Murder on Lenox Avenue

"Murder on Lenox Avenue" (1941) is a Harlem based "race film" starring Mamie Smith, Alec Lovejoy, Norman Astwood, Augustus Smith, Alberta Perkins, Edna Mae Harris, Sidney Easton, and many others. This tries to do too many things for its own good, but compared to many of this ilk, this is actually pretty good. Acting is severely stage-bound; so is cinematography, which honestly at times is stagnant. Opening scene is a nice montage, with odd angles, etc., but photography for the most part is claustrophobic and uncreative. Story regards the black race and white grifting and grafting, the rise of black business in a black community, but mostly this is about a black man who promises women his love and forfeits his promises over and over, leading to one pregnancy and suicide and eventually...well, that would be a spoiler.

Fascinating from an historical view. Not the best film ever made, but certainly better than a lot of others of its type that were made almost strictly for black theaters in black neighborhoods and starring nearly an all-black cast and made on the cheap-cheap. Music here alone would make this worthwhile. It's performed off-the-cuff, actually raw in some numbers with mistakes and all, though the jazz numbers with Smith and one or two others are quite okay, if not smooth. Musical numbers pervade the film. For the record, though I'm not sure it's really accurate, Mamie Smith has been listed as "the first recorded American female black blues artist." In 1920 she recorded "Crazy Blues".