Movies

[jaggedwolf]

Man’s Castle | A Study of Negro Artists | Murder In Harlem

Man’s Castle (1933)

11/419 on the NYC list A depression-era pre-code film focused on a couple living in a Hooverville near the East River. Once more I think Loretta Young (playing Trina) should get away from that man, but at least here the man is forgivable.

I was more entertained than I should be by the variety of poor-paying jobs Bill takes in this film - a walking coffeeshop add with neon lights under his shirt, stilt-walking promo, process server. In that last one, he steps on stage to serve papers to an actress, and the actress is into him because of that??

Unsurprisingly I spent most of the film uninterested in Bill, who is a jerk and also does the jokey threats of violence thing that James Cagney does in Taxi, but I found the final reunion with Trina believable, with the two of them hopping on a train together. Also did like the kids kicking him off their baseball team because he’s too distracted by the train whistles.

The most compelling character was Flossie, an older alcoholic who’s more aware than her first appearance suggests, and I love that she confronts the creeper guy with a gun and just shoots him. Because I am me I had a brief moment contemplating Flossie and Trina banging.

The film was re-released in 1938 with nine minutes of cuts made for the Hays Code, though it was later at least partially restored. There was an odd cut while Bill and Fay were sitting on the couch and I wondered if something was lost there, since it was uncharacteristic of the rest of the film.t

A Study Of Negro Artists (1935)

12/419 on the NYC list. A 35 minute silent film of visual artists of the Harlem Rennaissance at work. My favourite artists to watch here were the sculptors, including the little kids learning some art.

Murder In Harlem (1935)

13/419 on the NYC list. A whodunit loosely inspired by the Leo Frank case, that made me go “ehhhhh” at the film on its own merits and how it handles its inspiration. Unfortunate, I was looking forward to a Harlem-set mystery.

First, the film on its own merits. The acting is stilted, and the climax of the flashback narrative that prevents our couple from getting together is frankly bizarre — our main guy, Henry Glory, gets conked on the head right outside the apartment the apartment of Claudia Vance, the woman he loves, because some baddies misidentify him as their target. They carry him into his apartment while...she and her mother peer through their door and do nothing? And then we timeskip forward to three years later and we are supposed to understand this prevented him from ever seeing her again??

Up to that point, I was enjoying the film. There’s a great moment where the unfairly accused night watchmen stares right into the camera when he realizes he’s going to get the blame for this white woman’s death. I like the flirting between Henry and Claudia, their conversation about Henry obviously being the author of the book he is selling, their little jokes about whether a black man might do better for himself in DC over Harlem because of marrying a schoolteacher in the former.

Once we’re back in the present, however, the film drags. While I appreciate how much of the forward momentum of the investigation is carried by Claudia, not Henry, the dinner where she elicits information from a drunkard lasts longer than the initial bits of humour. In the context of the film alone, I didn’t mind the extra twist of the superintendent committing the rape but not the murder, with the boyfriend seeming suspicious from the start. Poor dead girl, her life sucked all around.

Okay, so the film in context of its inspiration — I don’t care for taking a real-life incident where a Jewish factory superintendent gets convicted of a murder under questionable evidence, has his death sentence commuted by the Governor due to doubts on said evidence, and is finally abducted from prison to be lynched...and turning it into a story where the superintended is confirmed to be guilty of grievous assault at minimum. I understand part of the appeal given the obvious framing of the night watchman in both reality and the film but it’s overall it’s off to me.