The Sport of the Gods

REOL Productions Corporation, was a white-owned, New York City based film company that released ten films for African Americans from 1920 to 1924.

The Sport of the Gods was the last novel written by Paul Laurence Dunbar. It was also Reol's first feature film. The screenplay was an adaptation of a migration novel by Mr. Dunbar, who was considered one of the finest African American writers. The movie opened on April 18, 1921.

The film attempted to deal realistically with some of the issues of contemporary African American life. A "typical race melodrama," it closely followed source material, one of the first novels set in an urban northern ghetto, which may have struck a chord with northern black audiences who knew firsthand the circumstances of Black urban life. It also "showed the relationship between the races from a southern viewpoint" that it concluded was a reflection of two contemporary features of African American life: the Great Migration and the unlawful imprisonment of African American men.

In the film, an innocent black man is imprisoned in Virginia for a crime he did not commit. Rather than stay in the South, his family moves to New York City. The protagonist's family is torn apart by the move: the son becomes involved in underworld activity, the daughter sings in a cabaret/brothel, and his wife, who considers her husband's imprisonment a divorce, is ready to marry another man who is simply out to steal her money.

The family is eventually reunited, but only after the film offers a powerful indictment of the evils of the big city and a call for protection of the patriarchal nuclear family. The film, which reversed the common cinematic ridicule of southern African American life, implies that northern migration is only destructive to the black family.

Source: Early Race Filmmaking in America edited by Barbara Lupack