The Complete Oscar Micheaux: The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940)
Director: Oscar Micheaux Run Time: 72 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1940
Starring: Carman Newsome, Edna Mae Harris, Gladys Williams, Robert Earl Jones, Vera Burelle
Country: United States
Language: English
The Complete Oscar Micheaux, presented from Thursday, September 19—Saturday, September 28, 2024. The program concludes with a limited engagement of the 2021 documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking on Sunday, September 29.
About the film:
Micheaux’s final surviving film.
Starring Robert Earl Jones as Benny Blue, a heavyweight contender modeled after Joe Louis, and Gladys Williams as gangster moll Elinor Lee, who buys Blue’s 10-year contract with plans to make him throw a championship fight. Lee’s scheme is derailed when Blue loses a key fight to a German boxer, clearly modeled off of Max Schmelling.
“[Micheaux] had come into Black filmmaking when it hardly existed, creating much of its origins and giving it ballast and a heartbeat”
— Wil Haygood,Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World (2021)
Shot in Biograph Studios in the Bronx and produced by pioneering Black aviator Hubert Julian who hosted the film’s lavish world premiere in Harlem. This presentation is a wonderful 4K restoration from materials preserved by the Library of Congress.
About the filmmaker:
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was an author, film writer and director, and independent producer of more than 44 silent films and sound films from 1919—1948. Micheaux was the first African American filmmaker to produce a full feature-length film and is regarded as a prominent producer of race films, and the most successful African American filmmaker of the first half of the 20th century. Micheaux’s work is not only a milestone in African American cinema, but an incredible insight into American history regarding race in society.
Born in 1884 to enslaved parents, Micheaux first left home to work for the railroads in Chicago. He had his sight set higher as a writer and a determined creative. He wrote a series of novels, including his self-published The Homesteader. Not only was Micheaux a pioneer in African American cinema, but also in independent publishing and filmmaking. After turning down offers to produce his novel into a film, he later found his own path to producing the 1919 film. Micheaux serves as a symbol of triumphing over the circumstances at hand to bring his vision to reality. The groundbreaking auteur’s features include The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), Body and Soul (1925), Within Our Gates (1920) and Birthright (1938).
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