Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2025 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Body and Soul (1925)

Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux convinced Broadway star Paul Robeson to make his film debut in this story of an escaped criminal, wanted for extradition to England, hiding in a small town while posing as the Right Reverend Isiaah T. Jenkins.

The drinking and thieving Jenkins has designs on young Isabelle, who is in love with Jenkins’ twin brother Sylvester. Isabelle’s mother, who blindly favors Jenkins, won’t give a blessing to Isabelle’s marriage to Sylvester.

On the pretext of saving her soul, Jenkins is alone with Isabelle. Later that day, something has happened, and in hopelessness Isabelle leaves Tatesville, watched by a gloating Jenkins.

Months later, her mother finds Isabelle in Atlanta living in poverty. Isabelle reveals that earlier Jenkins had raped her during an outing, then on the day she left town that he tortured her into revealing the hiding place of the family savings. Overcome by starvation, Isabelle soon dies.

During a rather comic sermon by Jenkins, Isabelle’s mother bursts in to accuse him of killing her daughter. Later, hunted by the townspeople, Jenkins begs forgiveness of the mother, which she reluctantly grants.

Worth noting is the none-too-subtle differences in the characters’ speech patterns that Micheaux deliberately made in the film’s intertitles. What might be seen by reactionaries today as prejudical stereotyping of ethnic speech is nothing more than Micheaux’s indication of the differences in the education and social levels of the film’s characters.

The film has survived in a small number of prints at various lengths; the origination of these versions has been difficult to document.

— Carl Bennett

The film is accompanied by a music score composed by Paul D. Miller (AKA DJ Spooky) and performed by a jazz trio of piano, drums and reeds.

Supplemental material includes theatrical trailers for selected films, including the missing Harlem After Midnight (1934) (3 minutes) and Temptation (1936) (3 minutes); the featurettes “Breaking Ground,” with Rhea L. Combs (9 minutes), “The Silent Years,” with Rhea L. Combs (7 minutes), “The Dawn of Sound,” with Rhea L. Combs (5 minutes), “Staying Relevant,” with Rhea L. Combs (5 minutes), and “More to Come?,” with Rhea L. Combs (1 minute); and a 12-page insert booklet with film notes.

As this edition is identical to that in the Pioneers collection noted below, this presentation shares our recommendation as the best home video edition of the film. Perhaps this edition is slightly favored for its modestly higher video rate encoding and DTS audio encoding.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Regions ABC Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Regions ABC Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Regions ABC Blu-ray Disc edition is also available directly from . . .

This Blu-ray Disc edition has been mastered in high-definition from a 35mm print from George Eastman Museum. The print shows a typical amount of dust, speckling, long vertical scratches, emulsion chipping, minor sprocket damage, and other flaws. The picture’s tonal range is a bit contrasty, with some closed-up shadow details and blasted-out highlights that are helped by the color-toning. Still, this is one of the best-looking presentations of the film.

The film is accompanied by a music score composed by Paul D. Miller (AKA DJ Spooky) and performed by a jazz trio of piano, drums and reeds.

Supplemental material includes the documentaries “We Work Again” (1937) produced by the Federal Works Project (15 minutes), and “The Tyler-Texas Black Film Collection: The Missing Link in Black Cinema” (1985), with Ossie Davis (6 minutes); theatrical trailers for Veiled Aristocrats (4 minutes) and Birthright (3 minutes); an interview with historian S. Torriano Berry on the works of James and Eloyce Gist (5 minutes); and the featurettes “Pioneers of African-American Cinema: An Introduction,” with collection curators Jacqueline Najuma Stewart and Charles Musser (8 minutes), “About the Restoration,” with edition producer Bret Wood (8 minutes), “The Color Line,” with Charles Musser (5 minutes), “Ten Nights in a Bar Room: An Introduction,” with Charles Musser (4 minutes), “Eleven P.M.: An Introduction,” with Charles Musser (3 minutes), “The Films of Oscar Micheaux,” with Charles Musser (9 minutes), “The Films of Zora Neale Hurston,” with film archivist Mike Mashon (2 minutes), “The Films of Spencer Williams,” with Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (7 minutes), “Religion in Early African-American Cinema,” with Jacqueline Najuma Stewart and Charles Musser (7 minutes), and “The End of an Era,” with Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (5 minutes); and an 80-page insert book with notes on the films and essays by Charles Musser and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, with contributions from Rhea L. Combs, Mary N. Elliott and Paul D. Miller.

As this edition is virtually identical to that in the Micheaux collection noted above, this presentation shares our recommendation as the best home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region A Blu-ray Disc edition is also available directly from . . .

The film is accompanied by a music score composed by Paul D. Miller (AKA DJ Spooky) and performed by a jazz trio of piano, drums and reeds.

The collection is supplemented with an insert book that includes notes on the films and essays by collection curators Charles Musser, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, and others.

Sight unseen, this is our recommended DVD home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 1 NTSC DVD edition is also available directly from . . .

The film is accompanied by a music score composed by Wycliffe Gordon.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 1 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

This budget DVD edition has been mastered from a VHS videotape copy of the 1998 Kino International home video edition of Body and Soul that features a too-jazzy and dissociated musical accompaniment by Honk, Wail and Moan, composed by Brian Casey and Stephen Perakis.

The disc’s picture occasionally has a twitchy warping that continues throughout the first half of the disc at the top of the image, caused by the maladjusted tracking of the VHS videotape machine used for playback during DVD mastering (as is seen in the top of the still frame above). A simple adjustment of the machine’s playback-head tracking could have corrected this problem. Also apparent is the smeary and coarse loss of image detail due to the limited resolution of the VHS video format. Use of a commercial VHS copy of the film to master this disc indicates either a lack of quality concerns on the part of Cascadia producers or an illegal edition produced from Kino materials without their knowledge or authorization. (We also wonder why a Canadian company would run an FBI notice at the beginning of the disc.)

The 35mm print utilized for the transfer is very good, with moderate speckling, dust, scuffing, scratches, emulsion chipping, some blasted-out highlights, and a couple of moments of sprocket damage to the image area of the print. Brief sections of missing film are represented by still frames in durations that approximate the length in time of the lost footage. Pausing the disc reveals a number of video compression artifacts that confirms the overcompression of the encoded video information. A reevaluation of the DVD only serves to downgrade our rating of the disc for the above-noted shortcomings that are all too apparent on high-definition equipment capable of upscaling to a 1080p signal.

Of note is evidence that Kino International’s edition was apparently produced from a sound reissue print of the film, indicated by some loss of picture information on the left-hand side of the frame (the area excised for a reissue print’s added optical soundtrack). To maintain proper framing of the film’s intertitles, the picture has been transferred offset to the right as if the area masked out for the soundtrack weren’t missing.

We cannot recommend this poorly mastered DVD.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .