Birthright

This film, from what I know and have seen of it, really is exceptional, quite well filmed and cast for its time. It recounts the uphill struggle that even a well educated black man faced (the handsome protagonist educated at Harvard University, at that!). Alas, its availability is quite limited. Even if there were earlier versions and remakes, silent as well as sound movies, this one deserves wider rediscovery. For some fairly extended scenes sampled from the film, there are bits of it included on the 2008 DVD anthology, "Jammin', Jumpin', and Jivin': All Black Cast Classics. vol. 2" (Something Weird Video. available on its own WWW site).

This adaptation of Thomas Edmund Stribling's novel was akin to Hitchcock's adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel, 'Jamaica Inn'. I enjoyed reading Stribling's novel simply because it was written from a black perspective. I don't think I should be too harsh on Micheaux because his contemporaries, Hitchcock and DeMille, weren't at their best either at this stage.

This was the third of five films bearing the title: BIRTHRIGHT. This film was produced by the Micheaux Pictures Corporation by Oscar Micheaux and released in 1939. Micheaux was inclined to adapt from his screenplays from novels. Micheaux based this one on T.S. Stribling's novel of the same title which was about a black student who graduated from Harvard University who confronted the racism of of his time. The film had a subtitle also, it was: A Story of the Negro and the South, it referred to the heroic young man in his attempt to found a school for African-American children in a small town in Tennessee so as to "Uplift the Race," a phrase used by Spike Lee half a century later. Micheaux also made the earlier silent-movie of the same title in 1924.