Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (Quoiat Films, Sky, Kino Lorber, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later that night (Sunday, February 8) Turner Classic Movies ran Within Our Gates, a truly great 1920 silent film written, produced, and directed by pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux which I’d seen at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html, and then followed it with Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking, a 2021 documentary produced in Italy by Quoiat Films in association with Sky (Rupert Murdoch’s satellite video channel) and Kino Lorber, which has several of Micheaux’s films available on DVD and Blu-Ray. Oscar Micheaux (the family name was originally “Michaux,” without the “e”) was born on January 2, 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, the fifth of 13 children born to parents Calvin and Belle Michaux, both of whom had been slaves. His parents were farmers and managed to scrape together enough money to move to a city, where Oscar began his education. But they soon fell on harder times and had to move back to the country, which turned Oscar into a rebel of sorts. Dad sent him off to the city to work in marketing, where Oscar had the chance to meet different sorts of people and broaden his horizons. At age 17, Oscar moved to Chicago to live with his older brother and worked in the stockyards and steel mills. Then he got a job as a Pullman porter, which oddly was one of the most prestigious employment opportunities then available to African-American men. Though the pay was pretty good for a menial job open to Blacks, it was reduced by management which insisted they had to pay for their own uniforms and meals. Still, it gave employees quite a lot of travel and allowed them to see new parts of America. According to the documentary, Micheaux supplemented his salary by skimming from the customers’ payments for meals aboard the train – as did a lot of the porters – though after he was fired in Illinois he got a similar job assignment in the South with no one the wiser in those pre-Internet days. When he’d saved enough money to do so Micheaux moved to Gregory County, South Dakota, bought land and set himself up as a homesteader on a farm he called “The Rosebud.” He prospered for a few years and also developed a second career as a writer, getting pieces published in the African-American newspaper The Chicago Defender.

When his farm finally went bust in 1911, Micheaux wrote a novel about his experiences as a farmer called The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. The first edition was self-published in 1913 without an author’s credit, but in 1917 he reissued the book as The Homesteader and put his name on it. It attracted the attention of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, run by brothers Noble and George Johnson, both actors (Noble Johnson would eventually have a film career and be best known as the native chief in the 1933 King Kong). The Johnsons were the first African-Americans to form a movie company, but negotiations between them and Micheaux broke down. So Micheaux decided to film The Homesteader himself, doing what would now be called crowd-sourcing to raise the production money. The film, which like all too many of Micheaux’s films is lost (of his 42 films only 20 survive in whole or part), was enough of a commercial success that Micheaux followed it up with Within Our Gates, a stunning movie that was widely interpreted – as it is here – as a pro-Black response to D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915). Though Micheaux denied having intended Within Our Gates as a response to The Birth of a Nation, he had certainly learned from Griffith. Within Our Gates and his later film Body and Soul (1925), which cast Paul Robeson in his screen debut as two brothers, a scapegrace phony minister and an inventor (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/body-and-soul-micheaux-book-and-film.html) are both major works of cinematic art. One can watch Micheaux’s films – at least the surviving silents – and appreciate them not only for their historical importance but as great movies in their own right. Micheaux would not only fund the production of these films but also market them directly, taking his prints on trains and traveling from city to city, showing up at movie theatres in Black communities and offering to show them. (Charles pointed out that this meant he was taking highly flammable materials on passenger trains and risking a fire or explosion.) The documentary mentions in passing that Micheaux had watched the German Expressionist masterpieces of the 1920’s when they were released in the U.S. and learned from them, which accounts for the film noir-like sequences in many of his films.

As I’ve written before about Micheaux, the twin blows of sound films in 1927 and the Great Depression two years later blew his business model. In the silent era it was relatively easy to create a professional-looking film on a low budget and end up with a product comparable to that of the major studios – especially if you had a ready talent pool, which Micheaux did from all the underemployed Black actors in the U.S. In the sound era that became much harder, as state-of-the-art recording equipment was so expensive you practically had to have a major studio behind you to afford it. Micheaux settled in New York City and bought a house in Harlem with the money he made from his books and films, which put him in the middle of the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s, but once sound came in he lost the ability to self-finance and had to go hat in hand to white financiers for his production money. One Micheaux talkie that is shown being restored in this film is Midnight in Harlem (1935), based on the notorious Leo Frank lynching case. Leo Frank was a white Jewish man who was lynched in Marietta, Georgia on August 16, 1915 for having allegedly raped 13-year-old Mary Phagan. His story was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1937 as They Won’t Forget, but Micheaux beat the major studio to the punch by two years and, of course, changed the victim from a Jewish white man to an African-American. Alas, Micheaux didn’t have enough money to gain the production experience needed to transcend the limitations of early sound film. His 1930’s productions have many of the same crudities of major-studio talkies from the late 1920’s, including stiff, wooden line deliveries and those obnoxious pauses between the actors hearing their cue lines and speaking their own. A lot of his sound films feature musical numbers, but it doesn’t appear he was as capable of recruiting top-tier musical talents for his films as he’d been fine actors like Robeson and Evelyn Preer in his silents.

It also didn’t help that Micheaux had his own racial agenda; he was big on stories contrasting hard-working “good” Blacks who got ahead and succeeded with lazy ones who stayed poor and blamed racism for their failures. Micheaux also frequently told stories about Black men who fall in love with white-looking women but are frustrated until the last reel, when a sudden last-minute revelation shows that the “white” woman the hero has been taking an interest in is actually Black, albeit super-light skinned. This reportedly came from an incident Micheaux went through in his homesteading days, in which he fell in love with a genuinely white woman of Scottish descent (though his biographers have so far been unable to come up with her name), only the relationship went nowhere because in the 1910’s interracial marriages were illegal throughout the U.S. (In 1946, Lena Horne and the white conductor/composer Lennie Hayton had to get married in Paris because no U.S. state then allowed white and Black people to marry. The California Supreme Court threw out the legal ban on interracial marriage in this state in 1949, 18 years before the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated it nationwide.) Micheaux’s later career was, in the words of Black author and film historian Thomas Cripps’s book title, a “slow fade to black.” After The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940) Micheaux made just one more movie, The Betrayal (1948), and died at age 67 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (A number of interviewees for this documentary wondered how someone who’d led an urban life in Chicago and New York ended up dying in so remote a locale as Charlotte.) Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking features interviews with African-American filmmaker John Singleton, film historian Richard Peña, actor Morgan Freeman, musician Stace England, biographer Patrick McGilligan (who’s also written books about Frank Capra and Fritz Lang), and Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart (who’s shown at least three Micheaux films ¬– Within Our Gates, The Symbol of the Unconquered, and Body and Soul – on her program). The film was written and directed by Francesco Zippel, who got his title from a strange quirk in the history of Micheaux’s birthplace, Metropolis. The city government has commissioned a giant statue of Superman and given it pride of place in the town square because in the Superman mythos his home town is “Metropolis.” Zippel argues that instead of embracing a fictional white hero who isn’t even from this planet, the town should have hailed Oscar Micheaux, the Black film pioneer who made it both artistically and commercially despite the long odds against him.