Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

Evelyn Preer and Jack Chenault in Within Our Gates

Cast: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith, Charles D. Lucas, Bernice Ladd, Mrs. Evelyn, William Starks, Mattie Edwards, Ralph Johnson, E.G. Tatum, Grant Edwards, Grant Gorman. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No credited cinematographer, production designer, or film editor.

Famous as the oldest surviving feature film made by a Black director -- Oscar Micheaux's first movie, The Homesteader (1919), is lost -- Within Our Gates is not only a powerful response to the kind of racism represented by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) but it's also a clear demonstration of Micheaux's skill as a director. It spares no one in its portrayal of the poison of racism: Its Black sycophants, toadying to the dominant white power, are as odious as its white bigots. The story centers on Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), an educated Black woman who has moved north to try to work on behalf of the people she left behind in the South. She carries with her a secret about her parentage that is finally revealed only when she returns to the South to aid a Black minister who is trying to run a school. Micheaux lays several subplots, and perhaps a few too many melodramatic coincidences, onto this central one, but he keeps the drive of the film moving steadily through the climactic lynching scene and the revelation of Sylvia's secret. Within Our Gates was reconstructed from a print found in a Spanish archive, and although there are some visible gaps -- the largest one explained by a title card -- the restored version is remarkably coherent.

Girl With Green Eyes (Desmond Davis, 1964)

Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in Girl With Green Eyes

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Peter Finch, Lynn Redgrave, Marie Keen, Arthur O'Sullivan, Julian Glover, T.P. McKenna, Liselotte Goettinger, Pat Laffan, Eileen Crowe, May Craig, Joe Lynch, Yolande Turner, Harry Brogan, Michael C. Hennessy, Joseph O'Donnell, Michael O'Brien, David Kelly. Screenplay: Edna O'Brien, based on her novel. Cinematography: Manny Wynn. Art direction: Edward Marshall. Film editing: Brian Smedley-Aston, Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

Rita Tushingham had a brief period as a movie star after a striking debut in Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey in 1961. For a time she was the embodiment of British young womanhood, with an appeal that suggested a more homely, down-to-earth Audrey Hepburn. Girl With Green Eyes, her fourth feature, captures her at her best. She plays Kate Brady, a bright young Dublin shop-girl, raised on an Irish farm and educated in a convent school, who finds herself out of her depth when she gets involved with Eugene Gaillard, a much older intellectual, married but on the brink of divorce, played by Peter Finch. He's taken with her girlish frankness, she with his maturity and wealth of the kind of experience she has only read about in books. Yet a clash of cultures is inevitable: She's still clinging to her Roman Catholic upbringing, attending Mass every week, and although he prides himself on being a kind of lone wolf, a writer and translator who lives alone in his large house on the outskirts of Dublin, he's still tied to a coterie of cynical sophisticates. It can't work, and it doesn't, especially when her family learns that she's sleeping with an older man who is about to commit the mortal sin of divorce. At the end, she sets sail for London with her boisterous friend Baba (Lynn Redgrave) and a life more in keeping with her age and experience. It's a coming-of-age movie, and a pretty good one, with fine performances all round, solidly directed by Desmond Davis -- it was his first film as a director after working as camera operator for many years. It was Tony Richardson, for whom he had worked on A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), who gave him the Edna O'Brien novel on which the film is based and suggested he direct it.