The Betrayal

The 64 year old Oscar Micheaux made this swansong film which lasted for three hours and was a box office disaster. It was an adaptation of his own novel, 'The Wind from Nowhere', but he was still doing the same thing as Alfred Hitchcock: adapting novels. The question is, was this film any better than 'The Paradine Case'?

I've read a number of articles about Micheaux and his films, and some stuff about this movie in particular, and it looks dire.

The released cut was just over 3 hours long, and by all accounts there was barely enough plot to cover something half that long. The acting received poor reviews (he had several amateur non-actors in the leads) and the script is absurdly verbose; a remark is made that Micheaux would use 100 words when 10 would do. There are lengthy speeches against interracial marriage (Micheaux seems to have had some racial-separatist views) and also took the stand that American blacks should abandon the cities and take to the frontiers to build new lives and communities. By all accounts, one of Micheaux's biggest failings was that he was a humorless and overly didactic storyteller, and even his best films became tedious and preachy. Apparently this was no exception. African-American audiences of the day found the film offensive. Micheaux's politics may have been outdated by the time the film came out; doubtless they would not go over well today.

Even though it's based on a novel, it's really a remake of his first film, "The Homesteader", telling an identical story with different names. By all reports, the technical aspects are crude, but that's almost to be expected as Micheaux's projects were chronically underfunded. He was a maverick in the "race movie' world and deserves to be remembered as a pioneer, but it's too bad that much of his work is seemingly so unimpressive. A similar issue is true of a pioneering female moviemaker, Dorothy Davenport, whose films are spoiled by a melodramatic, preachy tone as she sought to solve society's ills with well-intentioned finger-wagged.