Most film historians have exiled Spencer Williams to the fringes of cinema history, a situation based on both his race and the circumstances in which he worked. During the 1940s, he was the only prolific African American director \u2013 albeit in a series of cheaply-made, independently-produced features for a company out of Dallas that were distributed for exhibition in racially segregated cinemas serving the nation\u2019s black population.
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The only other African American filmmaker of that era was the legendary Oscar Micheaux, but his 1940s output was limited to a pair of features, one from the beginning of the decade (“The Notorious Elinor Lee” from 1940) and one at the end of the decade (the 1949 “The Betrayal,” now considered to be a lost film). But Williams turned out nine films between 1941 and 1947 \u2013 no mean feat for any filmmaker, and certainly an astonishing one for a nonwhite creative artist of the Jim Crow years.<\/p>\n
Williams\u2019 ascension to director was rooted in the combined forces of talent and luck. He began his career in the 1920s as a bit player in movies \u2013 he was an extra in Buster Keaton\u2019s classic “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” \u2013 and he was able to land a gig writing scripts for a series of two-reel sound comedies for Al Christie\u2019s comedy studio. The scripts were neither sophisticated nor sensitive \u2013 Christie was creating all-black comedies that relied on fractured English and perceived pretensions of upwardly mobile African Americans trying to become established in the middle class \u2013 but at least they helped to break a color barrier for black writers in Hollywood.<\/p>\n
During the 1930s, Williams struggled in bit parts without any special recognition. He received another chance to write in 1939 when the assignment of creating a screenplay for the all-black Western “Harlem Rides the Range” came his way. The next year, he wrote the horror-comedy “Son of Ingagi” and also landed a supporting role in that production.<\/p>\n
Williams\u2019 talent attracted the attention of Alfred Sack, whose Dallas-based company Sack Amusement Enterprises distributed all-black films to the nation\u2019s segregated theaters. Sack invited Williams to Dallas to write and star in a series of all-black films, and he also gave him the rare chance to serve as director. Although he was working at a fraction of the budget of a Hollywood-based independent film, Williams nonetheless created stories that could be adequately filmed under such tight financial circumstances.<\/p>\n
The first Sack-produced film directed by Williams is now regarded as a classic: the 1941 feature “The Blood of Jesus,” made for only $5,000, took the audacious risk of breaking down the tenets that ruled the all-black race films for decades. Rather than creating a secular and urban story, Williams put forth an unapologetically religious drama set in a rural Southern village. With its story of a dying woman\u2019s soul being tempted by the lusty charms of Satan\u2019s lieutenants and the ethereal promise of Christ\u2019s kingdom, the resulting work was profoundly moving. And despite the obvious poverty of its budget, “The Blood of Jesus” resonated with uncommon poignancy and immediacy for its audiences \u2013 many of whom were either still living in rural areas or were recently relocated to cities as part of the great Negro Migration that shifted the black demographics across the country.<\/p>\n
Sack would later recall “The Blood of Jesus” as \u201cpossibly the most successful of all Negro films,\u201d and it would remain in circulation for years as both a theatrical offering as well as welcome presence (via 16mm prints) in black churches.<\/p>\n
Sack obviously wanted to duplicate the success of The Blood of Jesus and encouraged Williams to rush into work on another religious film. But the result of that effort was probably the strangest work in the history of the race films.<\/p>\n
For his second directing effort, Williams sought to create a biopic on the life of Martin de Porres (1579-1639), a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican Order. De Porres was born in Lima as the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed African slave. Being of mixed race, he was prevented from becoming part of the Catholic clergy, although the Dominicans accepted him as a donado<\/em>, which enabled him to live in the monastery and wear the monk\u2019s habit while performing menial volunteer tasks. Despite years of insults from the priests for being illegitimate and of mixed race, de Porres never wavered in his faith and was credited with a series of miraculous healings in his lifetime. He was beatified in 1837, the first time that a person of African heritage from the Americas was elevated to such a holy stature within the Catholic Church. Pope John XXIII elevated him further to sainthood in 1962.<\/p>\n
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