5 Movies | Wednesday, October 5th
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is honoring Black filmmakers with its exhibition, “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971,” featuring films that explore depictions of the Black experience in the history of the United States and the history of film. In the early decades of the motion picture industry, Black characters were often played by white actors in blackface. One such film was D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which featured white actors portraying Black men as ignorant and violent, threatening to rule over whites and force white women into sex before being defeated by the “heroic” Ku Klux Klan. The film was a box office sensation and directly led to the resurgence of the Klan. Although Black newspapers and organizations like the NAACP protested this false and dangerously racist depiction, mainstream Hollywood studios, fearing financial backlash in the South, did not portray the Black experience realistically in films for decades. If Black characters appeared in films at all, they were usually portrayed as dim-witted, subservient and one-dimensional. Since Hollywood would not make films that accurately reflected and elevated their culture, several independent Black filmmakers (and a few white producers) formed companies to make movies with Black actors in Black stories, to be exhibited in segregated theaters, referred to in the Black press as “race films.” Full-length feature films were produced by independents like the Popkin Bros.’ Reform School (1939) and Jed Buell’s Harlem on the Prairie (1937) and Mr. Washington Goes to Town (1941), and for a brief time in the early sound era, shorts featuring Black music were in vogue. Warner Bros. and RKO jumped on the bandwagon with Yamekraw (1930) and Black and Tan (1929), respectively.
Reform School (later re-released as Prison Bait in 1944) was written by Hazel Jamieson, Joseph O’Donnell, and Zella Young and directed by Leo Popkin, who, with his brother, Harry, and Black writer-producer-actor Ralph Cooper, known as “Dark Gable,” founded the Million Dollar Productions. The film stars Louise Beavers, a highly talented actress who is perhaps best remembered for both the 1950s television program, Beulah, and what should have been a star-making turn co-starring with Claudette Colbert in the groundbreaking Imitation of Life (1934). The cast of Reform School included Reginald Fenderson and the "Harlem Tuff Kids,” (Eugene Jackson, DeForest Covan, Eddie Lynn and Bob Simmons.) In it, young inmates suffer cruel treatment by corrupt officials at a reform school until parole officer Mother Barton (Beavers) fights to improve school conditions and to keep the inmates from becoming hardened criminals. Reform School had been considered a “lost film” for many years until a 16mm print was donated by Giancarlo Esposito and Laurence Fishburne to the Academy Film Archive, who restored it in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts.
One aspect of Black history that has been largely overlooked in films is the existence of Black cowboys. While on tour as a singer with the Earl “Fatha” Hines Band in 1934, Herb Jeffries conceived the idea of a Black Western. “Traveling through the South, I noticed a thousand little tin-roofed theaters, created because of discrimination. Blacks couldn't go to white theaters, so they had their own makeshift theaters, and they were all playing white cowboy pictures. So it came to me that this was an opportunity to make something good out of something bad.” He struggled to secure funding until he read an article about the independent producer Jed Buell, who had made The Terror of Tiny Town (1938). “I figured if he had made a Western with little people, then he might be interested in doing a Black cowboy picture.”
Writers Fred Myton and F.E. Miller, who appears in the film as “Crawfish,” found their inspiration after speaking to a young Black rodeo star, Bob Scott, after a performance. When Myton and Miller asked why there weren’t more Black rodeo stars, Scott told them tales about the many accomplished Black riders on the circuit. Harlem on the Prairie is the story of Jeff Kincaid (Jeffries), a cowboy who helps Carolina Clayburn (Connie Harris) find the gold her late father (Spencer Williams) hid in the days when he was part of an outlaw gang but intended to return to the rightful owner. Williams, who was also known as a filmmaker, would later star in television’s Amos ‘n Andy program in the 1950s. Mantan Moreland, who was Miller’s stage partner at the time the film was made, provided comic relief, and had a successful Hollywood career in films for major and minor studios. Harlem on the Prairie was shot entirely on location at Murray’s Dude Ranch in Apple Valley, 90 miles east of Los Angeles, a favorite vacationing spot of Black families and Black entertainers for over 20 years when Blacks were not allowed into hotels, swimming pools and public parks, due to segregation.
When the film was complete, Jeffries expected that it would be restricted to the roughly 400 Black theaters in the United States, but thanks to his friend, Gene Autry, Jeffries was able to get a distribution deal with Sack Amusement Enterprises in Dallas, who booked the film into both Black and white theaters, and Harlem on the Prairie became the first all-Black film to be shown on Broadway in a first-run theater. While innovative, the film came into its share of criticism. In response, Miller wrote to the NAACP for help to offset the backlash, arguing that “colored motion pictures are in an experimental stage due to the fact that you can only interest independent capital. I think that criticism of these pictures should be constructive rather than destructive. Major studios flatly refuse to give colored people a decent part or to produce a first-class colored picture.” Harlem on the Prairie was the first of several singing cowboy films starring Herb Jeffries, but because Jed Buell did not think to hire Jeffries for a sequel, Richard C. Kahn of Sack Amusements built a series around him. As the rights to the character of Jeff Kincaid were owned by Buell, Kahn and Jeffries invented the character of Bob Blake, known as “The Bronze Buckaroo.”
After grossing $50,000 for Harlem on the Prairie, Jed Buell formed Dixie National Pictures in March 1940 to specifically make all-Black films that would run in white and mixed theaters. His biggest investor was white minister James Friedrich, who had made the 1939 religious film, The Great Commandment with John Beal and Albert Dekker. For their first film, Dixie National starred F.E. Miller and Mantan Moreland in Mr. Washington Goes to Town, a haunted house tale about prison inmate Schenectady Jones (Moreland), who learns that he has inherited the Hotel Ethiopia from his late uncle. While still in his cell, Jones dreams that he is working as a bellboy at the surreal hotel with bizarre inhabitants like men with gorillas, a headless spirit carrying his head under his arm and an invisible man. Many of the hotel guests were played by vaudeville performers.
Writers Walter Weems and Lex Neal’s working title was Mr. Jones Goes to Town. It is unknown why the title was changed, as neither Moreland’s character nor anyone else in the film is named Washington. Buell produced and co-directed with the prolific William Beaudine, who had begun his career in 1915 with the Kalem Company and worked for most of the major studios before falling on hard times. Having white men writing, directing and acting as crew for an all-Black film was reportedly the source of some awkwardness on set, but the film was quickly made in only six days with a budget reported at $15,000. Mr. Washington Goes to Town premiered in Los Angeles in May 1940 before the official opening in Harlem a year later in June 1941.
Yamekraw was one of the Warner Bros. early sound “Vitaphone Varieties” shorts that played in theaters as part of the program before the feature film. Directed by Murray Roth, with an original story by Stanley Rauh, it was adapted from the 1927 James P. Johnson composition, “Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody.” Johnson had written the piece after being impressed by the success his friend, George Gershwin, had in combining classical and modern music in his 1924 “Rhapsody in Blue.” Johnson’s rhapsody debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1928, with the “Father of the Blues,” W.C. Handy, conducting and stride piano legend Fats Waller as the soloist. Seven years later, Orson Welles would use “Yamekraw" as the overture for his all-Black theater production of “Macbeth.”
Roth’s 10-minute film is described in the opening titles as a “Negro rhapsody which expresses the moods and the emotional side of Negro life.” Shot with deep shadows and high angles, as well as highly stylized sets reminiscent of a German Expressionist film, Yamekraw is about a young, unnamed couple (Jimmy Mordecai and Margaret Simms) who are separated when the husband leaves the countryside to work in the city, where he becomes briefly infatuated with a nightclub dancer (Louise Cook) before heading back to his wife and wholesome life in rural Yamekraw.
A more historically significant film was experimental director Dudley Murphy’s RKO short, Black and Tan (1929), marking the film debut of legendary jazz composer and bandleader, Duke Ellington, and his Cotton Club Orchestra. The title of Black and Tan comes from Ellington’s jazz classic, “Black and Tan Fantasy,” which he wrote with his trumpeter, James “Bubber” Miley, in 1927. Fredi Washington stars as a dancer with a heart condition who falls ill while performing at a nightclub, and is brought home by her friend, Duke (Ellington), and his orchestra. As Fredi lies on her deathbed, she asks Duke to play the “Black and Tan Fantasy” while the Hall Johnson Choir mournfully sings in the shadows. Fredi dies as the music ends and Ellington’s face blurs to a fadeout.
Dudley Murphy had lived in Paris in the 1920s, where he was exposed to Black jazz. Returning home, he was determined to make films with the music of Black composers like Ellington and W.C.Handy. He directed famed blues singer Bessie Smith’s only known film appearance in 1929’s St. Louis Blues, which he filmed simultaneously with Black and Tan at RKO’s Gramercy Studios in New York, recycling parts of the same sets and using many of the same crew on each. Dancer and actress Fredi Washington had a very successful stage career in Europe before returning to America, where she found securing film roles problematic. Washington was considered by Hollywood to be too light-skinned to play the stereotypical “Black” roles and too dark to play white roles. While she did appear in notable films like The Emperor Jones (1933) with Paul Robeson and co-starred with Beavers and Colbert in Imitation of Life, prejudice would rob her of the career she likely would have had in a different time.
A civil rights activist, Washington became the administrative secretary for the Joint Actors Equity Theater League’s Committee on Hotel Accommodations for Negro Actors, worked for the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts and served as head of the Negro Actors Guild. She would be inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975. In 2015, Black and Tan was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, which deemed it "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and worthy of preservation.
IMDB also includes Hazel Jameson and Joseph O’Donnell
