SWING (1938)

Directed by Oscar Micheaux, a groundbreaking African-American indie director, this "race film," a movie with an all-black cast, begins in Birmingham as we see an alarm clock go off at 6 a.m. and Mandy reluctantly rising to go her job as a maid to a white family. Her husband Cornell, a self-styled dandy, comes strutting in from catting around all night and just wants to go to sleep. Meanwhile in another Birmingham home, Lem gets ready to go to work as his wife Eloise stays in bed with a headache. Lem, the jealous type, suspects her of cheating, and sure enough, we soon discover that Eloise and Cornell are having a fling. When Mandy tracks them down at a nightclub, she starts tearing the clothes off him and gets into fisticuffs with Eloise. Months later, Mandy, having left her husband, is living in Harlem where she has met up with Lena, an old Birmingham friend. Mandy was helpful to Lena back then, so Lena is determined to help Mandy, getting her a job as a wardrobe mistress for a show being put on by producer Ted Gregory, Lena's boss. But, surprise, the star of the show is none other than Eloise, using the name Cora Smith, and being a general pain in the ass to everyone. Lem is around too, and eventually Cornell shows up, broke and miserable. In a twist right out of 42ND STREET, a drunken Eloise breaks her leg and Lena tries to talk Ted into using Mandy to save the show at the last minute.

These race films, which got only limited releases in areas with good-sized African American audiences, had lower budgets even than the mainstream Poverty Row B-movies of the era, so they come off as cheap in most aspects, such as sets, costumes, music and acting, but most of them have an appealing scrappiness that keeps you watching. This one mixes melodrama, comedy and music, and the acting, at least by the women, is a notch above what you might expect. Cora Green is OK in the lead; she comes off a little too goody-goody early on but toughens up later—at one point, she exclaims, "My name is Mandy Jenkins and I can whip any hussy that stands on two feet!" Better is Hazel Diaz as Eloise, the bitch you love to hate. Both women only made a couple of movies and apparently were better known as club singers; Green does a nice rendition of "Bei Mir Bist du Schon." There's also a good tap number called "I Got Rhythm, Boy." There are also decent performances from Dorothy Van Engle as Lena and Carmen Newsome (pictured) as Ted. Stereotypes are mostly confined to the no-good Cornell, but unfortunately we discover at the very end that the name of the show that's opening is "Ah Lub's Dat Man." [TCM]