Body and Soul (1925)

TCM ran a night of movies back in January highlighting some added in the most recent round of the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. The 1925 Oscar Micheaux film Body and Soul was among the selections that TCM ran, so I recorded it to do a post on here.

Paul Robeson, in his movie debut, has a dual role, with the first one being Reverend Isaiah Jenkins, a preacher somewhere in small-town Georgia. The Reverend is a phony, as a shot of a newspaper article at the opening informs us. The Reverend immediately heads to a speakeasy whose owner also engages in card games, and proceeds to shake down the owner for free liquor!

Also in town is the young woman Isabelle (Julia Theresa Rusell), and her mother Martha Jane (Mercedes Gilbert). Isabelle happens to be in love with Sylvester, who is Isaiah's twin brother, so also played by Paul Robeson. Black churches were, I think, an even bigger part of the black community at the time than white churches were, and Martha Jane and a bunch of other townsfolk look up to Rev. Jenkins, not knowing of course that he's a crook. Martha Jane, in fact, would be happy for Isabelle to marry the reverend.

Martha Jane has saved up money for Isabelle to start a life with whomever her husband is when she gets married, but when she goes to show a couple of her fellow parishioners the money that she's kept in the Bible, she finds that the money is gone! And then she finds a note from Isabelle that she took the money and left for Atlanta for reasons that Ma would never understand.

Ma goes off to Atlanta to try to find Isabelle, who is living in poverty since as it turns out she didn't take the money and that letter she left Ma was a lie. She then tells the real story, which is that Rev. Jenkins assaulted her (really, raped, although this had to be hinted at), and then came back to take the money knowing that nobody would believe her. After telling her story, Isabelle dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Actually, all the good people in the movie do live happily ever after, which is the problem with the movie. It's not Micheaux's fault, however. When he went to show the movie, the censors in New York had a fit and said they'd never let that sort of preacher be shown. So Micheaux had to make edits and, not having the money to make good edits to placate the censors, came up with one of the worst plot resolutions you can think of. It's maddening, because the film otherwise has so much potential. (The print TCM aired ran 93 minutes while IMDb lists a running time of 102 minutes; I'm not certain what version that is.)

Robeson does quite well, looking surprisingly timeless as the Reverend while many of the other characters do look like the came right out of the 1920s. Gilbert, however, as Martha Jane, suffers, engaging in all sorts of silent film histrionics that look over the top even by the standards of silent movies.

It's a shame that so few of Oscar Micheaux's movies survive, because all of the ones I've seen have been quite interesting even though they're not without their flaws. Body and Soul seems to be available on a Criterion Collection box set of Robeson movies, so while it is out there, it's also rather pricey.