appreciate a theme dealing and laying somewhere among these 4,000,000…”
Fayette Pictures took a lease on space at the Metropolitan Studios in Fort Lee. In mid-January, Micheaux declared, he would commence photography on “the first all-black talkie” (a claim that pointedly dismissed Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah!, which Hollywood had promoted in similar terms). His financing even afforded him time to prepare his cast. His actors had already had been “in rehearsal for some time,” one article in the black press noted. After “five weeks of intensive rehearsal,” said another, “all the dramatic artists entered the studio the day the shooting was scheduled to begin, knowing every word of their parts.”
Though separated by twelve years, The Homesteader, the first feature-length silent race picture, and The Exile, the first all-black talkie directed by a black man, sprang from the same source material: Micheaux’s own life story. After The Homesteader, Micheaux had incorporated versions of his autobiography into several silent pictures, and that habit would continue into the sound era. The Exile was Micheaux’s latest reworking of his homesteading saga, divided between Chicago and South Dakota, but spiced up with underworld vice, a vamp’s murder, and song and dance numbers.
Once again, the hero of the tale was the Micheaux alter ego Jean Baptiste, a young, self-righteous man who finds himself at odds with decadent Chicago. Jean Baptiste is besotted with Edith Duval, who is determined to become the “Queen of Chicago’s Negro Underworld.” Edith dwells in a South Side mansion formerly owned by a wealthy meatpacker, but “deserted by his heirs who fled, frightened and terrified,” according to a title card, “by the sight of an endless stream of Negroes, brought North to supply labor demands for the war.”
Baptiste and Duval eventually quarrel over her plans to turn her mansion into a “social club” with recreational activities for the criminal element. Indignant, she brands him a sissified “Goody Man.” Armed with a land deed, the hero heads west. When the story picks up five years later, Jean Baptiste has established himself as a successful homesteader in South Dakota. Among the other settlers he is sometimes mistaken for white, though he doesn’t hide his true identity and always tells the truth about himself.
One of his friends knows that Jean Baptiste is “colored,” but wonders about his relatively light complexion. “I understand that nig—colored people are smoky,” the friend stammers. “That is—black, you understand?”
“Yes, that is true,” Jean Baptiste answers, his reply summarizing the insistent problem of many Micheaux films, “but if you are part colored and part white it is all the same—you are considered all colored.”
Against his better judgment, Jean Baptiste falls in love with the daughter of a neighbor—still a Scottish girl from Indiana. He and the neighbor’s daughter have the usual tortured romance, one that on the surface seemed to be an “egregious violation of racist guidelines concerning miscegenation,” in the words of scholar J. Ronald Green, “laid down by contemporary censorship boards throughout the United States.”
Jean Baptiste flees the prairie, returning to Chicago, again falling under the spell of Edith Duval. Her mansion is now a thriving cabaret complete with house band and nightly entertainers, frequented by drunks, reefer smokers, and gamblers.
When the vice queen is murdered, Jean Baptiste is arrested for the crime. After a time, the real culprit is revealed, and when Jean Baptiste emerges from the D.A.’s office a free man, he finds the Scottish girl waiting for him, with news she has learned from her father: her mother was “of Ethiopian extraction.” The couple takes the train back to South Dakota, entwined in each other’s arms, facing a bright future together.
The leading roles went to a set of fresh faces. Stanleigh Morrell, who portrayed Jean Baptiste, had played a small part in the Broadway musical Green Pastures (while also understudying the lead). Micheaux had first seen Morrell act (and play stomp piano) onstage at the Alhambra at 126th and Seventh in the 1920s, when that vaudeville and movie house hosted a stock company. Nora Newsome, portraying the Scottish daughter, was probably from Great Bend, Kansas; another Newsome from that family tree would figure significantly in later Micheaux pictures. Newsome was cast mainly for her creamy skin, which added credibility to her character’s ability to “pass,” and for her long wavy tresses, which Micheaux photographed with a pre-Raphaelite luminosity.
Another newcomer to film, Carl Mahon, had a pivotal scene, playing the distraught former lover spurned by Edith Duval; when he threatens suicide, she hands him a gun, and instead he shoots her. Eunice Brooks played Edith, and the large supporting cast included Micheaux veterans A. B. DeComathiere, Lorenzo Tucker, and Katherine Noisette. Charles “Daddy” Moore even returned to reprise the role he had originated in The Homesteader: the white-haired Rosebud neighbor from Indiana who is slow to inform his daughter she is of mixed race.
Some of the actors tucked in their roles for Micheaux between performances in Green Pastures, which had opened to resounding acclaim on Broadway the previous February and was still drawing packed audiences. Many in the cast of Green Pastures—from Richard B. Harrison and “Daddy” Moore to J. Homer Tutt, Salem Tutt Whitney, Mercedes Gilbert, and Susie Sutton—were already well-known to fans of Micheaux films.
With the biggest, most secure budget of his career, Micheaux felt flush. This time his glee was genuine. He splurged on the singing-dancing sequences, bringing Leonard Harper and Donald Heywood to Fort Lee to stage the film’s cabaret interludes, and to help out with Darktown Revue, a short subject to accompany the feature.
Harper, a former vaudeville dancer, had become the premier choreographer of the stage spectacles at Connie’s Inn, where he was the house producer. His revues were always fast-paced and witty; they boasted headliners, but were equally renowned for their skimpily clad chorus lines of young no-names. (Pre
achers, law enforcement officials, and puritanical critics regularly mounted attacks on Harper’s risqué shows.) Along with his genius for staging musical numbers, Harper brought his “Hot Chocolates” over from Connie’s Inn.
Early in his career, Heywood, a composer, lyricist, and playwright from Venezuela, had composed music for the Smart (and Smarter) Set companies. He wrote prolifically for Harlem and Broadway musicals; one of his hit songs, “I’m Coming, Virginia,” became a standard among jazz artists, and was recorded by Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Art Tatum, and Artie Shaw, among others. For The Exile, Micheaux asked for an overture of spirituals (to underscore the opening images of the film, a shimmering montage of Chicago buildings and street life) and dance music for the club scenes (“searing quotations of hot jazz,” in the words of J. Ronald Green). Heywood brought his own choir and band to the studio, and even appeared on-screen conducting the orchestra.
Micheaux’s films abounded with performers obscure to white America, who were celebrities on the black show business circuit. During the silent era he had drafted the Lafayette Players and other stage idols and introduced them to big-screen audiences. In the sound era, his films were chock-full with black singers, musicians, cabaret entertainers, specialty acts, and kooky comedians who never hopped the Hollywood gravy train; these included every type of tap-dancer: twins, kid tappers, “muscle dancers,” dancers who tapped while jumping rope.
The highlight of The Exile’s filming was the extended nightclub sequence from which Micheaux would carve out acts to interlard the story. The ruthless interspersing of these acts would become a fixture of his sound-era features: He’d cut to his leads sitting at tables for a brief exchange of dialogue, then back to the parade of performers.
Among the marvels in The Exile were Roland Holder, a buck-and-wing specialist, and Louise Cook, a sparkler from Connie’s Inn, singing “Make Hay While the Sun is Shining” while doing her shimmy and kootch. Leonard Harper’s tap-dancing chorus girls took over here and there, exploding before the cameras with their big smiles, slivered outfits, and long legs. Nothing in Hollywood movies compared with the “Hot Chocolates” at their hottest: Micheaux knew he’d have to shuffle this sexy footage when facing the censors later.
Some of the best music and funniest comedy was squeezed into the two-reeler, Darktown Revue, which spotlighted Donald Heywood’s Harlem Choir, lustily belting out their numbers around a piano. The small chorus was elegantly dressed, the tone was high-class and solemn. But there was also a mock spiritual, and songs ranging from “Watermelon Time” to “Jazz Grand Opera.”
High art often fused with low in a Micheaux production, and the choral concert was interrupted by the “coon comics” Andrew Tribble (from Blackbirds of 1928) and Tim Moore (later the Kingfish of television’s Amos ’n’ Andy series). The two rambled on-screen to discourse on work and ignorance (swiping “at the U.S. cult of personality and myths of upward mobility and individual self-reliance,” as film scholar Arthur Knight has observed). Their sidesplitting satirical exchange devolved into a lengthy haunted house anecdote.
Continuing the general heresy, Amon Davis materialized in blackface to deliver his uproarious send-up of a digressive, sanctimonious preacher, full of hot air and weird malapropisms.
Micheaux may have been the odd man out among his intellectual contemporaries, but “if one wants to get some idea of what the Harlem Renaissance looked like in motion,” in the words of film historian Clyde Taylor, for dance, music, and rough comedy, “Micheaux’s movies are among the best sources available.”
It’s likely that The Exile boasted two cameramen, because Micheaux had to divide the schedule around actors appearing nightly on Broadway. He had a fondness for newsreel photographers, because they came at a discount and weren’t ruffled by mishaps. His team for The Exile was Lester Lang, who’d been shooting low-budget material in New York since the early 1920s, and Walter Strenge, a newsreelist who proved himself during a long career by winning Emmys and an Academy Award nomination, ultimately serving as president of the American Society of Cinematographers. Both cameramen would work on Micheaux films intermittently throughout the 1930s.
If any proof is needed that Micheaux was cinematic when he had the means and opportunity, The Exile is Exhibit A; the film would boast a textbook array of shots and angles, and an intimacy in the staging that benefited from superior studio lighting. Micheaux used smoke and mirrors cleverly. And unlike most Hollywood directors, who were forever relegating musicians to the background of club scenes, diminishing their numbers by excerption, he showcased his performers’ at length, with attentive framing.
The filming was over by the end of February; thanks to Micheaux’s rejuvenated finances, his editing bills were paid ahead, and The Exile was completed by mid-March. A special midnight preview was planned for the Odeon, with Darktown Revue to be screened as a prologue. The advance publicity stirred anticipation in Harlem, and the full house for the preview included members of the national black press.
The midnight audience enjoyed a production that was sumptuous by previous race-picture standards. The detail lavished on the decor and costumes was extraordinary, the musical sequences extended and vibrant. If the story was improbable, it was also deeply sincere and steadily involving, entertaining even as it touched astutely on sensitive issues—prejudice (in the character of a nefarious homesteader from Arkansas who brags that he doesn’t like “coloreds”), intermarriage between the races, even “white flight” before that phrase existed.
True, some of the dialogue seemed to be spoken in slow motion—partly because Micheaux wrote speeches that spelled out every hint of meaning, and partly because the actors, unaccustomed to microphones, were overenunciating their every syllable. And, true, some of the novice players—particularly Nora Newsome—seemed inept. But Micheaux’s casting was hardly infallible, and wordy scripts and clumsy technology also were common among many Hollywood studio films, during the bridge years of sound.
Micheaux’s preview was greeted as “a wonderful effort” by George Tyler in The Afro-American. “Some good acting is done in this picture,” Tyler noted, while also praising Darktown Revue. The New York Age, as usual, offered a more measured reaction. “It is by far the best picture Mr. Micheaux has ever turned out,” wrote W. E. Clark in the Age, “genuinely entertaining in spots.” Nevertheless, he found that The Exile evinced “many obvious faults,” especially weak acting by the female leads.* And Micheaux couldn’t hope to woo New York sophisticates, Clark tsk-tsked, when he used “the outside of the famous Charles W. Schwab mansion on [New York’s] Riverside Drive as a notorious house in the Windy City.”
The Exile wouldn’t have its official premiere for another two months, suggesting that there may even have been extra in the budget for fine-tuning after previews—another Micheaux first. But the dream of opening one of his films in a theater on the aptly named Great White Way was still elusive.
Instead, The Exile opened at the Lafayette in May 1931—to overflow crowds and triumphant notices. The “first Negro all-talking picture” was completely ignored by the white press, but covered as an historic occasion in papers like the Pittsburgh Courier, which hailed the story, acting, musical sequences, and a “portrayal of Negro life in a city that no one but a Negro, who has traveled and lived in cities, could tell.”
Micheaux immediately hit the road, traveling to black theaters in the major markets of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C, and Chicago to personally arrange key bookings. Everywhere he went, he met with the press. He couldn’t be blamed for sounding a note of vindication in his interviews.
In a career of switchback reversals, The Exile was the miracle comeback, a rebound for the ages. “Micheaux studied hard and waited a long time for the breaks,” declared the Pittsburgh Courier; “his Exile now is a credit to him.” No other race-picture producer from the silent-film era—not a single one—broke through all the barriers and crossed over into the sound age. Micheaux was the first a
nd only.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1931–1935 JEWS WITH MONEY
They were white and Jewish—Jews with money that Micheaux desperately coveted.
An Austrian immigrant, Leo Brecher was the man with the deep pockets. Frank Schiffman, from the Lower East Side, was Brecher’s manager and enforcer. Together they were the gods of Harlem show business.
Brecher and Schiffman ran the Odeon, the Roosevelt, the Douglas, and the Lafayette theaters. Brecher was also the landlord of the Cotton Club, upstairs from the Douglas. In 1934 the partners would launch the Apollo. In 1935, when they finally succeeded in buying the Renaissance from its black owners, they controlled Harlem’s five largest theaters, offering movies and live entertainment to a combined capacity of 6,700 people. With four shows at each theater, they catered to a paying public of more than 25,000 customers daily.
Brecher and Schiffman also had theater interests in other East Coast cities—Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.—so performers in the popular Lafayette revues always followed up their Harlem engagements with a bus trip “Round the World,” as the circuit was called, before returning to rehearse the next show.
The balding, bespectacled Schiffman was the hands-on man who interacted with the public and the performers. Some who worked for Schiffman called him “Pops,” considering him a generous man who befriended black people and donated to Negro causes and benefits. Before the partners took over the Lafayette in 1925, after all, black customers had been consigned to the famous theater’s “nigger heaven,” just as they were in most places in America—even in Harlem.
According to “local legend,” on one occasion Schiffman even defended Micheaux’s civil rights. “Frank was personally responsible for breaking down the color barrier that existed in many of the stores and restaurants on 125th Street well into the 1940s,” wrote Ted Fox in Showtime at the Apollo. “As the story goes, he and black film producer Oscar Micheaux went into Frank’s Restaurant, a well-known Greek-run steak house, and ordered two steaks. When Micheaux’s came smothered with pepper, Schiffman exchanged dishes with him, ordered another, and told the waiter if he ever tried that again, he’d have a hell of a fight on his hands.”
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 31