Two Actors try their hands at stage comedy.Two Actors try their hands at stage comedy.Two Actors try their hands at stage comedy.
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Did you know
- TriviaFilm was made by the 'Historical Feature Film Company [us]' which was a white-run company; but, distributed by the Ebony Film Company [us]' to make it appear that it was released by a black-controlled company.
- Quotes
Knight I: We'vll all dall up.
Featured review
Two Reels of Mediocrity
Two Black men find a couple of tickets to a vaudeville. When they attend the show, their misbehavior gets them thrown out. Instead, they put on their own awful vaudeville show.
There's little that is original to this short comedy. Edison had shown Rube and Mandy thinking that the events on a movie screen were not only live, but real, almost fifteen years earlier. The year that this came out, Chaplin did A NIGHT AT THE SHOW, based on the Karno Company MUMMING BIRDS that he had appeared in before his movie career has begun and Larry Semon would do the same thing in 1922's THE SHOW. Likewise, the second half of the movie, in which the characters would offer their own, poor performances is something I have seen far too many times. Our Gang would do several times a year, well into the sound era, when Carl Switzer would warble something awful.
So, in reviewing this, it needs the looked at in comparison to other movies which offered the same plots, and it is not very good The "real" vaudeville acts offered in the first half are not particularly good and Jimmy Marshall's and Frank Montgomery's burlesque of them not exceptionally performed.
So why did the Black press of the era hate the piece so much? It's a movie that could have come from Keystone that year, starring Roscoe Arbuckle and Al St. John and been lost in the shuffle; this movie even ended in a Keystone-style free-for-all.
The letters in the Black rest that damned this movie hated it because its leads were Black. Instead of praising it because Black performers could do the same sort of hijinks that stage Irishmen, Dutchmen and Jews could, they offered the viewpoint that every Black performer represented all Black people. Rough slapstick and coarse humor was the path many an ethnics would tread on its way to a respectable show business career, but the black community would debar this route all on its own.
There's little that is original to this short comedy. Edison had shown Rube and Mandy thinking that the events on a movie screen were not only live, but real, almost fifteen years earlier. The year that this came out, Chaplin did A NIGHT AT THE SHOW, based on the Karno Company MUMMING BIRDS that he had appeared in before his movie career has begun and Larry Semon would do the same thing in 1922's THE SHOW. Likewise, the second half of the movie, in which the characters would offer their own, poor performances is something I have seen far too many times. Our Gang would do several times a year, well into the sound era, when Carl Switzer would warble something awful.
So, in reviewing this, it needs the looked at in comparison to other movies which offered the same plots, and it is not very good The "real" vaudeville acts offered in the first half are not particularly good and Jimmy Marshall's and Frank Montgomery's burlesque of them not exceptionally performed.
So why did the Black press of the era hate the piece so much? It's a movie that could have come from Keystone that year, starring Roscoe Arbuckle and Al St. John and been lost in the shuffle; this movie even ended in a Keystone-style free-for-all.
The letters in the Black rest that damned this movie hated it because its leads were Black. Instead of praising it because Black performers could do the same sort of hijinks that stage Irishmen, Dutchmen and Jews could, they offered the viewpoint that every Black performer represented all Black people. Rough slapstick and coarse humor was the path many an ethnics would tread on its way to a respectable show business career, but the black community would debar this route all on its own.
helpful•15
- boblipton
- Aug 2, 2016
Details
- Runtime11 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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