I usually cringe when people call movies "important," because relative to the world at large, it can be a laughable idea. In this strangely sprawling hour-long feature, however, there's a moment when three African-American characters who are struggling to find work as artists turn on a radio and listen to a news story about a black athlete's acceptance at Yale. The struggling writer looks at the young musician and gives him a nod that encompasses a unity and pride and hope that must've reverberated through the black audiences for whom this movie was made. It's important that this movie was made, it's important that it survived (thanks to archivists at Southern Methodist University), and it's important that it's still shown (thanks, Austin Film Society). It's a mess of plot points and comedic filler, but it's all entertaining, sharply written, and well performed. Glad to have been able to peek through that window.
Except for the oddball Carib Gold (1956), produced in Key West, this is the latest surviving “race film” we know of. Race films, of course, were made for Black and sometimes other minority audiences during the era of segregation. WWII, the second wave of the Great Migration, the integration of the military and baseball, and Hollywood’s belated recognition of Black markets rendered these films superfluous. In 1949, the year this was released, Pinky, Intruder In The Dust, Lost Boundaries, and other Hollywood big-budget films dealing explicitly and sympathetically with race relations came out, and the following year saw Sidney Poitier’s star-making turn in No Way Out. Whether intentionally or not, this swan song for an entire subindustry seems to acknowledge — but also to celebrate — that subindustry’s demise. William Greaves, who also appeared in Lost Boundaries and would go on to become an important independent filmmaker in his own right (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take 1 and Nationtime), plays an Alabama blues singer who has migrated to Harlem and gets his big break on TV. Shortly thereafter, as Letterboxd user laird notes, Greaves and his roommate, down-on-his-luck writer Emory Richardson, hear a radio broadcast announcing that real-life Black football player Levi Jackson has become the captain of Yale’s team. Black people were finally beginning to “arrive” in mainstream American culture. Unfortunately, the film as a whole suffers from all the problems endemic to its low-budget genre. Most notable is the gratingly didactic plot. Greaves and Richardson’s other roommate, gambler-turned-thief Jimmy Wright, spurns the love of good girl Billie Allen for good times with bad girl Savannah Churchill and must pay the ultimate price. The acting is fairly amateurish, and director Powell Lindsay can’t be bothered with second takes when anyone flubs a line. Musical numbers get shoehorned in, bringing the plot to a screeching halt each time. Perhaps most laughably, the walls of the set wobble unsteadily when, during a fight, one of the participants gets knocked against them. I also have to admit that, as much as I respect Greaves, it’s hard to believe anyone would pay to hear him play his guitar and sing. Yet despite all that, films like this are fascinating for the insight they offer into Black life in the first half of the 20th century. Most striking to me was the goofy humor, which is a far cry from the stereotypical type found in mainstream films’ depiction of Black comic relief. A running gag involving a jukebox-loving jitterbug and the bartender who hates his dancing is suddenly turned on its head when the two men start dancing together — with the jitterbug trying to touch the bartender’s @ss! Film buffs who cherish movies made on the extreme margins of the industry love that sort of weirdness.
Pretty fascinating "race film" about a would-be hustler sharing a low-rent Harlem apartment with two other guys. To say it lacks technical polish would be an understatement, but it has an irresistible power and undeniable historical value as well.
