Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (21 page)

Once again Evelyn Preer would play the vulnerable ingenue, with Lawrence Chenault as her “lost” fiancé (who is “found” in time to ensure a happy ending). Chenault had been a dramatic singer at the turn of the century before emerging as a crowd favorite with the Pekin Players in Chicago, and later, a heartthrob with the Lafayette Players in New York. Over time he'd become a stalwart for Micheaux—his most versatile lead, equally at ease in comic or serious roles, able to add age, play “white” (because of his relatively light complexion), villains, or, on rare occasions such as this one, the “ideal hero,” as his fellow Micheaux player Shingzie Howard put it.

To portray “The Brute,” the underworld boss of the story, Micheaux found another actor who would go on to become a regular in his films. Originally from the West Indies, A. B. DeComathiere was a stellar athlete (football and tennis), before he turned to acting and became a formidable character actor for the Lafayette Players and other troupes. The rest of the cast—including E. G. Tatum, Flo Clements, and Mattie Edwards—already amounted to Micheaux's informal stock company.

Undoubtedly, the highlight of the filming was the July 8, 1920, staged showdown between Cutler and Langford at the Royal Gardens on East Thirty-first Street. Micheaux promoted the event with advertisements in the
Chicago Defender,
throwing the fight open to public attendance and incorporating the hundreds who attended as free extras (“See Yourself in the Movies by Being a Spectator at the Ringside During This Mighty Battle”).

Once again, the leading lady may have suffered almost as much as the pugilists. “In one scene,” Evelyn Preer recalled, DeComathiere “was sup
posed to hit me in the eye and knock me to the floor, and when I got up the eye was supposed to be black. I wanted this to be so realistic that I begged Mr. Comathiere to hit me.

“In the movies they usually play the violin to make you cry,” Preer continued, “but after Mr. Comathiere hit me, I didn't need music, onions, or glycerin to bring tears. They were there whether they were wanted or not, and the eye was black, not just for an hour, not for just a day, but for
several
days.”

For another scene—“one of Mr. Comathiere's best,” recalled Preer—the strapping actor “chopped the door down with an ax and yanked me out and dragged me around by my hair. Another bright suggestion from me.”

Micheaux productions never involved long schedules, but the boxing choreography and crowd scenes of
The Brute
took more time than usual. The filming lasted three weeks.

“I am expecting phenomenal business,” Micheaux wrote to George P. Johnson afterward. “Not because I desire to appear boastful or egotistic, but if everybody who has seen it to date['s] opinion is worth anything—as a Negro picture, it is in a class by itself. It has some faults—none of us have as much money to make the best picture we might think up, as fine as it should be in technical detail, tho' this one is so much more elaborate than anything before.

“But the acting is so fine. To the Lafayette Players I owe this,” the director added modestly. “They were able to carry out my direction as fine as I know how to give it to them.”

For the August 1920 premiere of
The Brute,
the Langford-Cutler climax was reennacted with heavyweight Sam McVey (famous for lasting forty-nine brutal rounds in a 1909 Paris match) standing in for the absent Cutler. A reported ten thousand boxing fans attended the event in East Chicago, and the next day the film opened simultaneously at the Vendome in Chicago and the Vaudette in Detroit.
The Brute
sustained “a record breaking run” at the Vendome and other Chicago theaters, according to the press, and was seen by “thousands of people.”

“There is a great prize fight,” said the reviewer for the
Chicago Defender,
“and a world of comedy.”

Making its way to other towns and cities,
The Brute
continued to “stack them out,” in Swan Micheaux's terminology, that is, draw overflow crowds. “We opened in New York City and in Philadelphia, charging
from 30 to 55 cents,” Swan claimed. “Our share in both cities [in the first week], was approximately $3,000.00.” The company even manufactured extra prints, so a couple could stay in the East, while the rest circulated in the South.

The serious-minded Micheaux had proven he could also be hilarious; the “preachment” factor in
The Brute
was low-key, there was exciting boxing, and there were no lynchings.

 

The crowds were royally entertained by Micheaux's rousing action film; the critics, however, had reservations. Almost overnight, Micheaux the heralded pioneer became a magnet for criticism from anyone with a notion of the ideal race picture.

Though
The Brute
had been fashioned as an intentional break from more serious films like
Within Our Gates,
Micheaux's boxing spectacle stirred unexpected grumbling from prestigious figures in the black press who argued that every race picture should be decorous and uplifting in its depiction of black life. Echoing Micheaux's feuds with the Reverend McCracken, these generally big-city, middle-class critics cringed at the director's more realistic and unblinking vision of their shared heritage.

The well-known Lester A. Walton, an early associate of the Lafayette Players, praised
The Brute
in the
New York Age
as “a very creditable endeavor in many respects,” conceding that the fight scene was “a genuine thriller.” (“When Langford floors Cutler with a knockout wallop with his mighty right, my such a noise from the audience!”) But Walton went on to rail against a story set in a sordid underworld that echoed “the attitude of the daily press, which magnifies our vices and minimizes our virtues.”
*

The national columnist Sylvester Russell, whose jottings appeared in several black newspapers, including the
Indianapolis Freeman,
the
Chicago Defender,
and the
Pittsburgh Courier,
also criticized the film's milieu: its many tavern scenes, the loose morals of its female characters, the pervasive cigarette smoking, and too-brutal violence.
The Brute
“was
not elevating,” lamented Russell, a one-time vaudeville performer and singer turned drama critic. “All of us well-reared people sighed. Some departed.” (As one dubious alternative, Russell urged Micheaux to feature more “unadulterated blackface comedians,” which, in fact, he later often did.)

To Micheaux, however, publicity was good, and controversy was extra publicity free of charge. In these early years of his career, praise and criticism alike seemed to roll off Micheaux's back. He had an inner compass and fierce creative momentum.

At the same time, Micheaux was shrewd about critics, and if they talked like censors he treated them like censors. He sought out Sylvester Russell, for example, smiled and shook the enemy's hand, and then launched into a heated argument with the columnist. He sought out his critics often this way during the 1920s, and though he didn't always win them over, his sincerity and conviction gave them pause.

From all accounts,
The Brute
survived reviewers' quibbles. It proved among the most remunerative of Micheaux's early pictures, with repeat bookings into the mid-1920s. As the prints circulated, their number and quality dwindled, and today
The Brute
is another “lost” film, lodged along with
The Homesteader
atop the wish list of Micheaux films scholars hope will one day be rediscovered in an attic—however unlikely that may seem.

 

By the time
The Brute
had its premiere, in the waning summer of 1920, Micheaux had finalized a difficult decision, one that he had been considering for some time and had come to see as necessary and inevitable. During his long sojourn East (supposedly en route to Europe) earlier in the year, the race-picture producer had quietly laid the groundwork for a big change: He would move his home and central office to New York City—to Harlem.

“I like Chicago,” Sidney Wyeth, his recurring alter ego, says in one Micheaux novel. “Like it better than I do New York.” But in the same breath Wyeth goes on to concede that “New York is a freer city for Negroes to live in now.”

The 1919 riots probably crystallized Micheaux's decision. At the turn of the century, when Micheaux first arrived in Chicago, the Black Belt had seemed alluring to slavery's descendants. But when black soldiers re
turned from World War I, expecting to be rewarded for their sacrifices, they found pervasive unemployment and a deepening gulf between the races. More ex-Southerners arrived all the time, spreading across the South Side, truly blackening the belt. Rents soared and firebombings greeted newcomers to formerly predominantly white neighborhoods.

For Micheaux, there was another constant irritant: Chicago's provincial censorship board. Micheaux anticipated more leeway in New York. Chicago's days as a hub of motion picture-making were over; its once-premium studios now stood empty or in disrepair. There were first-class production facilities and experienced personnel in New York, and in nearby Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Micheaux had toured the studios and felt welcomed.

Harlem was the new mecca, the new capital of Black America. There was a general feeling among black Americans that New York might succeed where Chicago had failed. In his contemporary book
Negro Life in New York's Harlem,
the African-American writer Wallace Thurman compared the two: “As the great south side black belt of Chicago spreads and smells with the same industrial clumsiness and stock yardish vigor of Chicago,” Thurman wrote, “so does the black belt of New York teem and rhyme with the cosmopolitan crosscurrents of the world's greatest city.” Clumsy, smelly Chicago was the hope of yesteryear. Harlem, the cosmopolitan black belt of New York, augured the freedom of tomorrow, “a dream city pregnant with wide-awake realities,” in Thurman's words.

And by the year 1928, Harlem would have a population of two hundred thousand black people, all of them potential paying customers for a dreamer named Oscar Micheaux. He could reincorporate in Delaware, drawing fresh investors from the many other black belts that were strung along the eastern seaboard. He'd have close proximity to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, which had proven crucial markets for his pictures.

He publicly announced that he was transferring his headquarters to New York. Not that he would ever leave Chicago entirely behind: Apart from its value as a center of distribution to the Midwest—and his close contacts at the
Chicago Defender,
which for years he would continue to use as a launchpad for national publicity—Chicago was the city Micheaux knew best. It would endure as a symbol and setting in his films and books. He'd visit regularly, keep up with acquaintances, and shoot all or parts of many future films in Chicago.

“The better studio possibilities, together with the fact that the screen artists of the race are available in greater numbers in the big city, and disinclined to leave, has prompted the Micheaux Film Corporation to make their future productions in the vicinity of New York,” the official press release announced.

Putting his younger brother Swan in charge of his reduced Chicago operations, Micheaux left for New York in September. Along the way he planned to stop off in Cleveland to meet with the well-known author Charles W. Chesnutt, with whom he had corresponded, hoping to acquire the screen rights to some of Chesnutt's stories and novels. While en route Micheaux also intended to finish the script for his fourth film, which he was calling “The Wilderness Trail.”

 

“The Wilderness Trail” would be, in part, a return to “preachment”—tempting more censorship and controversy. Just as Micheaux couldn't stop himself from arguing politics with the Reverend McCracken, he couldn't refrain from writing “strong stories” about home truths. So he would weave another lynch mob into his latest scenario, and would offer bad as well as good role models for the race. But Micheaux was always experimenting, changing the proportions of his ingredients, and as he became a more nuanced and capable filmmaker, he tried different recipes. This time the “preachment” would be heavily leavened with humor and sentiment.

Micheaux's script concerned yet another “colored homesteader” who falls in love with a female settler whom he believes to be white, but who turns out to be a member of his own race. Again and again in his books and films Micheaux relived his rupture with the Scottish blonde maiden on the Rosebud, trying to find, in fiction, an idealized solution to the real-life failure that still haunted him. “He probably regretted that decision all his life,” observed Micheaux scholar J. Ronald Green, “and undoubtedly there is an element of obsession in his repeated plots in which the perennial object of his desire is finally obtained because of a dramatic reversal of her race.”

This time, however, the Scottish girl was a “beautiful quadroon” named Eve, who is aware of her racial identity. Living in Selma, Alabama at the beginning of Micheaux's story, Eve learns that her grandfather, a
Negro prospector, has died and left her a claim to a homestead in the Northwest. She travels to “Oristown” (a pseudonym for Bonesteel, South Dakota, that Micheaux first used in
The Conquest
) to lay claim to the land.

Arriving in Oristown, Eve attempts to check into a hotel. The clerk is “a Negro but masquerading as white,” according to published synopses, who loathes his own race. In his youth the clerk had tried to carry off a romance with a white woman, until one day his mother accidentally interrupted their embrace. His mother's darker skin revealed the clerk's true identity, and the romance was ruined. (In a flashback, he throttles his own mother over the incident.)