Aside from the only U.S. screen appearance of jazz great Sidney Bechet, Moon Over Harlem (1939) is notable for being made by Edgar G. Ulmer, one of the great unsung directors of American cinema. For most of his career he labored on ultra-low-budget Poverty Row B-pictures and is best known today for his primitive film noir classic Detour (1945). That movies and others, such as Ruthless (1948) and The Naked Dawn (1955), brought later critical attention to Ulmer for stamping his work with a clearly identifiable style and vision despite the most dismal production conditions.

This was many years, however, before that acclaim, and even Ulmer's most ardent admirers see little of his directorial signature in this story of the conflict between the Black middle class and Harlem street life in the context of the social oppression of the time. Few of the many all-Black gangster movies of the era ever succeeded critically or commercially and rarely reflected African-American life in an honest way. But Moon Over Harlem rose above the pack. The highly influential Pittsburgh Courier, then one of the few Black-owned newspapers in a major American city, almost never favorably reviewed Black crime dramas. But the Courier said this film represented "the finest acting ever performed by Negroes. So far in front of the others, it is hard to tell what other colored pictures come in second."

That in no small measure could be attributed to Ulmer, who produced and directed from a script written by his wife Shirley (who later wrote for such TV series as Batman and CHiPs). Although largely overlooked in studies of the director's oeuvre, this picture has a number of distinctive touches: a long tracking shot down 125th Street past such notable Harlem landmarks as the Apollo Theater; cuts and dissolves that built the episodic sequences into a compelling whole as few "race movies" had ever done; nuances of cultural differences and the details of daily Harlem life; and a respect for the characters and the actors that earned Ulmer their abiding affection. And all this accomplished despite the necessity Ulmer often faced of having to shoot between sixty and eighty set-ups a day. In fact, Moon Over Harlem was shot in just four days on a budget of $8,000. Ulmer later recalled: "The singers were paid 25 cents a day. It was one of the most pitiful things I ever did. It was done on nothing. But we made quite a good picture."

Famed jazz clarinetist Bechet and his wife, Marieluise, have small parts in the picture. After great success in America and Europe in the 1920s, Bechet took a break from his long music career in the 1930s when the popularity of his style became eclipsed by the emerging (and increasingly white-dominated) Big Band sound. He ran a tailor shop in Harlem for a few years to make ends meet until 1938, when some landmark recordings he made with several other musicians spearheaded a resurgence of New Orleans "Storyville" jazz. Nevertheless, Bechet left the U.S. for good in 1942 to spend the rest of his life in France, where he was a major star and cultural icon and made several films in Paris in the 1950s such as Serie Noire (1955) and Ah, Quelle Equipe! (1957).

Director/Producer: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Shirley Ulmer, Mathew Mathews
Cinematography: J. Burgi Contner, Edward Hyland
Editing: Jack Kemp
Original Music: Donald Heywood Cast: Percy 'Bud' Harris (Dollar Bill), Cora Green (Minnie), Ozinetta Wilcox (Sue), Carl Gough (Bob), Zerita Steptean (Jackie), Petrina Moore (Alice), Sidney Bechet (musician).
BW-70m.

by Rob Nixon