MURDER IN HARLEM

Director: Oscar Micheaux

96min.

Cast: Clarence Brooks, Dorothy Van Engle, Andrew S. Bishop, Alice B. Russell, Alec Lovejoy

 

Inspired by the racially charged 1913 murder of Mary Phagan (which ended with the notorious lynching of Jewish businessman Leo Frank), this powder keg of a movie follows a novelist-turned-lawyer (Clarence Brooks) who investigates the killing of a female factory employee, and exposes a conspiracy to pin the murder on the Black night watchman. A remake of Micheaux’s 1921 silent THE GUNSAULUS MYSTERY (now lost), MURDER IN HARLEM (also released as LEM HAWKINS’S CONFESSION) is noteworthy for a speaking cameo by the director (as a detective), and a thinly-disguised version of himself: a writer selling his novel door-to-door (as Micheaux himself had done)