Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (40 page)

He would bring audiences into the story using a detective as his alter ego, just as he had in his earlier versions of the story. But in the remake,
Lem Hawkins' Confession,
the Micheaux analogue (who pays his way through law school by selling his novel door-to-door) is named Henry Glory, not Sidney Wyeth. Henry is reluctant to admit that he's the “anonymous” author of the novel he's hawking, even after striking up a relationship with a polite and pretty young customer named Claudia Vance. Yet Claudia lives next door to a vamp, and a series of elaborate misunderstandings separates her from Henry before their friendship can ripen.

The script would open with the murder, with this backstory tucked into a flashback. Years after Henry and Claudia first meet, her brother Arthur, a night watchman, is arrested for the killing of a young woman at a chemical factory. (The victim, Myrtle Gunsaulus in the silent film, is Myrtle Stanfield here.) Henry is now an attorney, and Claudia hires him to defend her brother and track down the true culprit.

Henry and Claudia set a trap for a dubious witness, a lowly factory worker named Lem Hawkins, who has implicated her brother. The trap works: Hawkins reveals that he has been coerced by Brisbane, the head of the factory, into lying. Hawkins believes that Brisbane himself is guilty of the crime, but when Hawkins is dragged into court to refute his previous affidavits, the real killer is revealed through a series of interconnected flashbacks.

As he had in the silent-era version, Micheaux set his latest exploration of the Frank case in Harlem. But he drew the dialogue between Brisbane (the Leo Frank character) and Lem Hawkins (based on janitor Jim Conley) from press accounts and trial transcripts. Many details of his script were extracted “almost verbatim” from the facts of the case, as scholar Matthew Bernstein has pointed out.

Here, as Bernstein reported in his study of
Lem Hawkins' Confession,
is Conley's actual testimony from the trial, recounting a conversation he claimed to have had with Frank on the day young Mary Phagan was slain:

In a parallel scene in
Lem Hawkins' Confession,
the Brisbane and Hawkins characters recount that same sequence of events, which is visualized in one of the film's flashbacks:

Although the remake would be pointedly situated in the present day (“I'm going to run so fast that Ralph Metcalfe can't catch me,” exclaims Hawkins, in one of the script's contemporary references),
*
everything else about
Lem Hawkins' Confession
—from its central characters to minor details—was constructed as an obvious parable of the “familiar, if decades old, public controversy,” in Bernstein's words.

Yet one of the beauties of the script was how Micheaux managed to borrow so closely from the history of the case—and then, in unexpected ways, ultimately diverged from its verdict.

 

Though critics sometimes chided Micheaux for playing to stereotypes, he had a real, underrated, talent for casting. He was cunning about launching veterans of the black stage and vaudeville into motion pictures; he often countercast actors resourcefully, and sometimes made in-jokes with his choices; and he had a solid track record for discovering newcomers.

In Clarence Brooks, Micheaux had an established actor whose name would guarantee bookings and crowds. But a leading lady was equally vital to his success, and finding the right actress had proven elusive for some time.

The great Evelyn Preer was lost to him forever: The pioneering star of Micheaux's best-known early films had passed away at age thirty-six in November 1932. Bulletins of her death from double pneumonia interrupted radio shows. “The statement could hardly be believed,” wrote Harry Levette, a Hollywood correspondent for black newspapers. Thousands of shocked fans lined the sidewalks and crowded the Independent Church of Christ at her funeral.

Katherine Noisette, who had played important roles in recent
Micheaux pictures, also underwent a tragic reversal of fortune. After a messy public divorce, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized at Bellevue Hospital; in 1936, she died at twenty-nine. Stardom in black show business demanded talent, but also an iron constitution that could endure the relentless work and stoic drive required to offset the pervasive inequities of racism. The prejudices drove many to drink, despair, or early death.

Nora Newsome and Starr Calloway had fizzled. Lucille Lewis had sued Micheaux before vanishing. But one fair-skinned young actress had impressed Micheaux as a supporting player in
Harlem After Midnight
and
Ten Minutes to Live.
Dorothy Van Engle was a Harlem native who grew up in the same 145th Street apartment building as Lena Horne. Her stepfather, Arvelle “Snoopie” Harris, played saxophone in Cab Calloway's band. Though she had a fleeting career as a model, Van Engle wasn't glamorous; she had a delicate beauty, a modest, unaffected manner, and a keen intelligence. (She was also a talented seamstress, who designed her own wardrobe.) Micheaux cast her as Claudia Vance, billing her as “The Creole Constellation.”

Brisbane and Lem Hawkins were the other two major parts. For Brisbane—the Leo Frank character, his Jewishness disguised but implicit—Micheaux turned to Andrew Bishop, the veteran who had anchored several of his best silent films. There is no better example of Micheaux's cross-casting: once a Lafayette Players heartthrob, Bishop would now give life to the lecherous, pale-skinned factory-owner of
Lem Hawkins' Confession.

Micheaux's casting for Hawkins was also inspired. Roly-poly Alex Lovejoy was a first-rank showman. He had been on the stage since the age of thirteen, playing in the occasional Broadway show but touring widely with revues throughout Europe and America. Lovejoy was celebrated for his vernacular comedy, though his English was perfect off-stage, and Micheaux had written this enigmatic aspect of the real James Conley into the Hawkins character.

Rounding out the principals was the smouldering singer-dancer Bee Freeman, late of
The Phantom of Kenwood
and
Harlem After Midnight,
as Claudia Vance's vampish neighbor. And, following his now-standard procedure, before the cameras rolled at Fort Lee studios in the fall of 1934, Micheaux filled out the cast with a host of musical entertainers and cabaret performers.

Even the song and dance numbers climbed a notch. In one mesmerizing number, Freeman—decked out in a fishnet costume—sold “Harlem Rhythm” before lacing into a wild tap and shimmy. (The cameraman pulls back so quickly to capture her sinuous moves that the boom mike can be glimpsed dangling overhead; Micheaux's films are not for perfectionists.)

Donald Heywood had moved on, but to replace him Micheaux had enlisted Clarence Williams, a prolific composer and musician who had collaborated with Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Sidney Bechet, and W. C. Handy. When not writing or recording his own music, Williams was A&R director for Okeh Records, one of the premier race labels of the era. He also ran the “largest Negro music publishing house of the nation,” specializing in spirituals, blues, and jazz.

Fiery jazz, sexy chorus girls, silky tap dancers, and comedy cutaways enlivened the extended scenes set at “The Midnight Club,” where Claudia Vance has her crucial rendezvous with the chameleonic Lem Hawkins. Vance pretends to flirt with Hawkins, plying him with drink until he becomes thoroughly soused and blabs his “confession.” In this lengthy, stellar sequence, Hawkins betrays his contradictory selves: a man of some erudition known to his cronies as “The Professor,” he is also a low-life character who knows how to play the fool. (Micheaux makes this patently clear in one flashback, revealing Hawkins's “coon act” with Brisbane as a masquerade.)

Micheaux had made of Hawkins a character who cannot quite be believed, or trusted—but who is also fundamentally human beneath the charade, who is plainly deeply moved and shaken when he first spies Myrtle Stanfield's dead body. Van Engle and Brooks, who ooze with decency, have relatively thankless roles in the movie. But Alex Lovejoy is a revelation, alternating broad humor with a perverseness and inscrutability that made him a ringer for the actual Jim Conley, as described in accounts of the Frank trial.

Another standout was the usually suave Andrew Bishop as the despicable factory owner. Although Bishop had acted for Micheaux as early as 1924,
Lem Hawkins' Confession
is the first of his performances to survive for viewing today. For most of the story, the audience is led to believe that Brisbane murdered Myrtle Stanfield, just as Micheaux long believed that Leo Frank killed Mary Phagan. But the ending delivered a startling twist: In a flashback, we learn that Brisbane indeed made sexual advances to
ward Myrtle, but the girl stumbled and fell while fending him off, striking her head. In a panic, Brisbane rushed off to secure Hawkins' help, setting the cover-up in motion. But we also learn that Myrtle's white boyfriend has been hovering outside the room in a mounting rage, sure that Myrtle is flirting with Brisbane.

As Myrtle lies unconscious, the boyfriend steals into the room, strangles her, and slips away unnoticed. It's an ingenious twist, one that leaves both Brisbane and Hawkins with good reason to believe that Brisbane caused Myrtle's death, while placing the real responsibility on the shoulders of another.

In the end, the white boyfriend is implicated by his own mother (played by Laura Bowman). He becomes the object of a manhunt, but even then Micheaux is reluctant to hand the perpetrator over to police. A newspaper clipping reports he has been slain outside a prison, while trying to aid the escape of ne'er-do-well friends.

Thus, regardless of his own conflicts with Jews, and in spite of the ordeal he had just gone through at the hands of Frank Schiffman, Micheaux had found an imaginative explanation for this crime that still troubled him, and a dramatic solution for
Lem Hawkins' Confession
that steered clear of anti-Semitism. He still didn't accept that Hawkins/Conley committed the murder, but he had come around to believing in the possible innocence of Brisbane/Leo Frank.

One of Micheaux's later novels,
The Case of Mrs. Wingate,
published during World War II, concerned American blacks who align themselves with the Nazi cause. The black Nazi sympathizers try to recruit Sidney Wyeth, the surrogate Micheaux character, into making an anti-Semitic film. They feel confident that the unemployed Wyeth will accept their offer to bankroll an anti-Semitic tract, considering his reputed antipathy toward Jews.

But Wyeth protests that his feelings about Jews have been misunderstood by the black Nazis. When grumbling about Jews, he explains, he doesn't mean to sound prejudicial. “I just have a way when I refer to certain people by emphasizing their race,” he says. True, some Jewish producers had treated him badly in his career; yet Wyeth felt indebted to others, “rich but kindly Jews” who treated him well. “I don't hate Jews,” he insists. “I don't hate anybody.” In the end Wyeth refuses the Nazi money, sticking to books.

Micheaux did brood about Jews, but with
Lem Hawkins' Confession
he also found reason for a change of heart. One factor may have been the influence of a new set of “rich but kindly Jews” in his career. The brothers who operated Sack Amusement Enterprises in Texas, Alfred N. and Lester Sack, were Jewish, and Alfred, who ran the company, was no Frank Schiffman–style bully. He would serve as Micheaux's partner and producer for the rest of the decade, allowing him to make seven more films over the next seven years, far more discreetly and helpfully than Schiffman.

 

Lem Hawkins' Confession
ought to have resurrected Micheaux's career. Yet most of the big-city critics simply ignored Micheaux's comeback film—the first signal that his time had passed. Worse yet, in Harlem, where the Schiffman ban had limited him to brief, unadvertised bookings in small theaters, the movie was lambasted. The reviewers rejected Micheaux's zigzagging narrative structure; after screening the picture in April, one complained that he couldn't follow a story with so many flashbacks. “The continuity has again been ignored,” wrote the critic for the influential
New York Amsterdam News.
And apart from Clarence Books and Alex Lovejoy, the paper jibed, the acting was “decidedly overdone.”