Content area
Full Text
This essay explores Oscar Micheaux's silent drama Body and Soul (1925) and some of the critical discourses of the period. It also addresses the politics of racial identity and the quest for racial unity in a period when the class structure within the African American community was becoming more stratified.
Paul Robeson, the world s greatest actor of the race . . . makes his debut as a screen star . . . [in] an Oscar Micheaux production, entitled Body and Soul, . . . Mr. Robeson plays a dual role, that of Rev. Jenkins, a rascal masquerading as a minister of the Gospel, and that of his twin brother, a hard working conscientious lad. During the course of the story, complications arise out of which develop one of the most tragic, yet sympathetic stories yet filmed. . . . In nine great reels, here is melodrama to the nth degree, a story guaranteed to hold one speechless to the very end, beautifully photographed, extraordinarily original and acted by a cast of the race's greatest artists, including other than Robeson, Julia Theresa Russell, Tom Fletcher, Madame Robinson, Mercedes Gilbert, Walter Cornick and a coterie of others [too] numerous to mention.
-New York Age, November 14, 1925
What excuse can a man of our Race make when he paints us as rapists of our own women? Must we sit and look at a production that refers to us as niggers?
-filmgoer William Henry of Richmond, Virginia, Chicago Defender, January 22, 1927
In a scathing review of Oscar Micheaux's The Brute (1920), critic Sylvester Russell, writing in The Freeman, voiced his distaste for the barroom scenes, which showed patrons dancing the shimmy at 3:00 A.M., a woman shooting dice, and a woman smoking cigarettes. There was also the suggestion of physical violence: a battered wife with a black eye and her aunt coming to her defense with a pistol. Russell noted that the "story was not elevating," "good moral philosophy [was] lost," and "all of us well reared people sighed. Some departed." Russell ended by rhetorically addressing the filmmaker: "No, Mr. Micheaux, society wants a real story of high moral aim that can appeal to the upbuilding of your race and society."1
Lester A. Walton, an...