The Symbol of the Unconquered

THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED (1920) is one of the earliest surviving silent films to prominently feature a black cast, and is directed by Oscar Micheaux. It tells the story of Eve Mason (Iris Hall), a woman from the south who inherits property from her grandfather and journeys to settle there. Along the way, after being forced to stay in a barn by a light-skinned black, Jefferson Driscoll (Lawrence Chenault) who hates his race and tries to pass for white, she encounters Hugh Van Allen (Walter Thompson), a neighbor who owns property which turns out to be very valuable. When Driscoll and his white friends learn of the value of Van Allen's property, they plot against him in order to force him to sell - or suffer the consequences...

SCRIPT: As with Micheaux's previous feature WITHIN OUR GATES, the narrative rambles and is crowded with too many characters to make a definite impression. The central themes deal with a black woman trying to find a place for herself in a hostile world, and a biracial man who harbors resentment against his own race for supposedly hampering his progress in society. (A flashback shows why – Driscoll's mother unwittingly interferes with his attempts to court a white girl, and he reacts by throwing his mother to the ground.) Interesting themes, but unfortunately the narrative sags fatally in the middle with rather uninteresting plotting by the villains, and by the time the climax comes along, it's too late to really perk things up. There's also really very little character definition – nobody seems like anything more than a character type here. SCORE: 5.5/10

ACTING: The acting is adequate here for the most part, but since there are so many characters to keep track of, I can't say that I felt any of the performances really stood out. There is some melodramatic behavior and mugging early on, and some of the scenes are unintentionally funny as a result. Iris Hall is charming as the heroine, but she doesn't really get enough screen time to do much with her role. Chenault is a bit broad but mostly effective as the villainous Driscoll. SCORE: 6/10

CINEMATOGRAPHY/PRODUCTION: The camera-work is fairly competent here, with some interesting and evocative shots of the night sky, as well as a few menacing shots of the KKK ride at night. The editing is a little clumsy at times. There could be a bit more variety in long, medium, and close- up shots, though. It would help to maintain interest. SCORE: 6/10

SUMMARY: THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED does have an intriguing premise, and one has to commend Micheaux for being willing to bring such uncompromising material to the screen. The narrative is uneven and the acting is adequate, but there's not much chance for anyone to make an impression. Still, the movie does have historical importance as an early example of films that address the issues of black life in the early 20th century. SCORE: 6/10

I watched this on Turner Classic Movies, which helped finance the restoration of the film from the only surviving print, located in Belgium. It was introduced by Ruby Dee, who mentioned it was advertised to negroes with statements like "come see the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan," which was pretty bold in 1920. It sounded good to me, but the film warns you that missing footage will be summarized by title cards. And wouldn't you know it, the supposed annihilation was part of the missing footage! What a letdown! And the ultra modern percussion music score by Max Roach, consisting of drums, a symbol and sticks just seemed out of place for this film, and I found it very obtrusive. Even though the filming techniques were primitive, it had some interesting elements, touching on a light-skinned negro who hates the negro race, and a white woman who helps the negroes. Micheaux never made the bad guys all white or the good guys all black, like some exploitation films in the 60's and 70's. The narrative was sometimes confusing, but that may have been because of the title translation or some missing footage. Still, I was disappointed, especially after I enjoyed Micheaux's film "Within Our Gates" so much.

'The Symbol of the Unconquered', like most silent westerns, is an easygoing outdoor yarn making good use of attractive sylvan locations; but with the unorthodox racial element one expects from a film by Oscar Micheaux. The villainy is surprisingly not exclusively white in origin, the meanest of the bad guys being a mulatto called Driscoll whose hatred of blacks derives from his own failure to pass for white - in a flashback anticipating 'Imitation of Life' - when his black mother inconveniently shows up while he's courting a nice local white girl. The veteran black actor Leigh Whipper (best known for the role of Crooks in both the original Broadway production and film version of 'Of Mice and Men') makes his film debut rather bizarrely playing the role of a villainous Indian fakir.

After much scheming the bad guys finally make their move on the estate of hero Hugh Van Allen's oil-rich settlement with the help of the local Ku Klux Klan, who saddle up in an impressively shot night sequence, while heroine Eve Mason changes out of her frock into an equally impressive Annie Oakley buckskin cowgirl outfit to ride off herself for help.

Unfortunately, it's at this point that a substantial chunk of the film is tantalisingly missing. But the help duly arrives, since the Klan get their asses kicked and are sent packing by a fusillade of bricks thrown by a brother. When the dust settles, Hugh is now an oil millionaire with a big office, his arm round the comely Eve. The End.

After "Within Our Gates" (1920), the second of Oscar Micheaux's three surviving silent films (that I know of as of this writing), "The Symbol of the Unconquered" is another, along with the prior picture, strong rebuttal to D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), as well as a reflection of the Great Migration in the United States and a revision of the melodrama and Western genres. Griffith's ahistorical and racist Civil War and Reconstruction-era epic is probably the most influential film ever made, including being largely responsible for the creation of the second KKK. It also galvanized African Americans into action, including the then-nascent NAACP, which protested the film, and Micheaux, who took to filmmaking to correct such screen misrepresentations of race, sex, and the Klan. Not the heroes Griffith depicted, the night riders are terrorists behind a system of corruption and racism.

Unfortunately, little more than half of the original film appears to exist now, including the surviving print missing its climax and with the restoration only providing a brief synopsis from a contemporary review to give us an idea of what happened in it. We see what leads up to and what the resolution is of the attack from the Klan on a black prospector in an effort to steal his land, but we're missing the confrontation itself. It makes it difficult to evaluate the picture aesthetically, without the payoff, just as the heightened crosscutting was escalating the tension--contrasting torch-lit nighttime cinematography of the Klan with daytime (and perhaps originally tinted day-for-night) images of the female heroine mounting her own horse to organize a rescue effort for her prospector neighbor. The anti-racist intent of racial uplift of the film remains clear, though, and given the financial and technical limitations (the day lighting of some of the supposed night scenes here in particular) accessible to the African-American filmmaker Micheaux, the extreme censorship and other difficulties in distribution his films faced and the fact of the poor treatment of nitrate prints for most of the afterlife of the silent film era, it's fortunate the much of the film still exists at all. Most of his silent films--most silent films in general--don't.

In addition to recasting the Klan as the villainous and multi-racial "Knights of the Black Cross," Micheaux also focuses a lot on relations between lighter and darker-skinned African Americans. The dilemma of the central romance hinges on the man not knowing that the woman he loves is also black and her not knowing that she's sometimes "passing" as white. "The melodramatic trope of someone being other than what he or she seems," as Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence put it in their essay "Oscar Micheaux's The Symbol of the Unconquered: Text and Context," and given that melodrama was the genre both Griffith and Micheaux tended to work in, the effectiveness of the melodrama (as Dan Florey begins to get at in the essay "Race, Rationality, and Melodrama: Aesthetic Response and the Case of Oscar Micheaux") was paramount to Micheaux's recasting of the cinematic representation of race, sex, or the Klan.

Additionally, the Western genre plays interestingly into the Great Migration narrative of the film, which is set in the Northwest, the heroine having moved their from the South to inherit her grandfather's land. The prospector hero, Van Allen, is ruggedly self-sufficient and courteous to a good woman as typical of Western heroes. Adding to the racial difference from mainstream entries in the genre, it's the heroine, Eve Mason, dressed in full cowgirl regalia and riding a horse as it bucks, who comes to rescue the man as his property is threatened by unscrupulous bandits.

Perhaps even more intriguing, the main villain hates his own race, including his black mother, who once ruined his courtship of a white woman by her presence exposing his racial heritage, as he intentionally tries to cross the color line. That Lawrence Chenault portrays such a complicated antagonist makes "The Symbol of the Unconquered" all the more compelling. This reconfiguration of the "mulatto" characters, the good woman and the bad man, is in stark contrast to Griffith's simplistic and racist depiction of their villainy as an innate consequence of miscegenation. It's the locus of Griffith's racial and sexual paranoia, of black men having sex (but always considered rape by Griffith and his ilk) with white women. For Micheaux's mulatto, it's also sexual, but may be a consequence of the interracial relationship being denied rather than the other way around. That the role of Chenault's Driscoll's mother is cast as the proof of his race and, perhaps, a suggestion of the history of white men raping black women also hints at this reversal of Griffith's characterization. Micheaux, after all, did much the same in the more-complete extant print of "Within Our Gates." Another great scene here of Driscoll forced to confront his own race occurs in a through-the-mirror shot as he sees the proudly black Van Allen behind him before they fight over stolen horses.

J. Ronald Green (in the book "With a Crooked Stick -- The Films of Oscar Micheaux") also points out that the early scene of Eve's escape into a storm as recalling Lillian Gish in Griffith's "Way Down East" (1920). Although now an incomplete film, what remains of "The Symbol of the Unconquered"--its use of melodrama and the Western to counteract Griffith's cinematic misrepresentations, to portray good and evil as not based on race, heroes and those to be rescued as not based on sex, and to offer positive portrayals of race men and women for social uplift--is enough to prove its greatness beside Micheaux's two other surviving silent films, "Within Our Gates" and "Body and Soul" (1925).

Symbol of the Unconquered, The (1920)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Strange film from the black independent director Oscar Micheaux. A light skinned black woman travels North to get her inheritance that her grandfather left her. In this new town she meets another black man who hates his race and pretends to be wife, an evil Indian and eventually the KKK. The director apparently started making these "black films" in response to how blacks were being shown at the time so on a historical level this film is pretty interesting but as a film it really never takes off. The stereotypes are pretty out there and laughable and the film is way too over-dramatic in every single scene. The film was originally promoted to black people claiming that the KKK would be massacred in the film. That happens but sadly this scene is lost so we're not able to view it today. I guess you could call this one of the first "blaxploitation" films, although the director never makes all the whites bad and all the blacks good. It's rather interesting seeing his hatred towards certain members of his own race. Another down note is the horrible music score added to the film. Again, for film history sake this is a must see but on its own there's really nothing too special here. I also recorded the director's Within the Gates and Body and Soul, which are apparently better.