The Belgians who saw this in the 1920s probably thought it was just another cheap western – we now recognise it as that rarity of rarities, a film made by Oscar Micheaux, a black director/producer, for black audiences. There is an amateurish quality to Micheaux’s work which is unbearable in bad prints – and all the Micheaux films I’ve seen are in bad prints – so it is a relief to watch this one. We see images I never thought I’d see in a silent film. Driscoll (Lawrence Cheanault) is that figure of scorn in so many silents, the half-breed, or mulatto. He passes for white and hates his own race. Micheaux’s artistic vision is presented in the broadest possible strokes. When he wants to show the heroine hungry, he makes her salivate like a comic charade. Nonetheless, this is bound to be in great demand in America – where a Micheaux film is on the National Register. And it is of enormous fascination from the sociological point of view. 

Kevin Brownlow