Offering criticism for this 91-year-old film is like shooting fish in a barrel - the dialogue is stilted, the acting is terrible, and the static camera conveys no life. On top of it, the quality of the print which survives is poor, entire scenes or bits within scenes are missing due to damage or local censorship, and the result is a bare bones story with abrupt transitions and frequent audio skips. It's the polar opposite of 'polished,' and is frustrating at times to watch, even at just 44 minutes.
On the other hand, the film touches on important subjects, that of 'passing' as a black person in white society, and class differences within the community that end up being based on how light or dark-skinned someone is.
Oscar Micheaux was conservative in some ways, and indeed we see here one character saying they must all strive to achieve, which while having a point, also comes across as the old "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" argument. He was also progressive in ways that went beyond representing black people on the big screen or condemning the KKK and D. W. Griffith in The Symbol of the Unconquered. Here he makes it clear that while there is a group of "select and elite colored" people in the town, the young woman is right to marry not only for love, but right to be proud of being black. The explicitness of this message was decades ahead of its time and must have had a degree of power to the black film audience at the time; for that, he deserves credit.
I seriously wonder what cuts the Virginia Censorship Board imposed on this film, after having objected to its silent version five years earlier and in a state that had passed the "one drop" rule in 1924 (that is, any single ancestor in a person's ancestry, a single drop of "black blood" meant the person was black). By filming this story, as creaky as it is when seen today, Micheaux was in a way questioning these racist laws, how ridiculously arbitrary one's skin tone and genetic makeup were being defined, and pointing out that it was harmless for black people to intermingle with white people and have a path to upward mobility. Those were alarming concepts to the status quo, and I wish all the dialogue had survived, even if it would have been delivered poorly by this mediocre cast.
Here's something that did survive, which despite the derogatory term used by one of the black servants, I confess I chuckled over as a 1932 version of "Once you go black, you never go back":
"Honey, when they once love a spade, ain't nobody can take them away from 'em."
"Mmm-hmm, and I bet he's a dark one too."
These same servants (including Donald Lambert at the piano and Mabel Garrett as the second vocalist) then perform three song and tap dance numbers over 6 minutes, which was a treat. Aside from simply being entertaining, I wondered why this sequence might be in the film, placed where it was. I thought it might be Micheaux's way of providing a contrast to the more staid musical performances earlier in the film with the society people at a ballroom dance. Despite being on the bottom rungs of society, there is joy and power here - just look at that sassy little look Garrett gives the camera at the end of the last number. To me it seems not random, but in keeping with the main story, and another element of Micheaux prefetching James Brown, "I'm Black and I'm Proud." It almost bumped my review score up a half tick - but the final scene, with the return of its wooden acting, reminded me of how rocky this had been.