The Black Kino Fist: Black life as depicted in film history

The Exile (1931)

The Exile is a 1931 American film by Oscar Micheaux with the co-direction of the Dances and Ensemble by Leonard Harper. A drama–romance of the race film genre, it was Micheaux's first feature-length talkie, and the first African American talkie. Adapted from Micheaux's first novel, The Conquest (1913), it has some autobiographical elements: like the film's central character Jean Baptiste (played by Stanley Morrell), Micheaux spent several years as a cattle rancher in an otherwise all-white area of South Dakota.

"Murder, suicide, estranged lovers, and “interracial mixing” are all interwoven into Oscar Micheaux’s plot for The Exile (1931). The idealistic Jean Baptiste falls in love with Edith Duval, an ambitious nightclub operator. Edith’s “dive” is in the former mansion of one of Chicago’s aristocratic elite, now located in the heart of the city’s South Side black urban district. The two lovers are torn apart when Edith introduces racketeering and the “numbers” into her business, all of which are totally inconsistent with Baptiste’s high moral principles."

-La Cineteca del Friuti

Status: Lost.



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