“Dad’s books are still selling,” her letter closed, “but nothing like in the past.”
Astor Pictures, a distribution company on West Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan, had been in existence since the mid-1920s; by the late 1940s the firm had twenty-six offices in key cities around the country. Astor’s main business was circulating reissues of A pictures relinquished by major Hollywood studios; most of its business came from RKO. But after World War II, the Southern-born head of Astor, R. M. Savini, announced a plan to produce “dignified, entertaining Negro pictures” for the now estimated 678 American theaters said to welcome a mixed or substantial black clientele. Yet the first film it produced—Beware, starring the boogie and blues bandleader Louis Jordan—wasn’t especially profitable, and Astor’s first fully financed “Negro picture” was also its last.
Still, Astor agreed to distribute Micheaux’s comeback, starting with a June 24, 1948, premiere at the Mansfield Theatre on Forty-seventh Street, at last fulfilling the race-picture pioneer’s lifelong dream of opening one of his films on Broadway. Ticket prices for the three hour and fifteen minute version of the film sold from ninety cents to $1.80. “The Greatest Negro Photoplay of All Times,” raved the advertisements, and the “Longest Picture Since Gone With the Wind.” Micheaux placed ads beyond Harlem, even in New York’s white newspapers.
Micheaux was rolling the dice with this final variation on his life story. But starting with its blunt retitling—the evocative The Wind from Nowhere became the bitter-sounding The Betrayal—he gambled badly. The reviews, which called The Betrayal obvious and tired and old-fashioned, might as well have been aimed at the man himself.
The white New York newspapers, which had long ignored Micheaux but now profited from his advertisements, published devastating notices. “It is not a professional production,” said the New York Daily News. “It is even difficult to class as amateur. The characters religiously interpret Oscar Micheaux’s poor script with the stilted movements and hesitations associated with grade school plays. Flimsy and without purpose, the plot offers neither argument nor substantial material for discussion of any kind.”
“A preposterous, tasteless bore,” echoed the New York Herald Tribune.
The New York Times, which had never reviewed a single one of Micheaux’s more than forty previous pictures, dismissed The Betrayal as “confusing,” “gauche,” poorly photographed and “consistently amateurish.” Even the show-business bible Variety, which had neglected Micheaux’s productions for thirty years, critiqued the race-picture pioneer’s final testament, calling it “overlong,” “dull,” and “stilted and artificial.”
Though most simply overlooked The Betrayal, the black press was hardly kinder. The Chicago Defender—which had boosted him in the past—reprinted the New York barbs; then staff writer Al Monroe, who knew Micheaux’s history full well (he’d been writing for Chicago’s black press since the 1920s), piled on, lambasting the “poor” continuity, the “ill-timed and tasteless” dialogue, and the directing, “faulty to say the least.”
Leading man Leroy Collins watched the movie with his fraternity brothers in a packed audience at the Chicago premiere. As the film dragged on, he slunk down in his seat, seeing his worst fears come to life on the screen: the wooden acting, the long-winded speeches, the interminable convolutions, all leading to the revelation of the Scottish girl’s “one drop of Negro blood,” an outdated climax that hardly carried the same impact for young, post–World War II audiences.
“It was long,” Collins reflected ruefully.
Astor might have handled the distribution, but Micheaux was as ever the chief hawker of his own wares. Ignoring the reviews, he tweaked his sales pitch: a year later he was trumpeting The Betrayal as the “Greatest Picture of Its Kind Since Imitation of Life and Lost Boundaries [a 1949 Hollywood film about the perils of ‘passing’].” He tried mounting a pseudo-“road show” to enhance bookings, adding short subjects and special showtimes while charging higher prices. Though his various afflictions now restricted him to Harlem, he sat at his desk, sending out circulars and ads exhorting others to share his enthusiasm.
“We colored people, 15,000,000 of us, don’t like to be monkeyfied,” he told theater managers in his circulars. “Nor do we like attempts to flatter us by making us, on the screen, what we are not in everyday life. And we don’t like being pushed off the screen altogether as the major producers seem to be doing, to appease the South. We want to see our lives dramatized on the screen as we are living it, the same as other peoples, the world over.
“That, my dear exhibitor,” his statement continued, “explains why I am returning to the production of motion pictures after an absence of seven years, during which time I wrote and published four novels.”
From Harlem, he would use mail, telegram, and telephone to make one last stand against censorship. The Betrayal might have been an overly familiar story to many, but the white censorship board of Pennsylvania still found it an exceptionally violent drama about a black man who appeared (throughout most of the story) to be romancing a white woman. Times might be changing in postwar America, but not that fast, at least not in Pennsylvania. No doubt Micheaux gave a snort of familiar indignation when The Betrayal was “condemned in toto” there; he may also have felt perversely vindicated by the censors’ dismissal, which confirmed that miscegenation was still a hot-button issue. Then, reaching into a bag of tricks as old as his first silent film, he rounded up prominent local black citizens to appear before the board and successfully demand that the ruling be overturned.
Yet the censors weren’t Micheaux’s only problem. More than anything, it was the Gone With the Wind-like length of The Betrayal that put off theater managers, forcing Micheaux to recut the picture. He tried a compromise, offering to divide the film into “three installments.” “Like a serial, you’ll say,” Micheaux explained in one circular. “Please do not confuse this as any serial. It was not conceived as a serial and will not be exhibited as such. It is simply a super-feature, too long to be shown in all theatres, as is, at one time, so we’re offering to let you run it in three installments…
“Incidentally, the installment prints run 3 hours and 24 minutes, 9 minutes longer than the road show prints.
“Before arguing that no picture has ever been shown this way,” Micheaux continued oddly, “recall that no country had ever employed the Atom-bomb until we dropped two on Japan—and ended a destructive and costly war right quick.”
The circular ended with this salutation, “Kindly get in touch with us—and let’s make some money—yeah man!”
Some black theaters in eastern cities agreed to book the picture for one- or two-day stints. Most took a pass. The Betrayal found more receptive venues in the South and West, where “Direct from Broadway!” became part of the sell. “When they showed it throughout the South, the theaters were packed,” Collins insisted. “I saw pictures of the theaters with lines going down for blocks. It was accepted by the black audience. They wanted to see it.”
Whether or not The Betrayal truly broke “attendance records” at spots like the El Rey Theatre in Oakland, where it played for two weeks in August 1949, or whether this was boastful publicity—no one can say.
Whether The Betrayal was abysmal, as the critics claimed, or whether the packed audiences in the South and Oakland suggest that the old master was still in touch with a segment of his audience—no one can say. It’s unlikely that more than two or three prints of Micheaux’s last picture were ever struck, and like two-thirds of the movies he wrote, directed, and produced, his last film is “lost” today. Astor, which had gone into the “Negro picture” business with such fanfare, got out of it quietly but speedily and altogether.*
The failure of The Betrayal crushed Micheaux financially. It was no secret in Harlem that the race-picture pioneer was broke. But he also disappeared from the streets. The failure had finally ruined his health.
Actor Lorenzo Tucker still visited occasionally, and “around
1949 or so” he stopped by to see the man who had launched him into motion pictures, who had mentored him, whom he thought of as a second father.
The tough body that had tamed the Rosebud was gone with the wind. Tucker found the once-strapping Czar Oscar shrunken, folded into a wheelchair. The vigor was gone, but more surprising, so was the zeal to reclimb the mountain. Micheaux knew that he had reached the bottom, not Booker T. Washington’s bottom rung—always a good place to start—but the deep bottom of ending, and never-ending.
Yet Micheaux was religious at his core, and he believed in the inevitable bottom. He had always been an idealist on behalf of his race, but a realist when it came to his own fortunes. He sold illusions to inspire others, while living a hard-luck life of heartbreak and disappointment himself.
“I don’t go out now,” Michaux told Tucker matter-of-factly, his once-fiery eyes now stoical. “He rolled his chair from his desk to his dining room,” Tucker recalled, “and I had something to eat with him, and that was the last time I saw him.”
There was still business to attend to: Even from his wheelchair, Micheaux arranged bookings here and there for his most durable old films, and filled the small number of mail-order requests for his books. Ironically, his reputation as a novelist was on the rise in Harlem, even as he was being written off as a race-picture artist. In 1948, Hugh M. Gloster’s Negro Voices in American Fiction rated Micheaux alongside the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Gloster devoted four pages to Micheaux’s pre-filmmaking novels, finding them “unimpressive in technique,” but graced with characters, settings, and situations “far removed from the well-trod paths of American Negro fiction.”
For its fortieth anniversary edition, the New York Amsterdam News featured a roundup of significant black writers of the twentieth century, and whether book editor Constance Curtis had changed her mind about Micheaux, or felt compassion for his sorry circumstances, she ran his photograph at the top of the page, where it shared space with the portraits of such eminences as W. E. B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and the NAACP leader Walter White. True, Micheaux had not won “critics’ acclaim” with his books, but they appealed “to the public,” she wrote. And he was “still writing books,” reported the Amsterdam News.
This belated recognition might have given him solace, but it’s unlikely that Micheaux really was still writing books, or much else. A shadow spread over him in his twilight years, as his arthritis, hypertension, and arteriosclerosis advanced. His feeble health is one reason to question the widespread belief, based on a brief clipping in the Charlotte Observer, that in the winter of 1951 the filmmaker became ill “while here selling books and making a tour of the South.” Yet it is a fact that around that time Micheaux ended up in Good Samaritan Hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Some rumors suggest that Micheaux may have ended up at the Good Samaritan after a car accident. Whatever the case, Micheaux was hospitalized there for six weeks, before passing away on Easter, March 25, 1951. He was sixty-seven years old.
Neither advertisements placed in the Charlotte Post, the city’s black newspaper; nor repeated requests for information posted in the Charlotte Observer, the largest city daily; nor a search of medical and police records by local officials, has been able to establish the true circumstances of Micheaux’s death. Not a single person could be located who claimed to have met Micheaux, or who knew what he was doing in Charlotte on that final trip.
One likely scenario is that the race-picture pioneer journeyed with his wife to North Carolina, where she had relatives, to find refuge at Good Samaritan (today part of Carolinas Medical Center), an historic black hospital said to be the first in the United States operated exclusively for African-Americans. Mrs. Micheaux, with whom he had just celebrated twenty-five years of marriage, was at his bedside when he died. Dr. Allen Atkins Wyche, a black physician who was a pioneer in the treatment of heart disease, signed the death certificate.
The day after his death, Micheaux’s body was shipped back to Kansas for a family funeral; after the service he was buried in an unmarked grave in a Great Bend cemetery.
As far as can be determined, Oscar Micheaux’s obituary was not reported in any white newspaper in America. The Chicago Defender gave Micheaux’s death three paragraphs on page one, with no mention that he had ever lived in Chicago or produced some of his best-known films there. The New York Amsterdam News announced his death on the front page with a long article, hailing him as “one of Harlem’s most distinguished citizens.”
No will has ever been probated. Perhaps, in spite of the many bank accounts that Micheaux had strewn across America, in spite of all the money that had passed through his hands, there was nothing left to be declared.
In the month that Micheaux died, one of his masterpieces, Harlem After Midnight, was playing at the Ambassador Theatre in Kingston, Jamaica; another, God’s Stepchildren, was hopping around theaters in the Deep South. Not long after, these and other Micheaux pictures disappeared into seeming oblivion.
Micheaux’s widow, Alice B. Russell, wasted no time in vacating Harlem and moving back to New Jersey, where she lived close to family members, determinedly out of the public eye. As far as is known, she never gave a single interview. Bitter over her husband’s destiny, according to some accounts, Mrs. Micheaux burned all his business papers and filmmaking memorabilia and junked the remaining prints of his pictures.
Alice B. Russell Micheaux outlived her husband by nearly thirty-five years, but was indigent for the last twelve, a senile ward of the state at the Woodland Nursing Home in Rye, New York. When she died of a heart attack on New Year’s Day, 1985, at ninety-five, her occupation was listed on the state certificate of death as “Vocalist.” Micheaux’s faithful and loving partner was buried as a pauper at Greenwood Union Cemetery, “So. Acre W/19 Lot 31, Grave #6,” an unmarked site that can be found only by consulting records in the cemetery office.
Unmarked gravestones wouldn’t be the last bleak image if this were a film written, directed, and produced by the great and only. Even Micheaux’s bleakest film productions—Within Our Gates or God’s Stepchildren—held out hope for future generations.
For twenty years after his death, Micheaux was largely forgotten. Unlike Hollywood films, his weren’t shown routinely on television, weren’t available for rental in 16 mm format; they vanished from public consciousness, and many of them were lost altogether. His novels went out of print. All of this during a time when America was galvanized by the Civil Rights movement, a time when black history and heroes were avidly being rediscovered and reclaimed.
The rediscovery of Micheaux began, fittingly, in South Dakota in the late 1960s, when local historians began to research and write about the black pioneer whose first novel had been such an authentic account of the homesteading experience. The excitement spread to film circles in the early 1970s, when a handful of black show business historians started writing about race cinema and Micheaux’s accomplishments in that arena. As part of their research, scholars and documentary filmmakers initiated valuable interviews with the last surviving actors and personnel who had worked with Micheaux. When these first pieces about race cinema were being published, only a handful of Micheaux’s films were known to have survived, all in poor condition; it would take time, luck, and persistence to reintroduce his best work to audiences.
Micheaux’s 1925 film Body and Soul, for example, was located in the late 1960s, on deposit at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Transferred to 16 mm, the picture, featuring Paul Robeson in his impressive dual roles, was publicized as part of Pearl Bowser’s Black Historical Film Series at the Jewish Museum and Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1970, though it had to be pulled from the series at the last moment. Bowser began showing it in Paris in 1981, and then as part of her “Black Independent Films: 1920–1980” program that toured the United States. Body and Soul was meticulously restored in 1986, and a high-quality tape was made available to the general public in 1998 for the Robeso
n centennial. At the New York Film Festival in 2000, the silent film was presented with a newly commissioned orchestral score by jazz trombonist Wycliffe Gordon.
Detective work abroad has affirmed the international distribution of some Micheaux pictures. A print of Within Our Gates was located by Thomas Cripps in the Cineteca Nacional in Madrid, Spain, in the spring of 1979, shortly after he completed his distinguished black film history Slow Fade to Black. The 1919 production, which had overcome opposition by a group of Chicago ministers, bore the Spanish title La Negra. Another decade passed before a swap could be arranged with the Library of Congress: La Negra for a print of the 1931 version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. By 1995, Within Our Gates had been restored and made widely available by Smithsonian Video.
In 1983, a Southern Methodist University archivist named G. William Jones received a phone call from a superintendent who was clearing out a building in Tyler, Texas, about eighty-five miles east of Dallas. Jones was guided to “a stack of octagonal steel film cans ten feet high, ten feet deep and ten feet wide sitting in a corner” of a warehouse used by the long-defunct Sack Amusement Enterprises. The piles of film-footage cans yielded more than one hundred short and feature films, including twenty-two separate “black-audience” pictures. “Some of these films were on pre-1950 nitrate stock, and were already in a state of decomposition,” wrote Jones in his book Black Cinema Treasures: Lost and Found. But among the treasures was a good-condition copy of Murder in Harlem (the Southern retitling of Lem Hawkins’ Confession), Micheaux’s 1935 restaging of the Leo Frank case.
The Symbol of the Unconquered, Micheaux’s fourth silent feature, which had been presumed lost, surfaced at the Cinématique Royale in Brussels in the late 1990s. Advised by Jane Gaines and Charlene Regester, the coeditors of the Oscar Micheaux Society Newsletter, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) undertook restoration of the 35 mm print with translation of the French and Flemish intertitles. The recovered version of Micheaux’s 1920 homesteading picture, with its anti-Ku Klux Klan theme, had its television premiere in midsummer 1998, along with a New York City unveiling at the Apollo Theater. Jazz drummer and composer Max Roach provided a new musical score.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 42