Body and Soul (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I was running The Big Chase because I was waiting for Turner Classic Movies’ scheduled showing of a film I was particularly interested in, especially since I’d never seen it before and it was Paul Robeson’s film debut. The film was Body and Soul (1925), produced by Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering African-American filmmaker. To the extent that there was a prestige Black cinema in the 1920’s, Micheaux was it; his productions were reasonably well-mounted and self-financed (he was a successful Black author and his books sold well enough he could make his movies with the royalties from them, and many of the films were based on stories Micheaux had previously published as novels and therefore had a pre-existing market), and he seemed to have had his pick of the Black acting talent pool. Micheaux’s business model, like that of so many other independent filmmakers, evaporated under the twin blows of sound in 1927 and the Depression in 1929. In the silent era it was possible for an independent filmmaker to make a quality product virtually indistinguishable from the output of the major studios; when sound became standard that changed overnight because independent producers couldn’t afford the top-quality audio equipment and the controlled studio conditions under which movies sounded better. While Micheaux continued to produce movies until 1948, after the Depression he had to go hat in hand to white financiers to beg for production money. Also, sound allowed Micheaux to indulge his predilection for preachiness that sometimes afflicted his silents but grew worse when he could actually have his actors declaim at length Micheaux’s messages of racial uplift. The one previous silent film of Micheaux’s I’d seen was Within Our Gates (1920), a great movie that showed Micheaux as one of the most technically accomplished directors of his time, even though Micheaux’s directorial skills were hamstrung by an overly didactic and preachy script.

Body and Soul was the only one of Micheaux’s silent films that was a flop on first release – though it’s also, ironically, the only one that survived with its original English intertitles. (Within Our Gates survived only in a print released in Spain, with garbled translations that made it clear whoever was rendering the Spanish versions had a rough time understanding the originals. Having seen Body and Soul and noticing how many of the titles attempted to reproduce Black dialect – including two that include what has come to be called the "N"-word, though Micheaux spells it "niggah" – I could see why the Spanish translators were thrown!) The main problem seems to have been that its central character was a corrupt minister, Rev. Isaiah T. Jenkins (Paul Robeson), and though Micheaux’s opening title makes it clear that he’s not a real minister but a crook posing as one, apparently African-American audiences at the time didn’t want to see a movie in which a minister (even a phony one) was the principal villain. The central characters are actually two women, Martha Jane Perkins (Mercedes Gilbert) and her daughter Isabelle (Julia Theresa Russell). Martha Jane works as a laundress and has saved enough money for Isabelle and her husband-to-be to buy a house for themselves. She stashes it inside the family Bible. The only problem is that Martha Jane wants Isabelle to marry that fine, upstanding minister Rev. Jenkins, while Isabelle only has eyes for Sylvester (also Paul Robeson), Rev. Jenkins’s good-guy brother. (Turner Classic Movies hosts Jacqueline Stewart and Lonnie G. Bunch, Jr. identified the two Robeson characters as twins; the film itself calls them brothers but not necessarily twins.) Mom doesn’t want Isabelle to marry Sylvester because he doesn’t seem to have a way to support them; he’s supposed to be an inventor but we only find that out in the final scenes, when he gets a $3,000 advance check from a company that has bought one of his inventions and promised him royalties.

While Martha Jane and her friends, church ladies Caline (Lillian Johnson) and Lucy (Madame Robinson), are talking up Rev. Jenkins to Isabelle and telling her what a fine, upstanding, moral, Godly man he is, we’ve seen Rev. Jenkins drinking (during Prohibition) and hanging out with lowlifes like a speakeasy proprietor (Marshall Rodgers) and a light-skinned Black crook, Yello-Curley Hinds (Lawrence Chenault). Yello-Curley had known Rev. Jenkins before he started posing as a minister and therefore could expose him; he tells Rev. Jenkins he’s interested in Isabelle as a potential performer in his “Cotton Blossom’s Shoulder Shakers” revue in Atlanta (the film mostly takes place in the small Georgia town of Tatesville but has key sequences set in Atlanta) and seems to think Rev. Jenkins can get her to him and allow him basically to traffic her. Only Rev. Jenkins wants Isabelle for himself, and one night while he and Isabelle are stranded in the rain during a nighttime carriage ride when their horse runs away, he takes Isabelle to a deserted cabin and rapes her. The rape scene is subtly and vividly staged, with shots of Jenkins’s feet approaching Isabelle’s cabin room, a title reading “A half-hour later,” and then Jenkins’s feet leaving in the opposite direction. Micheaux masks out the top and bottom of the frame and creates a proto-wide screen effect that enhances the sense of Isabelle’s violation. He also gets a superb performance out of Julia Theresa Russell, who expertly depicts what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder – while Mercedes Gilbert as her mom irritates her (and us) by her continued faith in Rev. Jenkins and his essential goodness. Rev, Jenkins attacks her again in the Perkins home and forces her to steal her mom’s savings from the family Bible, then gives her back $10 of the loot to get the hell out of town and go to Atlanta, where the $10 will enable her to survive for a week.

When mom discovers the missing money (and Mercedes Gilbert’s acting is variable; in her close-ups she’s as good as Julia Theresa Russell but she also gets a lot of the arm-waving gestures endemic to mediocre to bad silent-film acting), she’s convinced Isabelle ran off to Atlanta with it. She tracks Isabelle down to a barely furnished room in the big city and confronts her, asking her why she’s living in such shabby circumstances and starving herself to death when she has all that money. Isabelle explains that she really doesn’t have that money and Rev. Jenkins forced her to steal it and give it to him. At first mom defends the minister, until Isabelle tells her the complete story (and we get the kind of long, almost proto-noir flashback Micheaux used in Within Our Gates as well) and then expires, presumably from malnutrition. Martha Jane returns to Tatesville and confronts Rev. Jenkins just as he’s leading a service and preaching the “Dry Bones … In the Valley” sermon the titles tell us is a highlight of the Black church generally and a key rite of passage for any Black minister. Micheaux manages the difficult feat of reproducing the visceral excitement of a Black church service in a silent film; as Jenkins delivers his sermon the crowd gets more ecstatic and writhes on the church floor or in their pews. One of Jenkins’s altar people even gets knocked down twice when Jenkins delivers his sermon with flailing-arm gestures. When Martha Jane calls out Rev. Jenkins, the churchgoers turn on him and it looks for a while like Micheaux is pulling a switcheroo on the usual racial stereotypes – it looks like a crowd of Black people are getting ready to lynch one of their own – and in scenes that are strikingly reminiscent of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones (which Robeson didn’t film until 1933 but which he’d acted in on stage in 1925, the same year he made Body and Soul), he makes his escape through the woods to Martha Jane’s home, where he begs her forgiveness – and she gives it to him. Then there’s an unconvincing resolution in which the presumably dead Isabelle turns up again, alive and well, with Sylvester (the “good” Paul Robeson) in tow, and Martha Jane comes back to consciousness and realizes that the whole last part of the movie was (you guessed it) just a dream.

Just where the real part of the film’s story stopped and the dream part began was a mystery to both Charles and I, and Charles also pointed out that Sylvester presumably would have known that Rev. Jenkins was a crook and could therefore have exposed him. (I assumed that the two had been separated as children and raised in different households, so Sylvester wouldn’t have known of Jenkins’s adult activities.) At least some of the lacunae in Body and Soul may be due to the New York film censors, who according to the film’s Wikipedia page initially denied Micheaux permission to release the film because it would "tend to incite to crime" and was "immoral" and "sacrilegious.” Ultimately Micheaux was forced to re-edit the film and take out much of its content – the Wikipedia page said the cuts reduced the film from nine reels to five, though the current version runs 102 minutes and that’s about the norm for a nine-reel silent – and, alas, the censored version is the only one that survives. Still, despite its plot holes and its overall preachiness (a word that keeps coming up in connection with Micheaux’s work), Body and Soul remains a quite powerful work. Like Within Our Gates, Body and Soul is good enough to establish Oscar Micheaux not only as an important pioneer of Black American cinema but a major film artist in his own right, worthy of study and veneration.