Review of What Happened in the Tunnel

It is hard to say what was on the minds of the Edison people when they made WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TUNNEL (1903). Racism already ran rampant at their Yankee film studios, as evidenced by the two stomach-turning WATERMELON CONTEST shorts which preceded TUNNEL. This sorry excuse for a comedy features a white lady forcing her black servant to kiss a really ugly and inexplicably horny white man when the train they are riding enters a railroad tunnel (the total darkness of which is a movie myth perhaps started by this piece; I've been in lots of tunnels, and none of them have been as dark as the ones shown in the movie in order to perpetuate implausible story lines that couldn't possibly happen in real life; if you want TOTAL darkness, find a cave--but obviously the Edison people were too cheap to leave Manhattan to film WHAT HAPPENED IN THE CAVE!). Furthermore, the abused black actress who was horn-swoggled somehow into making her 65.09 seconds of infamy no doubt got lynched for miscegenation the first time she visited her relatives back South.