Veiled Aristocrats
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Oscar Micheaux
Laura Bowman
Lorenzo Tucker
Oscar Micheaux
Film Details
Synopsis
Twenty years after leaving home, John Walden returns to Fayettesville after having achieved his ambition to become a lawyer. He and his mother Molly, who is glad to be reunited with her son, discuss the problem of his sister Rena. A dark-skinned black man, Frank Fowler, has proposed marriage to her, while Molly had picked out a more light-skinned man for Rena. John also does not want the refined Rena, who has been reared not to associate with colored people, to marry any man who is black, as the family is light-skinned. As well, John has heard Frank say that he and Rena would marry immediately if it were not for Molly. Rena overhears her mother ask John to break up the match, and he promises to do so. At a nightclub, a woman indicates she will tell the story of the Waldens, and a waitress sings with piano accompaniment.
Director
Oscar Micheaux
Film Details
Articles
Veiled Aristocrats
Micheaux and Chestnutt were both interested in the ways different skin tones affected African-American communities, especially in matters of social status, miscegenation, and racial "passing." They approached these issues from somewhat different personal perspectives, since Micheaux had dark skin while Chestnutt was a "bright mulatto" with mixed black and white ancestry. But both were strongly committed to the African-American culture of their time.
The main character of Veiled Aristocrats is Rena Walden (Lucille Lewis), a light-skinned North Carolina woman. In the opening scene, her brother John (Lorenzo Tucker), also light-skinned, returns home for the first time in twenty years. He is now a prosperous lawyer, and his mother Molly (Laura Bowman) coos with joy at what a "great man" he has become. Rena is equally pleased with her handsome and impeccably dressed brother, whom see hasn't seen since she was a little girl.
John may be a great man, but he has questionable ideas as to Rena's future. Instead of spending her life in the black neighborhoods of Fayetteville, he wants her to move elsewhere with him and establish a new identity as a white woman. Rena is reluctant, since she's in love with dark-skinned Frank Fowler (Carl Mahon), a rising entrepreneur who wants to marry her. John's arguments are persuasive, though, and Rena agrees to give it a try.
Frank agrees to the plan, since he has no doubt she'll eventually see the light and return to him. Rena's new home is splendid, complete with a household staff of black servants, and she passes so successfully that a wealthy white man proposes to her. But she can't get over her feeling that she's acting like a "liar and a cheat," so she goes back to Frank and resumes the black identity she temporarily laid aside. "I only know that I am not a white girl but a negress," she tells her disappointed brother, "and happy and sorry as only I know they can be." She wants to share "their joys, their sorrows, their poverty, their everything," and marrying Frank will be the first step in her new life as a proud African-American woman.
Veiled Aristocrats is a musical as well as a melodrama, spiced with songs and dances by the multitalented supporting cast. These are the film's most engaging moments, since the serious aspects of the story are often undermined by the wooden dialogue, clunky camerawork, and stiff, inexpressive acting frequently found in Micheaux's movies. But what the picture lacks in professional polish it makes up in heartfelt sincerity and historical interest, presenting a rough-hewn yet vivid sketch of African-American identity politics almost a century ago.
Director: Oscar Micheaux
Producer: Oscar Micheaux
Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux; based on Charles W. Chestnutt's novel The House Behind the Cedars
With: Lucille Lewis (Rena Walden), Lorenzo Tucker (John Warwick), Laura Bowman (Molly Walden), Barrington Guy (George Tryon), Willor Lee Guilford (Miss Waring), Mabel Garrett (The Maid), Aurora Edwards (The Cook), Bernardine Mason (A Singer), Arnold Wiley (The Driver)
BW-48m.
by David Sterritt
Veiled Aristocrats
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
Although the length of this film has not been determined, it is believed to have been released as a feature. The credits and plot synopsis are based on a surviving trailer and fragments from two reels preserved in the Library of Congress. No song titles for this film have been found. According to a news item in Film Daily, the picture was finished by the beginning of the year and was the first of six planned all-black cast films to be produced for the current season by the Micheaux Pictures Corp. A later news item in Film Daily indicates that retakes on the movie were completed in January 1932. According to modern sources, the film was produced during the summer of 1931 at the home of actress Alice B. Russell's mother in Montclair, NJ, which was known as "The Homestead." Miss Russell was Micheaux's wife. Modern sources note that the cast included Barrington Guy, Lawrence Chenault and Walter Fleming, and that Micheaux wrote, directed and produced the film.