Moon Over Harlem

From director Edgar G. Ulmer came this, his rare foray in "race movies", Moon Over Harlem. The story, about a rich widow who unknowingly marries a gangster to the consternation of her daughter, is the kind that already seemed old hat in 1939, though Ulmer does the best he could under the circumstances with the low budget and a short schedule of only four days. The best one could say about the results is that the dialogue does keep flowing and the score mostly keeps playing. Too bad someone didn't try to keep the movie preserved enough to maybe clean up some of the wear on both the soundtrack and print. All that said, the performances of Buddy Harris as mob boss Dollar Bill, Cora Green as new wife Minnie, Izinetta Wilcox as daughter Sue who also provides a nice singing voice, and Earl Gough as Sue's crusading boyfriend Bob are pretty good despite their limited rehearsal time. And it's nice to see jazz legends like Christopher Columbus and New Orleans native Sidney Bechet perform here during the wedding reception. I was also slightly amused by Freddie Robinson as Half-Pint. Also, if I didn't read the cast list here on IMDb, I wouldn't have recognized Jacksonville, FL, native Mercedes Gilbert, who I previously saw in Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul, in this movie. In summation, Moon Over Harlem is uneven as drama but should be interesting enough for anyone curious about these old movies made for a certain segment of the United States who were being treated as second-class citizens at this time.

This movie begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral, so one would expect it to be a tragedy. In fact, it is uplifting and exciting. This is actually an extraordinary portrayal of Harlem around the 1930's. It is the richest and most interesting portrayal of life recorded in that period. After watching hundreds of films where Afro-Americans are limited to cameo roles as smiling, dancing servants, it is exciting to see them portraying three dimensional people. Only King Vidor's "Cabin in the Sky" matches it for intensity and realism.

This film was shot in four days on an $8,000 budget by the cinema genius director, "King of the B's" Edgar Ulmer. It unfortunately has technical problems in the first reel, on the Platinum DVD, I watched. It was difficult to understand the dialog over the noisy soundtrack for about five minutes. However, the soundtrack improves quite significantly and the problem soon disappears.

The plot of the film is a political reformer (read "communist" in the subtext) fighting against a hoodlum who has been running an insurance=protection racket. This could have been totally stereotyped in lesser hands, but Ulmer and his screenwriter wife, Shirley, has been able to make both characters believable and interesting. The reformer really does love Harlem and really does want to unite black people. Even the gangster responds to this idea of unity, refusing to go along with the white gangsters who actually control crime in Harlem.

A couple of other amazing things about this film: it contains perhaps the first inter-racial romance and almost kiss (there is a cut just before the lips touch) and their is an incestuous sub-plot about a step-father lusting after his step-daughter.

This is a unique film and anybody who wants to see what the Golden age of Hollywood might have been like if it wasn't so racist should see it.

I would recommend this Black cast film first to anyone who's new to Black cast films. This film is the best. You can tell that because this movie has been shown a lot over the years even till this day. Moon over Harlem is more then just a Black film, it's a family story that anyone can relate to. A mother falls in love with a gangster and doesn't know it, desperate to have a man because her husband died, she overlooks her new husband flaws. All the time he has his eyes on the beautiful daughter and his new wife's money. The new husband comes between the daughter and mother and mother takes the new husband side. The daughter has to go into show business to support herself and drops out of school, something her mother detested her daughter doing. All goes wrong for the married couple, for both dies. The daughter never made amends with her mother but she has her man by her side, so everything will be okay. This really tells a story and you forget the color and look at the talent. The Black entertainment in the film is wonderful. It shows you how the nightclubs were in Harlem that we hear so much about. Its not stereotypical at all. The cast does some great acting and most of these people have never been in films before. One thing about these Black cast films is that the people that were in them only appeared in a few and that's it. I wish they would of done more and I wish the public would of kept up with them. I'm glad these films were made and I guess these wonderful actresses and actors were too beautiful and talented for Hollywood but thank goodness for Black Cinema. Izenetta Wilcox is very beautiful and talented. I wish she would have done more. The whole cast is filled with pretty girls... High Browns and High Yalla's. Cora Green is great as always, check her out in Oscar Micheaux's Swing. It's a fast paced story but ful-filling. A movie like this could never be made in Hollywood because it's not stereotypical and Blacks are really acting and Hollywood could never back then have Blacks as classy and sophisticated as whites in Hollywood movies. That's a big no no! I'm glad Edgar Ulmer made this movie outside of Hollywood and this is his best.

Gangster marries world's kindest, most charitable woman, scams money from her while coming on to her daughter. When gangster is caught by his wife attempting to rape the daughter, he lies and blames the girl. Driven from her mother's home, the girl turns to show business to make a living.

Performances vary from extraordinary (Cora Green) to unusual (Percy Harris) to just plain amateur night. According to the publicity accompanying the dvd of this film, Ulmer made it for $8,000. It seems hard to believe since there are many sets and crowds of people.

Edgar Ulmer's 1939 black programmer was almost lost forever. Several versions of the film were found and re-mastered into a dvd which is at best fair. It is frequently hard to hear and there are occasional bewildering cuts. If you see this movie, remember it was made in the same year as "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz."

The best thing about the movie is it's display of a black working/middle class far from the "street" folks many people tend to associate with Harlem. The movie is never condescending and never portrays blacks as seterotypes. As a glimpse into the life of the average black family in New York in the late '30's, Moon Over Harlem, while it fails as drama, succeeds as history lesson.

Edgar G. Ulmer's "Moon Over Harlem" has its good points and its bad points. It's good points are that, as several posters have mentioned, it wisely avoids the stereotypes that many all-black-cast films of the time--known as "race films," almost all of which were made by whites, as was this one--were party to. The black people in this film come from strong families, are educated, gainfully employed, and are about as far from the "Stepin Fetchit" image of blacks that pervaded films of the time as you could get. Its downside is that, frankly, it's just not very good. Performances range from just above competent to just below embarrassing, and, even taking into account its rock-bottom $8000 budget, the preponderance of stock footage gets annoying and its production shortcomings--the sound is terrible, for one thing--are frustrating. Ulmer had a good idea with this film, and it's obvious that he was trying for something much different than that found in the typical "race film" of the time, but as so often happened with Ulmer's projects, talent and good intentions couldn't overcome a lack of money. The cast tries hard but they're just not up to it, and the general shoddiness of the production and the amateurishness of the performances help to defeat what potential this film had to stand out from the other race films of its day. Ulmer gets an "A" for effort, but a "D" for results.