Charles Gilpin used to be a prosperous man in his community. He was partners in a mill. When he started drinking, however, the business went away, and now he drinks every evening at Laurence Chennault's tavern, coming home only when his younger daughter comes to fetch him.
It's an all-Black version of Timothy Shay Arthur's famous novel, pretty well translated by a company in Philadelphia. The camerawork is good, and the acting is likewise, although director Roy Calnek seems unable to coax close pantomime out of his players; except for the big scenes, it relies on title cards to tell what is going on.
Yet it is in those big scenes that this movie lives, and those are well directed, with good crowd scenes and plenty of emotion, that transforms a story typically played for pure melodrama into something a bit smaller and more real.
The cast list is incomplete, and the players who are accounted for seem to have limited their work to Calnek's movies; the one exception is Chenneault, whose film career goes back to 1913, and whose almost two dozen known film appearances ran as late as 1934. The records are often sketchy at the large Hollywood studios. The small race films like this one often failed to leave any records at all.