Go Down, Death!

Go Down, Death! (1944)

The owner of a juke joint arranges to frame an innocent preacher with a scandalous photograph, but his scheme backfires when his own adoptive mother interferes.

Date of release
1944-01-01
TMDB
3.1 / 10 (12)
Runtime
56m
Genres
Drama
Director
Spencer Williams

Casting

Interesting facts

Go Down, Death! is a 1944 race film directed by and starring Spencer Williams. The film's title derives from a poem by the African-American writer James Weldon Johnson.

Production

Go Down Death was the third in a trilogy of religious-oriented films directed by Spencer Williams, an African-American filmmaker and actor, for the production and distribution company. He previously directed The Blood of Jesus (1941) and the now-lost Brother Martin: Servant of Jesus (1942). Publicity material for the production listed the film's original title as Go Down, Death! The Story of Jesus and the Devil.

To depict the horrors of Hell, Williams used clips from the Italian silent film L'Inferno (1911), which had been an international success.

In the course of its distribution, Go Down Death ran into several censorship problems. The state censors for Maryland, New York, and Ohio demanded that edits to the Hell sequence involving a brief exposure of a woman's bare breast in a scene from L'Inferno, and the action of a woman pulling up her dress. Ohio censors also requested removal of an image from the Hell sequence where a devil is seen chewing a man.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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