Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2013 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Body and Soul (1925)

Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux convinced Broadway star Paul Robeson to make his film debut in this story of an escaped criminal, wanted for extradition to England, hiding in a small town while posing as the Right Reverend Isiaah T. Jenkins.

The drinking and thieving Jenkins has designs on young Isabelle, who is in love with Jenkins’ twin brother Sylvester. Isabelle’s mother, who blindly favors Jenkins, won’t give a blessing to Isabelle’s marriage to Sylvester.

On the pretext of saving her soul, Jenkins is alone with Isabelle. Later that day, something has happened, and in hopelessness Isabelle leaves Tatesville, watched by a gloating Jenkins.

Months later, her mother finds Isabelle in Atlanta living in poverty. Isabelle reveals that earlier Jenkins had raped her during an outing, then on the day she left town that he tortured her into revealing the hiding place of the family savings. Overcome by starvation, Isabelle soon dies.

During a rather comic sermon by Jenkins, Isabelle’s mother bursts in to accuse him of killing her daughter. Later, hunted by the townspeople, Jenkins begs forgiveness of the mother, which she reluctantly grants.

Worth noting is the none-too-subtle differences in the characters’ speech patterns that Micheaux deliberately made in the film’s intertitles. What might be seen by reactionaries today as prejudical stereotyping of ethnic speech is nothing more than Micheaux’s indication of the differences in the education and social levels of the film’s characters. — Carl Bennett

This film is accompanied by a music score by Wycliffe Gordon.

USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase helps support the Silent Era website.
Canada: Click the logomark at right to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase helps support the Silent Era website.

This DVD edition has been mastered from a VHS videotape copy of the 1998 Kino International home video edition of Body and Soul that features a too-jazzy and dissociated musical accompaniment by Honk, Wail and Moan, composed by Brian Casey and Stephen Perakis.

The disc’s picture occasionally has a twitchy warping that continues throughout the first half of the disc at the top of the image, caused by the maladjusted tracking of the VHS videotape machine used for playback during DVD mastering (as is seen in the top of the still frame above). A simple adjustment of the machine’s playback-head tracking could have corrected this problem. Also apparent is the smeary and coarse loss of image detail due to the limited resolution of the VHS video format. Use of a commercial VHS copy of the film to master this disc indicates either a lack of quality concerns on the part of Cascadia producers or an illegal edition produced from Kino materials without their knowledge or authorization. (We also wonder why a Canadian company would run an FBI notice at the beginning of the disc.)

The 35mm print utilized for the transfer is very good, with moderate speckling, dust, scuffing, scratches, emulsion chipping, some blasted-out highlights, and a couple of moments of sprocket damage to the image area of the print. Brief sections of missing film are represented by still frames in durations that approximate the length in time of the lost footage. Pausing the disc reveals a number of video compression artifacts that confirms the overcompression of the encoded video information. A reevaluation of the DVD only serves to downgrade our rating of the disc for the above-noted shortcomings that are all too apparent on high-definition equipment capable of upscaling to a 1080p signal.

Of note is evidence that Kino International’s edition was apparently produced from a sound reissue print of the film, indicated by some loss of picture information on the left-hand side of the frame (the area excised for a reissue print’s added optical soundtrack). To maintain proper framing of the film’s intertitles, the picture has been transferred offset to the right as if the area masked out for the soundtrack weren’t missing.