Borderline

Although the 1920s brought him acclaim as a stage actor and singer, Paul Robeson still had to prove himself as a viable screen performer. Mainstream avenues were limited, however, and his first films were made on the peripheries of the film business. Borderline, the sole feature of British film theorist Kenneth Macpherson, boldly blends Eisensteinian montage and domestic melodrama, and features Robeson and his wife, Eslanda, as lovers caught up in a tangled web of interracial affairs. —The Criterion Collection