Richard Corliss at Time honors Black History Month by naming "the Twenty-Five Most Important Films on Race". Many of the films aren't by conscious design on race so much as they are touchstones in the hundred-year fight by black artists for their right to be seen onscreen and to use film as an expressive medium, and two movies by Spike Lee might be one too many even if one of them wasn't Bamboozled. (It also seems a bit odd that he says that he included Cooley High because he thought the selection would benefit from the inclusion of "a flat-out comedy." I guess he must think that Richard Pryor Live in Concert is a film noir.) The first half of the feature serves a useful tribute to some of the African-American talents who made a smaller mark on movies than they might have, given the size of their talents: not just Paul Robeson (Body and Soul, 1925), but such performers as Nina Mae McKinney (the "black Garbo" who starred in King Vidor's 1929 musical Hallelujah!), Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, and Lena Horne, whose 1938 debut, The Duke Is Tops, was later rereleased with Horne's name at the top of the credits and with the title changed to The Bronze Venus; and such directors as Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, Jr., whose The Blood of Jesus (1941) is now included in the National Film Registry, though Williams himself is probably best remembered as one of the stars of the TV version of Amos and Andy.
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