Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 52

50 Popular Culture Review narrow escape from death for him at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. A love story of beautiful texture lends added interest and some red-blooded scrapping and hard-hard riding furnishes the picture with the amount of exciting action required to make the blood tingle through your veins at high speed. (Chicago Defender, 8 January 1921: 4) Lynching surfaced again with the making of the motion picture the Gunsaulus Mystery, produced in 1921 and based on the Leo M. Frank case. Frank had received a considerable amount of attention in the press. A Jewish man, accused of murdering a young woman based on the testimony of a black man, Frank was later lynched by a mob. Micheaux, eager to capitalize on the attention which the case received, produced this film and provided an advertisement that read: Was Leo M. Frank Guilty? Do you recall the strange and tragic case of Leo M. Frank, charged with the murder of little Mary Phagan; tried, convicted and sentenced to be han g^ on the testimony (so claimed) of Jim Conley . . . [who testifiedl that the defendant led a double life? Oscar Micheaux, well known Race author and motion picture producer, was in the court room during this most sensational of all trials and shortly afterward wrote a story of the same, interweaving a romance . . . . (Chicago Defender, 26 March 1921: 5) Given the controversial nature of the film, this was another production which had difficulty receiving the censors' approval. The intimidation of African-Americans by the Ku Klux Klan reappeared in Micheaux's Son of Satan, produced in 1922, a film which reflected Micheaux's insistence on exposing those groups that attempted to strike fear in African-Americans. Perhaps, for Micheaux it was a rebuttal of the way in which D. W. Griffith glorified the KKK in his never-to-be-forgotten Birth of a Nation (1915). Son of Satan was described as "a hair-raising, side-splitting