WAY DOWN SOUTH (1939)

This rare oddity was aired last year on Turner Classic as part of its "Race and Hollywood" series. Unfortunately, the most interesting thing about the movie is that it was written by famed poet Langston Hughes and politically active actor Clarence Muse, though as film critic Donald Bogle noted before TCM's showing, the script was most likely reworked by other hands before it was actually shot. The setting is a pre-Civil War plantation (owned by the kindly Ralph Morgan) where all the slaves are healthy and happy as they sing and dance their ways through their chores. Morgan's lawyer (Edwin Maxwell) tells him he's spending too much money on keeping the slave quarters comfortable, but Morgan ignores his advice. One day, while out with his young son (Bobby Breen) and house slave Uncle Caton (Muse) to watch the slaves dance and sing as they cut the last of the sugar cane, Morgan loses control of his horse and is killed. The wicked lawyer, as the executor of the estate, becomes a cruel master, whipping the slaves (as Morgan never did) and soon deciding to sell off most of them in order to finance his own travels. Breen talks Muse into running away with him to New Orleans in order to get Muse on a riverboat to escape being sold, and Breen has the bright idea of having Muse dress up as a deaf and dumb white woman (his face covered by a veil). The owner of a Cajun inn (Alan Mowbray) befriends Breen and winds up helping him expose Maxwell, and a judge (Robert Grieg) is called in to stop the slave auction in the nick of time. The movie, which was released by RKO, has the low budget look of a Poverty Row race movie, aimed at a black audience, but the black characters are slighted, and what little character development there is occurs only among the white characters. The selling point of the film was 12-year-old Breen, a moderately famous boy soprano, and he's not bad, though a scene in which he sings "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" at a slave meeting is awkward at best. Grieg makes the most of his few minutes as a gluttonous judge with gout. Not only do the sets look cheap, but despite the existence of at least two dance numbers, not much money could have been spent on choreography. Film buffs may recognize Lillian Yarbo, who played maids in some 40 movies during the 40's, and Charles Middleton, most famous as Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon movies. [TCM]