The Devil's Daughter

The film was apparently made in Jamaica with some beautiful musical sequences with singing and dancing that complement the simple story. There had to be a good budget to film that and pay top money to the world famous star. It drags in parts, though, with boring unnecessary speeches that over explain the plot, EXCEPT the few exquisite scenes with Nina Mae McKinney: there should have been more closeups of her, her screen presence is hypnotic! You only watch her, even when the other actors are talking you are drawn to her face to see her reactions! A beautiful love theme was under-recorded and is barely audible at times. I suspect some additional minutes of footage were edited out or lost.

I'm very curious about the early cinema featuring actors of color. This one doesn't have much to say. It's about a phony voodoo ritual in Jamaica. There's a plot by a woman to prevent her sister from taking property left to her when her father died. Nothing much happens and the plot is about as dull as can be. There are some stereotypes around, the silly, crap shooting black man who speaks in that dialect we find so offensive today. I guess if there is a positive about this film is that, given a chance, black directors and black actors of this time were as capable of making a clinker as a masterpiece. Obviously, as a period curiosity, this is worth a look, but if you put aside that perspective, it's not really much. The events that occur are so uninteresting and so harmless that most of the punch disappears. I bet some of these people were fine actors, but this doesn't let them show their stuff.

"A young woman inherits a Jamaican plantation and moves from Harlem to Jamaica in order to take control of the operation. Her half-sister, who was running the plantation, has disappeared thus leaving the woman to manage things on her own. Unbeknownst to the woman, her half-sister plots to use the local legends and superstitions to her advantage, in order to scare the woman off and take control of the plantation," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis. A segregated production, with performers like Nina Mae McKinney (as Isabelle) capable of so much more...

** The Devil's Daughter (12/7/39) Arthur Leonard ~ Ida James, Nina Mae McKinney, Emmett Wallace

This is yet another of those "race" movies Nina Mae McKinney made during her lifetime. In this one, she's on an island practicing voodoo. I'll just now say that the all-black cast don't seem all that enthused with the dialogue they had to recite but I'm guessing there wasn't enough in the budget for retakes. I mean despite a cockfight, horse races, a fistfight (done in such an unconvincing manner), and voodoo ceremony, this is a very unexciting movie. There are some entertaining dances but that seems to be it. The version I watched on YouTube was only 51 minutes but it seems something was cut out. So, other than Ms. McKinney's presence, The Devil's Daughter doesn't have much to recommend it.

When an American woman- and her right hand man- return to Jamaica, so she can take over a plantation she has inherited...her sister- and her right hand woman- concoct a plan to try and scare her back to the US with some fake voodoo...so that they can keep the plantation for themselves.

The two Americans are extremely superstitious.

Thus, her sister- who has been running the plantation in her absence- plans to exploit this knowledge to run them out of town.

Because the man she is in love with, now has eyes for her younger American sister, on top of everything else.

So, having lost the base for all her future plans...and her man...she's understandably out for vengeance.

And there's only one way to get that...

...VOODOO...errr, well...OBEAH!!!

If only there was, like, a white saviour to save the soul of the poor black girl he loves from being handed over to the devil...

...Oh...FFS...

This was released by Sack Entertainment, which would put out films with mainly black casts, for cinemas that would cater to black audiences.

That being said, however...it's still pretty racist.

You can just tell that behind the scenes somewhere there's a rich white dude pulling the strings.

Aside from that, the film is bookended with musical parts...and is pretty slow paced in between.

It's not a horrible film.

It's just that nothing particularly memorable happens, other than the voodoo ceremony at the end, which has an almost ethnographic nanook style documentary quality to it.

The whole love triangle angle seems to have been forced to extend the length to near an hour, which it is just under.

Because it doesn't really fit with the rest of the film.

The sister does all that, just to give in at the end?

I guess...

In the end, blood is thicker than water (and we're left with a little chuckle).

Which, I think, is the moral of this story.

An interesting time capsule, but not a particularly memorable film.

3.5 out of 10.