Born Today July 20: William Crowell

 

1877-1929

Another actor working with director/writer Oscar Micheaux's group of film makers in the 1920's, African American actor William Crowell (not to be confused with the actor from the 1930's with the same name) was born William Benjamin Franklin Crowell on this day in Asheville, North Carolina. Crowell did not start his acting career with Micheaux, but when he went to work for him, he was in more of the business end of Micheaux's production company.  Mr. Crowell's first credit comes in an Arch Heath film Beyond the Great Wall in 1920; the film was also marketed as House of Darkened Windows. All of his other four film credits that have come down to us are related to Micheaux productions. His first direction by Micheaux came in 1922 in a take on the Bluebeard story, presented as domestic melodrama in The Dungeon. All of the other films that he acted in were also directed by Micheaux, save one that is a bit on the strange side.  Ghost of Tolston's Manor, released in 1923, was most likely also directed by Micheaux, but I looked it up in my handy Horror in Silent Film guide by Roy Kinnard and, though he attributes the film to the Micheaux Film company, he had Japanese director Keisuke Kinoshita down as helming the project and list Japanese actors as the cast. This is most likely just a mistake, but a weird one to be sure, as Kinoshita never made a silent film; he first directed a film in 1943. It is really no big deal, just one of those oddities that one encounters from time to time tooling about in the world of silent cinema. The last film that Crowell appeared in was The House Behind the Cedars in 1927, starring Shingzie Howard, who was largely a replacement actress for such roles after the departure of Evelyn Preer.  A United States Army veteran of the Spanish American war (rank of Corporal), Crowell held a lot of different jobs in his lifetime, including an insurance agent; but it was his job(s) with Micheaux Film that he held the longest and brought him the most success. In a addition to working as an actor, he was--most importantly--Vice President of the company, and probably should have been credited multiple times as a producer as well.  Crowell died suddenly on the 30th of July from heat exhaustion/heat stroke, just ten days after his 52nd birthday. I can find no information as to his burial, though he is listed as dying in Roanoke, Virginia. He was variously credited as W.F.B. Crowell and William B.F. Crowell in his acting roles.

IMDb

Born Today July 26: Evelyn Preer

 

1896-1932 

[Note: sorry for the double space....more Blogger glitches!]

Very important and pioneering African American actress Evelyn Preer was born Evelyn Jarvis on this day in Vicksburg, Mississippi. When her father died suddenly, her mother moved her and her siblings to Chicago; she was young enough at the time to attend grammar school in the city. Her mother also introduced her to "street preaching"--which in turn introduced her, inadvertently, to street theater--and then on to vaudeville. So after graduating from high school, and already bitten by the acting bug, she went into the field as a profession; despite some family misgivings about it, she prevailed in joining a vaudeville company.  She toured extensively on what was known as the "chitlin circuit" in segregated black America in various vaudeville shows--this would eventually lead her all the way to Broadway in a colored performance of Salome in 1923 (she acted with a movie cohort of hers Laura Bowman). Preer's last name came from her first marriage to Frank Preer, who tragically died in 1923. Evelyn married fellow actor  Edward Thompson the following year, but kept her first married surname.  They met while working together at the Lafayette Theater in Chicago--an extremely important theater group for the advancement of African American acting.  Preer made history in 1919, when she accepted the leading female role of Orlean in Oscar Micheaux's directorial debut The Homesteader; it is the very first feature length film made by a black director with an all black cast (it is also notable, due to Micheaux having adapted his own novel for the screen). It is a stinking shame that it is a now lost to us.  In fact, of her nearly 20 film roles, more than half of them are believed lost.  From then on, whenever she appeared in the Micheaux film, he made her the star; although after 1920, her appearances in front of his camera were fewer and further apart due to her stage work. The last Micheaux film that she appeared in was The Spider's Web, starring opposite Lorenzo McClane (with whom she almost shared a birthday).  Her appearance in the film also marked the last time that she was in a silent film.  She next acted in a number of early talking shorts, all of them produced in 1929 and all of them made by the Christie Film Company, a division of Paramount. These were part of a greater project at Al Christie's company to make shorts that would compete with other similar comedic talking short films that were fairly numerous in the late 1920's. What is really interesting is that this was a major studio making films with all black casts and with stories that did not stereotype them; some may say that's rare now, it was all but unheard of in the 1920's! The other thing that all of these shorts had in common was the casting of her husband in them as well.  The first of these was The Melancholy Dame; and it marked the first time that Preer was directed in film by someone other than Micheaux, in this case Arvid E. Gillstrom (I have provided a full list of links below to these important films).  The other director that worked on these films was William Watson and at least one of them featured the acting of Sam McDaniel, brother of Hattie McDaniel with first African American woman to win an Academy Award.  The first film of the new decade to feature her acting was the full musical:  Georgia Rose.  The film, which was written and directed by Harry A. Grant, was made for Arista Pictures and released in September of 1930 (it is among the list of the lost unfortunately).  Her last three roles came in major motion pictures, though she was only credited in one: Good Sport (1931) a romantic comedy, Ladies of the Big House (1931) a Sylvia Sidney picture in which she plays an inmate and Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932).  Preer was also an accomplished blues and jazz singer and twice contributed performances to films (along with her musical performance in Rose mentioned above). She also performed live with musical artists and recorded music--one of her musical collaborators early on was Duke Ellington. Preer had an ascendant career in front of her and she had motherhood to look forward to as well, but she developed post-partum complications about two weeks after giving birth to her daughter Edeve and eventually succumbed to double pneumonia in Los Angeles on the 17th of November at the just the age of 36.  She was cremated and her ashes were kept by family. Her husband continued to act in film during the 30's and 40's; and her daughter converted to Roman Catholicism, became a nun and university professor teaching African American cinema. During her lifetime, Preer's most important working relationship was no doubt with the powerhouse that Anita Bush. By far her most well known film performance came in Oscar Michaeux's Within Our Gates--which I am so happy to say is not only still with us, it is so widely available that as of this writing, it is available to stream on Amazon Prime. 

[Note: about half the sources on her birth have her birth date on the 16th of July, after doing some additional research this week, I believer that her birthday was indeed the 26th of July instead]

IMDb

Wikipedia      

Find A Grave entry     

Full List Of The Christie Shorts:          

The Melancholy Dame  

The Framing Of The Shrew 

Oft In The Silly Night 

The Lady Fare 

Brown Gravy 

 The Widow's Bite