Restoration World Premiere
Singer Herbert Jeffrey makes his cinematic debut in this long-unavailable film as the strapping young cowpoke who comes to the rescue of a traveling medicine show battling outlaws for buried treasure. Jeffrey would go on to play horse-riding heroes in several subsequent Westerns, garnering the nickname “The Bronze Buckaroo.” Filmed at a Black-owned ranch in Apple Valley, California, and also starring Spencer Williams (director of The Blood of Jesus and Dirty Gertie from Harlem, U.S.A.) and doo-wop quartet the Four Tones, Harlem on the Prairie packs thrills, romance, and comedy—chiefly thanks to Mantan Moreland and Flournoy E. Miller—into its economic hour-long runtime.
Note by Academy Museum Senior Director, Film Programs Bernardo Rondeau.
DIRECTED BY: Sam Newfield. WRITTEN BY: Fred Myton. WITH: Herbert Jeffrey, Flournoy E. Miller, Mantan Moreland, Connie Harris. 1937. 57 min. USA. B&W. English. DCP. Restored by the Academy Film Archive with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.