In preparation of reviewing a month of African-American films for Black History Month in chronological order (whenever possible), I looked up Google Video for the earliest available movie from the Negro pioneer, Oscar Micheaux. The Symbol of the Unconquered: A Story of the Ku Klux Klan was what I found on YouTube. It wasn't under that heading but that of the William Hooker Quartet whose members are Hooker on drums, Okkyung Lee on cello, Ras Moshe on saxophone and flute, and Sabir Matteen on sax also. The drums dominated the underscore to the first 20 minutes before all the other instruments came into play. I thought that score was pretty compelling for the story presented on the screen with the band being visually dissolved during the inter-titles. The plot itself, about a racist group-one of whom is a mulatto who hates blacks with a passion-that tries to scare a black owner, named Van Allen, of a valuable property off was something that had to be addressed after D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Too bad that scene of the Klan being defeated by another black man throwing bricks at them is currently lost as that would have made it a very exciting picture indeed. As it is, there's still the mulatto woman, Eve, whose happy ending with Van Allen is all but assured after things are cleared up that provides some fascination with the way Micheaux seems to like to present a light-skinned woman as more worthy of the hero than one with more darker skin or maybe I'm reading too much into the plot line. Worth a look once for anyone curious about the earliest days of the cinema.
