★ 6 / 10
It's poorly acted, clearly low budget, quite fragmented
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It's poorly acted, clearly low budget, quite fragmented but also absolutely fascinating. This is a piece of history. The all black cast does great in the…
It's poorly acted, clearly low budget, quite fragmented but also absolutely fascinating. This is a piece of history. The all black cast does great in the musical numbers, not so well on acting. For some odd reason, I really enjoyed it thoroughly.
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★ 3 / 10
Ten Minutes to Live" is a brief anthology
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"Ten Minutes to Live" is a brief anthology film--perhaps the [i]first[/i] American-made anthology film--that highlights the sort of B-list movies that were…
"Ten Minutes to Live" is a brief anthology film--perhaps the [i]first[/i] American-made anthology film--that highlights the sort of B-list movies that were being made as films with sound oblitarated silent movies and the careers most of the actors that performed in them. In both tales in the film, it's clear that one of things director and screenwriter Micheaux is doing is simply showing off the presense of sound. Both tales also very clearly show evidence of silent movie techniques, with the second half being obviously a silent movie that has been hastily and rather badly converted a talkie.
The first tale, "The Faker" is mostly a collection of Harlem nightclub routines (several performances by a troup of dancing girls, a couple of songs--with one being performed by the very sexy and talented Mabel Garrett, and a lame comedy act that shows that even black comedians were made up in something akin to black face when doing stand-up Back in the Day) with a paper-thin and badly acted plot featuring a con-man and abuser of women (Chenault) finally getting what's coming to him as he zeroes in on two new victims, including nightclub performer Ida Morton (Garrett).
The second tale, "The Killer", starts with a woman receiving a note from a pair of thugs as she sits with her date at a table in the night club. The note announces she has ten minutes to live. A flashback then follows, relating to us how she came to be in her present, perilous situation... and what follows is a standard silent movie melodramatic crime drama that's been retooled to show off sound. For example, car sounds have been added to a street sequence, and the sound of crowds in a train station. The sound effects aren't all that well done, the looping is painfully obvious, and the silent movie is still very much a slient movie. (I did appreciate the scene with Willor Lee Guilford changing from her dress into a skimpy nightgown and robe, even if I could have done without the strip-tease music that kicked at that time.)
In 1932, I'm sure the mostly rural black audiences for whom this film was made were awed by the sounds it feeatures. In 2007, however, "Ten Minutes to Live" is of interest only to fillm historians and historians of black nightclub acts the early 1930s.
In "The Faker", the interludes with actors thrown in between nightclub acts are really just an excuse to show us the nightclub acts, The filmmaker was plainly first and foremost interested in bringing music and dancing and singing (and the sounds of all these) to the patrons of movie-houses, some of whom might never make it to the glamorous Harlem nightclubs, but who could now enjoy all the sights [i]and[/i] sounds of being there. The best portion of it is Mabel Garrett's song and dance act... but she never should have opened her mouth in an attempt to act. With the sound down, her scene with Chenault as he convinces her he's a famous movie producer is decent enough, but she can't deliver a line if her life depended on it. Chenault isn't much better, and they demonstrate why so many silent movie actors lost their careers with the advent of sound. (I'm sure Garrett did well as a singer, though. She was beautiful and sexy enough, and she had a great voice.) For movie lovers, "The Faker is a complete bust, but if you want to see what routines would appear at Harlem nightclubs in the 1920s and early 1930s, it;s worth seeing.
With "The Killer", we get a muddled storyline that's decently enough performed and filmed as far as silent movies go, but it's undermined by a hackneyed attempt to add sound to it. The badly acted sequences of Guilford in the nightclub with her date aren't terribly destructive... it's the flatly delivered, badly written lines that are delivered by characters off-screen as a mad stalker lurks atop a staircase, and the obvious looping of traffic sounds and badly staged crowd "chatter" that's going to bug viewers. The upshot is that what could have been the better half of this fillm is dragged down by a "gee-whiz" factor that has been left behind by history. If you want to see a well-done conversion of a silent movie to a talkie, check out Alfred Hitchcock's "Blackmail" ([url="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=245672&entryid=293113&view=public"]review here[/url] ).
"Ten Minutes to Live" is not a film for the average viewer anymore. Film students should check it out, because it was the product of a pioneer in the filmmaking biz--Oscar Micheaux was the first black director to make a feature length film, a dedicated fighter for independent filmmakers, and a champion for portraying blacks on film as they really were--and because this is also one of the very earliest anthology films, but the rest of us can safely skip it.
(The copy I viewed was severely degraded, and I suspect that there aren't any out there in much better shape. One of the benefits of the DVD and digital storage in general is that films like this one get preserved. It may be a movie that time has left behind, but I think it's a valuable historical artifact, both for its documentation of the nightclub acts, and for its place in the evolution of America's race relations and the art of filmmaking. As a historical artifact, this film gets an 8/10 ( :fresh: ), but as a movie viewed with modern eyes, it gets a 3/10 ( :rotten: ). )
Ten Minutes to Live (aka "Ten Minutes to Kill")
Starring: Lawrence Chenault, Mabel Garrett, A.B. Comathiere, and Willor Lee Guilford
Director: Oscar Micheaux
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★ 4 / 10
58 Minutes of Confusion
"Ten Minutes to Live" was one of the first Oscar Micheaux films to emerge in modern times; it was first discovered by AFI in the 1970s. At that time, very…
"Ten Minutes to Live" was one of the first Oscar Micheaux films to emerge in modern times; it was first discovered by AFI in the 1970s. At that time, very little else of Micheaux was known to exist, and at the time no modern film scholar had seen anything like it, nor was it generally known that anything like it had been made at all. At the time, "Ten Minutes to Live" seemed so unique and out of the ordinary that such critical notices as were written tended to be charitable. Nevertheless, those who then saw the one, terribly battered print of "Ten Minutes to Live" weren't sure what Micheaux was up to; whether it was some kind of art film or some species of genre that they did not recognize. Fast forward four decades and we know a lot about Micheaux and the kinds of films that he made, and "Ten Minutes to Live," in that context, has suffered badly. It is clear now that the film is a failed narrative; in fact, two narratives drawn from an alleged short story collection entitled "Harlem After Midnight." The tales are called "The Faker" and "The Killer" and the front title promises three stories, but the film delivers only two. Perhaps Micheaux' later film "Harlem After Midnight" constitutes the third story not shown here. In any event, Micheaux never published these stories and it is difficult to make out from this film what exactly the narrative was.Time has not brought us a better print, and the one we have shows the telltale intrusions of censorship. In the first story, a fellow who claims to be a wealthy producer or something-or-other turns on the charm with several women. He tells one singer he can only pay her $3.25 a day to appear in a talking picture, and that appears to have been about the daily budget that Micheaux had to make "Ten Minutes to Live." There are so many ellipses and shortcuts that you can hardly tell a story is being told at all, and in the first part it so frequently interrupted by vaudeville acts and cutaways to non-speaking characters that you wonder who is actually participating in the tale told. The dancing, though, is all excellent, if not always shot to the best advantage, and in one scene the girls are crammed into a space so tight that they can barely move. Donald Heywood and his hard-working band are definitely an asset to the picture, even when their music is cut into little bits and shards, or interleaved with snatches of Beethoven symphonies. It is not completely foolproof, however; at one point a musician loses his music off the stand, and in yet another the whole band loses it place in the music, with the violinist diligently leading them back to the head.Despite the front title card's assertion that this is an "All Talking" picture, the second story, "The Killer," is strictly a part-talkie, and plays for most of its length silent. One wonders if this was something Micheaux had made earlier as a silent and merely added to "Ten Minutes to Live" with a few talking scenes added. Overall, as a film it is far more interesting than the first part and contains several beautiful visual touches, but these are mostly in the silent filmed sections. Once the sound returns, conversation is heard while a character, ostensibly in hiding, is seen overhearing and reacting to it -- for a very long time.While "Ten Minutes to Live" is not Micheaux' best effort by a long shot, it is also not his worst, and it would be his weirdest if "Swing!" didn't exist. If you approach it as a kind of arty affair and enjoy the dancing and music, you still might get something out of it. If you try to follow "Ten Minutes to Live" as a conventional story, however, you will get hopelessly lost. Not all actors are credited, and some are here credited incorrectly; some appear to be playing more than one part in the story, and there are lots of silent-style subtitles and letters to make things all the more mystifying.
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