The Complete Oscar Micheaux: Underworld (1937)
Director: Oscar Micheaux Run Time: 76 min. Rating: NR
Starring: Alfred 'Slick' Chester, Bee Freeman, Oscar Polk, Sol Johnson
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:
When recent college graduate Paul Bronson moves from the South to Chicago, he becomes involved with Leroy Giles, a local gambler. He also begins dating Dinah Jackson, a singer who is seeing Leroy although she is married to Sam Brown, a nightclub owner. While living in Chicago, Paul reconnects with Evelyn Martin, a beauty parlor owner and acquaintance from his college days. One day, Leroy spots the duo having lunch and informs Evelyn, who instructs Leroy to drug and rob Paul and to kill Sam. Just as Dinah walks into the room, Paul wakes up to Sam’s dead body and the murder weapon beside him; she accuses him of the murder. Paul is however acquitted when an eyewitness comes forward with exculpatory testimony.
“I think of Micheaux as the Black Pioneer of American Film—not just because he was a black man, or because in his youth he pioneered the American West, or because he was greatest figure in ‘race’ movies and an unjustly ignored force in early American cinema…His movies throw our history and movies into an alien and startling disarray.”
Upon its release in 1937, Underworld was barred from screening in the state of Ohio, and New York and Maryland both required the film to edit its content for approval. The film has since been mastered in 4K 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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