Amos ‘n’ Andy ‘n’ Independents (sic), by Michael H. Price
An earlier installment of this column had examined a 1931 gorillas-at-large movie called Ingagi as an unlikely long-term influence upon the popular culture as a class. Ingagi, a chump-change production built largely around misappropriated African-safari footage and staged mock-jungle sequences, tapped a popular fascination with apes as a class even as it fostered a generalized anti-enlightenment toward natural history and racial politics.
Strange, then, that the film should have inspired a sequel (unofficial, of course, and certainly in-name-only) from a resolutely Afrocentric sector of the motion-picture industry. The production resources behind 1940’s Son of Ingagi stem from white-capitalist niche-market corporate interests – but the screenwriter and star player, and his supporting ensemble cast, all represent a trailblazing movement in black independent cinema.
From momentum that he had developed beginning with Son of Ingagi at Alfred Sack’s Texas-based Sack Amusement Enterprises, Spencer Williams, Jr., attained recognition that would lead him to a role-of-a-lifetime breakthrough in 1950, with his casting as Andrew Brown on a CBS-Television adaptation of a long-running radio serial called Amos ’n’ Andy. Though created by white-guy talents Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, Amos ’n’ Andy needed black artists for its on-screen representation. (Gosden and Correll had gotten away with blackface portrayals in 1930’s Check and Double Check – the tactic would not have borne repeating by 1950.) The partners hired a pioneering showman of the pre-Depression Harlem Renaissance period, Flournoy E. Miller, as casting director for the CBS-teevee project, and Miller came through with such memorable presences as Williams, Tim Moore as George “Kingfish” Stevens and Alvin Childress as Amos Jones, Andy Brown’s business partner.
Popular acceptance (since 1928) of Amos ’n’ Andy gave way gradually to controversy and cancellation of the teleseries (by 1953), even though the teevee version had tempered its broader caricatures with resourceful likability and affectionate warmth while granting mass-media exposure to an under-employed sector of Hollywood’s talent pool. As a general-audience attraction, Amos ’n’ Andy also helped to signal a gradual end to segregated moviegoing. Which amounted to good news for the popular culture – and a career-wrecking development for Spencer Williams.
What had seemed a bold strategy for Williams in 1950 proved at length to have been a misstep upon the cancellation of his starring teleseries. He could not turn back to the off-Hollywood movie studios, for producer Al Sack – who had granted Williams creative autonomy since the small-market watershed ofSon of Ingagi in 1939-40 – had by 1953 edged away from the movie business, sensing the approaching collapse of the black-neighborhood theater circuits that had been his primary marketplace. Nor could Williams move forward in the major leagues of network television or Hollywood-at-large: The industry was damnably slow to open such doors, such mass-appeal powerhouse talents as Lena Horne, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Dorothy Dandridge notwithstanding.
Williams’ isolated creative prime of 1937–1946 had begun finding its shape in 1910, when the Louisiana-born artist landed a messenger job with Oscar Hammerstein in New York. Williams became a songwriter and recording artist, an audio engineer for the emerging talking-picture industry, and a scenarist and actor in collaboration with the Yiddish-Southerner humorist Octavus Roy Cohen on a late-1920s series of comedies about black-neighborhood life. If Cohen’s yarns indulged in blatant stereotypes, still Williams’ involvement seasoned the adaptations with a sense of authenticity that is lacking in the larger studios’ similarly concerned films of the same period. (A representative title is 1929’s The Framing of the Shrew.)
After Williams had contributed dialogue and a supporting-role presence to Herbert Jeffries’ black-ensemble cowboy movies of the waning 1930s, distributor Al Sack bought Williams’ original script for Son of Ingagi and hired him to play a bumbling but ultimately helpful police detective. Sack was so pleased with the result that he enlisted Williams as a producer-director-writer-star for a nine-film stretch.
Where Herb Jeffries’ Harlem-out-West movies follow frontier-adventure formulas very like those that had served the white-guy likes of Ken Maynard, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, Williams’ screenplay for Son of Ingagi is no more a conventional horror movie than it is a formal sequel to the 1931 Ingagi.
The film boasts a monster and a mad doctor – of course. But the renegade physician is a woman (played by the distinguished stage actress Laura Bowman), in an inversion of traditionally masculine casting of such roles. (Son of Ingagi foreshadows two major-studio B-picture productions of 1942–1943: Dr. Renault’s Secret, with George Zucco as the crazed scientist and J. Carrol Naish as an ape-become-human; and Captive Wild Woman, with John Carradine and Acquanetta Davenport in the respective roles.)
In Son of Ingagi,the forbidden objective of Laura Bowman’s character has less to do with outlaw laboratory shenanigans than with luring an innocent young woman (Daisy Bufford) into a forcible tryst with a captive ape-man (Zack Williams). The most nearly direct nod to the original Ingagi involves a suggestion that the ape-man comes from Africa. He bears the name of N’gena, which might sound something like Ingagi.
Williams’ screenplay concerns itself primarily with establishing a lifelike domestic situation between Daisy Bufford and Alfred Grant, as the romantic leads, and with Williams’ own comical portrayal of a cop who seems incapable of detecting the monster at close range. The story has as much to do with a hidden fortune in gold, sought by the mad scientist’s crooked brother (Arthur Ray). Amidst the search through a house riddled with hidden passageways, N’Gena abducts his quarry but accidentally sets the place afire. Williams and Grant perform the necessary rescues, salvaging the treasure in the process.
Williams’ deft comic timing accounts for much of the film’s appeal, and so does Laura Bowman’s portrayal of the ape-man’s doomed keeper as an impatient grouch. Williams’ script is rich in the finer points of middle-class household life, dwelling on the hospitable details of a wedding reception, reveling in a love of music, and establishing early on that the doctor has conflicted reasons – some friendly, some sinister – for wanting to see the young woman inherit a gloomy house-plus-laboratory. Bufford and Grant make convincing newlyweds, even to the point of an outbreak of bickering.
Spencer Williams’ greater body of work as an off-Hollywood filmmaker, including such high points as The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Dirty Gertie from Harlem, U.S.A. (1946), is preserved in the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection, Southwest Film & Video Archive, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas (http://www.smu.edu/blackfilms/orderform.pdf). Son of Ingagi can be found via such Web catalogues as www.oldies.com and www.lifeisamovie.com.
Prowler and Fishhead co-author Michael H. Price is responsible for the Forgotten Horrors series of movie-history books, from Baltimore’s Midnight Marquee Press. Price’s arts-scene commentaries can be found at www.fortworthbusinesspress.com, and in the Times Leader of Wilkes–Barre, Pa.