"You caused me to leave school. You taught me to smoke that filthy reefer, to drink, to gamble. To do the many evil things that have ruined me."

An oddly constructed plot, dreadfully poor audio, and dialogue heavy scenes make watching Oscar Micheaux's first foray into talkies a bit tough. On the other hand, the story held my interest and was easy to follow, and as it was based on Micheaux's autobiographical novel The Conquest, it carried with it aspects that were deeply personal to him. His leading lady, Eunice Brooks, turns in a good performance portraying a femme fatale who is lovestruck by one man (Stanley Morrell), and rather cruel to another (Carl Mahon). As with many of his other films, Micheaux livens things up with musical performances. Check out Roland Holder's nifty tap dance at 49:15, and the wild chorus girl dance to "Make Hay Hay While the Sun is Shining" at 57:20.

Unfortunately, it was often hard to hear the words while watching this, despite my TV being cranked up to maximum volume. Let's just say, I hope that someday someone puts the audio through noise filtering or the "AI" treatment that lost Beatles track just got. It starts with a man leaving his fiancée because she intends to turn the mansion of her former white employer into a speakeasy and casino. He doesn't drink or gamble and wants to move out west to become a rancher, something that doesn't appeal to her. There is an aspect of "good" man contrasted with "bad" woman here that could have done with more nuance, but I think Micheaux was appealing to virtue and work ethic as the way into the middle class for African Americans, a common theme for him.

While in Montana for five years, the man strikes up a relationship with another woman (Nora Newsome) but leaves her because he fears they can't be together. She's white, you see, and he feels this way despite her wonderful comment that "race doesn't matter" and a long kiss they share, something which must have caused eyebrows to raise at local censorship boards. I loved this boldness from Micheaux, even if after the man's gone, her father rather conveniently tells her that her mother was Ethiopian, which also allows us to guess where this going to go.

Meanwhile back in Chicago, the woman has become the "queen of the underworld," and of questionable virtue. We eventually hear that she's led an immigrant from Ethiopia on, and corrupted him with her wicked ways (as an aside, clearly the coronation of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia the year before was on Micheaux's mind). I wish we had seen all this, instead of hearing about it in the dialogue. In general, I wish the action had stayed on Brooks's character as she was more interesting. The two men had some degree of screen presence, but lesser acting ability, and not a lot of chemistry with her. Anyway, it all comes to a head when a gun is drawn, hearkening back to the old white owner of the mansion's violence we're told about at the beginning, but I won't spoil it further.

It's fascinating to think that this film was based on Micheaux's novel, and that he established and farmed on a homestead in South Dakota from 1904 to 1911. His marriage out there was deeply unhappy and short-lived, something he altered in the fantasy of his story. His homestead failing led him to write books, which in turn led him to make movies, so there is both the snippet of an origin story and imagined dream ending here. It's creaky and will take patience, but it's worth seeing.