Leaderboard

@richardmurrayI watched "Within Our Gates" and fully appreciated it for what it was. In fact, it inspired me to do some research on Oscar Micheaux because I was both curious and confused about him, even misspelling his name. I was, however, vaguely familiar with him which was why I was of the opinion that it must've been his movies that I was seeing quite a while back on a local TV channel that did not run them in prime time but instead put them on during the early afternoon, almost as if to fill in empty air space like the wrestling matches and The Liberace Show did back during the early days of TV. This would mean that my seeing these old films must've been back in the 1950s. Anyway, I learned, to my surprise, that Oscar Micheaux was born in 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, a town I know of because I had friends from there, and that he died in 1951, so he was alive during my life time. I watched a couple of short YouTube videos about him and have concluded that at least some of those sound movies I was watching back then were ones produced by him later in his career. Finally, imo, some of the stereotypes I previously mentioned did appear in Micheaux's "Beyond the Gates". Certainly Sylvia Landry, the lovelorn heroine of "Within Our Gates, was a "tragic mulatto" whose real father was white and whose black adoptive parents were lynched, her adoptive and nurturing mother, Mattie, being a "Mammy" figure, and the wicked Larry, brother-in-law of Sylvia's cousin, being a villainous "Trickster", while the tattle tale Ephraim, was the "Coon" figure. The minister Jacobs, who ran a school for black children, represented the "Righteous Reverend"and Dr. Vivian, who falls in love with Sylvia, represented the "romantic hero". These personifications, rather than being pantomimed degrading figures, were transformed in "Within Our Gates", and I suspect the improved versions, like the film itself, were used to counteract the negative caricatures that "The Birth of a Nation" depicted. My introduction to Micheaux was probably about 70 years ago and I'm curious if those films I remember seeing were lost and no longer exist since the claim is being made that this movie is the last of its kind in existence. Also, imo, minstrel shows were not totally without merit. They show cased sly humor, buck dancing and banjo artistry among other things. I mention this because there was a time when black Masons would stage their own minstrel shows and, having seen one put on by my father's lodge when I was a young girl in the 1940s, I remember being rather proud that my dad, was a member of a barbershop quartet that performed in a show his Masonic lodge staged. Just some thoughts...