MURDER IN HARLEM (1935) B/W 100m. dir: Oscar Micheaux

w/Clarence Brooks, Dorothy Van Engle, Andrew Bishop, Laura Bowman

A black night watchman finds the body of a white woman on his rounds. He's framed for the murder, and his sister's boyfriend, a young law student, tries to clear his name. This is a movie that FilmFrog has never seen but recommends on the strength of the reputation of its director. Micheaux has been hailed as the first strong black director, a filmmaker who took blacks out of their stereotypical roles in mainstream Hollywood films and placed them in stories which depicted their lives in a more realistic way. MURDER IN HARLEM may be more historically significant than technologically innovative, but it's certainly a film worth checking out.