"At their height in the late `20s...race films were an alternative to the racist images propagated by the mainstream media. Often exploring racial themes that were taboo in Hollywood, these films also provided work for a cadre of black actors, writers, directors, and technicians, who were barred from white unions...Hollywood's integration...led to the decline of the race film and with it, the opportunity for independent black expression." (Donald Suggs, Village Voice) Eleven P.M. uses a writer's-dream format to tell of a street musician who takes over the "education" of a dying pal's son. "The symbolism-of a middle class that confronts the realities of black life only as a strange fiction-is provocative...There lies within this disjointed narrative traces of an avant-garde sensibility" (Suggs). Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific and best known of the black film directors, in 1926 released The Spider's Web, a crime melodrama that showed that "even respectable people play the numbers" (D. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade). The Girl from Chicago is a slightly changed, sound re-make of that film. In Boarding House Blues, tenant troubles become an excuse for a musical revue featuring Moms Mabley, Dusty Fletcher, John Mason & Company.