The Exile

Micheaux's first sound film, 1931: a young man (Stanley Morrell) is torn between a Chicago nightclub owner and a South Dakota farm girl. Micheaux himself had been a homesteader; the prairie is not research. Independent, rough sync, a film about class inside a Black world Hollywood did not photograph. The exile is the man who left the land. The picture is him trying to decide whether to go back.