Spying the Spy (1918) User Reviews

The Biter Bit

[boblipton · 5/10 · 24 January 2018]

With the United States at War with Germany, Samuel Jacks decides he can best serve his country by rooting out German spies. He has all the tools needed for such detective work: a gun and a Sherlockian calabash pipe. When the first spy he captures turns out to be a Schwartz who is a Black man, he is undaunted... and locates what he thinks is another nest of German spies in a Black fraternity that loves vicious practical jokes.

It's one of the all-Black comedies (except for the Irish cops in one scene) issued by the short-lived Ebony Film Corporation. The structure, of an extended practical joke, is fairly old-fashioned for 1918, but given that this was meant for the Black film houses, that would likely not have been considered a drawback at the time; the performance by Mr. Jacks, although it relied on the comic stereotypes of the period, would have likely been considered no more outrageous than all the White comics doing Chaplin imitations.

Another Strange Ebony Short

[Cineanalyst · 20 February 2020]

"Spying the Spy" is the fourth broad-slapstick short film I've seen from the short-lived Ebony Film Company; the others being "Two Knights of Vaudeville" (1915), "Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled" and "A Reckless Rover" (both 1918). The following year, the studio would close after a boycott of their films led by the paper the Chicago Defender, which criticized the company for perpetuating negative racial stereotypes. With "Spying the Spy" including a black protagonist derogatorily named "Sambo Sam" playing an incompetent parody of Sherlock Holmes, whereby he is tormented by some black Free-Mason types to the point that Sam plays into the usual stereotypical humor supposedly found in African Americans being easily frightened--the trembling knees bit and all, one can see the point of those critics writing for or to the Chicago Defender.

Moreover, that a studio that aspired to cater to black movie-goers and that was managed (although not owned) by an African American, Luther Pollard, thought it funny for a black man to be ganged up on by men disguised in hoods and robes is incredulous--seemingly oblivious to the real-world connotation this imagery might have to the terrorism of the KKK against African Americans. Yes, in the film, those hooded-characters are also African Americans--and members of a freemasonry-like "Coffin Club," according to the signage behind them in one scene. They also wear mostly black instead of white, as well as skull and crossbones insignia, but Sam is unaware of their race due to the disguise, and being established as a "four-flusher," as another character puts it, he doesn't have a great eye for the details. It hardly matters, too, as the clan pretends to prepare to execute Sam.

Before all of this seriously unfunny stuff, Sam sets out to catch German spies in a bit of WWI-era American patriotism--you know, at the expense of making fun of a black parody of Holmes, pipe and, eventually, a semblance of the rest of the usual outfit included. "Spying the Spy" fares poorly compared to another silent short Holmes parody in Douglas Fairbanks's "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" (1916). Regardless, it's another interesting historical document of the early representation of African Americans in cinema. Like some of the other Ebony films, there's considerable decomposition in parts of the surviving print, but since most of the studio's output, as with most silent films in general, seem to be lost, I'm thankful that any of these films still exist and are accessible.