Veiled Aristocrats

Veiled Aristocrats (1932)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

John Walden (Walter Fleming) has been away at college for many years where he passed himself off as a white man. He eventually returns home and learns that his sister Rena (Lucille Lewis) is dating a very dark colored man. John tries to convince her that it's best to pass herself off as being white even if that means turning her back on their mother.

Oscar Micheaux's VEILED ARISTOCRATS is another one of the director's films where he's preaching. Yes, this film was meant to tell black people not to be ashamed of who they are and to live life as who they are and not something that they're not. For decades this film was lost and then a two-reel version turned up. Finally another version turned up and runs for 48-minutes but I'm not sure if this is complete or not. I'm going to guess that it's still missing some footage as the film seems very uneven at times.

With that said, even if the film had been complete I'm not sure it would have made a different. I've gone through the majority of Micheaux's work that isn't lost and I must say that it seems this here might have had the lowest budget of anything I've seen. Technically the film is very ugly at times and there's no question that many of the performances leave a lot to be desired. It's hard to be too critical of the filmmaker because it was 1932 and there just wasn't much funding for these types of race films so Micheaux pretty much had to do whatever it took to get a film out there.

It's also worth noting that many of his films ran into issues with the censors so there's no question that the director was simply behind the eight ball. With that said, as poor as this film is, if you're a fan of these race movies then you'll still want to check it out but the director has better out there.