Son of Ingagi (1940)

Widely regarded as the first horror film with an all-black cast (it may not be – John T. Soister in his book American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films, 1913-1929 suggests that The Conjure Woman (1926) by black cinema pioneer Oscar Micheaux predates it by 14 years), Son of Ingagi is important for being possibly the earliest surviving all-black horror film (the entirety of Micheaux’s catalogue is believed to have been lost) but it’s no great shakes as entertainment.

Eleanor (Daisy Bufford) and Robert Lindsay (Alfred Grant) invite a lovely and reclusive doctor, Helen Jackson (Laura Bowman) to their wedding and afterwards Jackson asks Detective Nelson (Spencer Williams) and her attorney Bradshaw (Earl J. Morris) to help her change her will. She’s later visited by her estranged brother Zeno (Arthur Ray) who believes that on her visits to Africa she discovered a cache of gold that she’s secreted about her office. Jackson frightens off her feckless brother by introducing him to N’Gina (Zack Williams), a hulking but essentially harmless ape-man she discovered on one of her expeditions. He’s enraged when he accidentally drinks a potion that Jackson had was working on, accidentally killing her during a violent rampage and the Lindsays learn that she left her house to them in her new will. Once they move in they find that N’Gina is still living in the basement laboratory and that Zeno is still sniffing around looking for that gold…

Written by Spencer Williams, later one half of television’s sitcom pairing Amos and Andy (though the film was directed by the white Richard C. Kahn), Son of Ingagi is refreshingly free of the sort of stereotypes that black actors were usually burdened with at the time. There’s no room here for a Mantan Moreland or a Stepin Fetchit – the characters in Son of Ingagi are middle class, successful, smart and resourceful, a far cry from the cringing, perpetually terrified stereotype. But sadly that’s about all the film has going for it and once you get over admiring it for its progressiveness (the scientists character is not only black but elderly and a woman!) there’s not much else going on.

William’s script, based on his short story House of Horror, doesn’t have much to say and by the time he writes himself a witless comedy scene involving Nelson trying to make himself a sandwich which the hulking N’Gina keeps stealing from him while his back is turned, it’s clearly run out of steam. There are oddities along the way, including a half-hearted and unresolved suggestion that Jackson is Eleanor’s mother, but Son of Ingagi is really just another old dark house chiller, complete with secret passageways and basement laboratories.

Performances are generally OK with Williams working minor miracles to sell the illusion of being an ape man despite the enormous drag factor a truly awful make-up job though the acting honours go to Bowman as Dr Jackson. She’d previously appeared in Drums o’ Voodoo in 1934 and the short Voodoo Fires (1939) but her career was short lived – her next (and last, uncredited) role wouldn’t be for another six years, though in 1909 she had appeared opposite her husband Peter George Hampton at Buckingham Palace, performing a vocal duet as part of a command performance for King Edward VII. The couple had also been hugely popular on the European stage.

Even at an economical 66 minutes there’s barely enough story to go around in Son of Ingagi. It looks terribly creaky today (it looks as if it was shot a good decade earlier than it really was) though it perks up immeasurable when vocal harmony group The Four Toppers turn up for a couple of lively numbers (“swing it, boys!”). The group are rather good and the same year they performed several show-stopping routines in the crime thriller Mystery in Swing (1940).

The Son of Ingagi title is unfortunate and not a little mystifying. In 1930, William Campbell had directed the openly racist Ingagi, the tale of a tribe of ape-like creatures, the eponymous “ingagis” who mate with Congolese women who then bear their half-human, half-ape offspring. Williams must surely have been aware of Ingagi and its content and it’s odd that he felt the need to try to position his film as a sequel (it isn’t – the two films have nothing in common beyond the title).

Son of Ingagi is interesting for what it is – or for what it’s often claimed to be – but it’s hard going. Williams was keen to see the lot of black actors changed for the better and wanted a more realistic representation of black culture on the screen. It was an uphill struggle in a Hollywood that really didn’t care but that didn’t deter him. He soon moved on to directing, including the religious fantasy The Blood of Jesus, his directorial debut, in 1941.

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