MURDER IN HARLEM (1935)

Arthur Vance, a security guard at a chemical laboratory, makes his midnight rounds and finds a dead woman, Myrtle Stanfield, on the floor of a small storeroom. When the police arrive, they find two oddly worded crumpled-up notes near her body that seem to implicate the watchman (one says, "The tall Negro did it"). Suddenly, we cut to a flashback from three years earlier which involves none of these characters. Henry Glory is trying to raise money for law school by selling his self-published romance novel door to door. One of his customers sends him to The Catbird, a good-time girl who lives in an apartment building across the street, but he rings the wrong doorbell and winds up selling his book to the sweet and innocent Claudia. Over time, sparks fly until The Catbird's thugs mistake him for someone else and knock him out and drag him into the Catbird's rooms. He assumes Claudia was in cahoots with the Catbird, and he ends his relationship with Claudia. Back in the present time, Glory is now a lawyer (and still writing novels), Arthur the watchman is Claudia's brother, and Claudia visits Glory at his office and asks him to take Arthur's case, which he does. Eventually, it comes out that Brisbane, Arthur's boss, claims he saw Arthur and Myrtle sneak off to the storeroom together that afternoon and his story is corroborated by his assistant Lem Hawkins, but when Claudia meets up with Hawkins at a party, she gets him drunk and another story emerges, one that could clear Arthur.

Most movie viewers, whether they are aware of it or not, adjust their expectations for a film based on genre. People hold Marvel superhero movies to a different standard than they would a low budget horror movie on Shudder. Similarly, classic movie buffs don't judge a B-movie from the 40s by the same standards as an A-movie like Casablanca. This film is an example of a race movie, a film made by Black performers and filmmakers, usually with very low budgets and outside of the studio system, so anyone watching this film needs to adjust to the at-times amateurish feel of the onscreen proceedings. This one, from director and writer Oscar Micheaux, has narrative problems, including the odd positioning of the three-year flashback, and some wooden performances, but taking those limitations into account, this is a fairly entertaining example of the race movie genre. The lead actor, Clarence Books (as Henry) is not terribly charismatic; I was assuming he was delivering some extra afternoon delight to his female readers, as there is an odd fade-out and fade-in during his first sale, but that seems not to be the case. Dorothy Van Engle is a bit better as Claudia, as is Bee Freeman as The Catbird. Despite some plotholes, the story is easy to follow and has a satisfying ending. In the opening scene, Arthur acts very suspiciously as though he is expecting to find a body in the storeroom, but this seems to just be the result of awkward acting. Out of the blue, there are a couple of musical numbers that have nothing to do with anything, including a delightful soft-shoe tap number (pictured above). At 90 minutes, it feels a big dragged out at times, but it's watchable and interesting from a historical perspective. [Criterion Channel]