The slapstick nature of the two male black actors doesn't lend itself to a positive portrayal of blacks in general, and for that reason the short film drew it's fair share of criticism back in the day from the community it sought to represent. Stuff that Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton could have handily gotten away with simply didn't work here, compounded by the fact that the gyrations of the principals in question were exaggeratedly over the top and moronic. In an attempt to put on their own show, the men who were kicked out of the theater for their antics attempted to mimic some of the acts they witnessed earlier, but turned out to be total buffoons. Misspellings galore on signs promoting their show also contributed to the perception that blacks weren't all that bright, even if they were 'too famuz akterz'. Mercifully short, the finale of the film ends with their acrobatic act descending into chaos. This may be of value to historians for it's early attempt to feature black players in film, and though it might have seemed inspirational for the principals, the effort got wasted on a less than appreciative public.
6 Reviews
Probably not all that different from the white comedies of the day....in other words it's not all that funny.
planktonrules3 August 2016
"Two Knights of Vaudeville" is a silent slapstick comedy made with an all black cast, though the company itself was white owned. The film isn't all that different from other comedies of the day in that the humor was very broad and not particularly funny. The best silent comedies would come in the following decade--after films started using scripts and comedy was refined. However, while seeing silent comics act like idiots was the norm, some folks in 1915 were bothered by the film's depiction of the characters.
A rich white man accidentally drops some Vaudeville tickets on the ground. Soon, two black men run up and snatch the tickets and soon go to the show along with their lady friend. During the course of the show, the two men behave like total idiots and, not surprisingly, they are tossed out of the theater. So, in anger, they decide to put on a show of their own for their friends.
The main problem with the film is that it isn't all that funny. And, I can see why some folks were offended when the film debuted, as the black characters cannot spell ANYTHING correctly and they behave so poorly. While some of the white comics of the time also behaved similarly, this was one of the only depictions of blacks...and it certainly was not positive in any way. Not a horrible short but one mostly of interest to historians...and the average viewer will have little to enjoy here.
A rich white man accidentally drops some Vaudeville tickets on the ground. Soon, two black men run up and snatch the tickets and soon go to the show along with their lady friend. During the course of the show, the two men behave like total idiots and, not surprisingly, they are tossed out of the theater. So, in anger, they decide to put on a show of their own for their friends.
The main problem with the film is that it isn't all that funny. And, I can see why some folks were offended when the film debuted, as the black characters cannot spell ANYTHING correctly and they behave so poorly. While some of the white comics of the time also behaved similarly, this was one of the only depictions of blacks...and it certainly was not positive in any way. Not a horrible short but one mostly of interest to historians...and the average viewer will have little to enjoy here.
Two Reels of Mediocrity
boblipton2 August 2016
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.
and who exactly were these "stupid blacks"?
kekseksa22 May 2017
For me one of the most irritating aspects of commentaries on films of this period featuring African American artists is what I have called elsewhere "reverse racism". This is a process by which the substance of the films is generally summarily dismissed, no interest is shown in the performers, who are assumed to be of no real significance, and the story becomes rather one of how these performances were exploitative and degrading and presented negative images of black people. Seemingly anti-racist (and many critics proudly emphasise this supposedly anti-racist line),it seems to me in fact just another way of being racist.
We are, bear in mind, in 1915, the year that saw the appearance of Griffith's racist epic British of a Nation and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The two are not isolated instances; they form part of a perfectly conscious attempt (announced by Thomas Dixon as the basis of his series of books, one of which provided the basis for the Griffith film) to "revise" US history in a manner more acceptable to Southern white supremacists.
Amongst the immediate reactions to the Griffith film was the formation in Chicago (the city par excellence of the Great Migration) of the Historical Feature Film Company (1914) and of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company (1916) by George and Noble Johnson. The latte was, it is true, a more distinguished enterprise (concentrating on "drama") and black-owned. The Chicago venture was more downmarket (concentrating on vaudeville and slapstick comedy)and run by whites.
Nevertheless HFFC was an important attempt to promote African American performers and the artists it employed were anything but insignificant. Of the four who are credited here, Frank Montgomery (who has no entry on IMDb where he is confused with a white actor/director of the same name) and his wife Florence McClain were producers of vaudeville shows with a national reputation. Montgomery himself was a skilled songwriter and choreographer who also worked for white shows. Jimmy Marshall seems to have been a relative unknown but Bert Murphy was a huge Chicago star (a sort of Chicago Bert Williams), both performing solo and, with a certain Miss Francis, as the duo Murphy and Francis.
It is true that this film was attacked by the black newspaper Chicago Defender (regrettably, I think) as purveying the usual black stereotypes but this was very much not HFFC's intention and it was sensitive to such criticism. In 1917 it changed its name to The Ebony Film Company and employed Luther J. Pollard as its President and General Manager. Pollard was anything but a "coloured front man", was an active partner in the business and deplored negative stereotypes. His brother Fritz (who also worked for Ebony) would later found New York City's first black owned newspaper, The New York Independent News.
Under Pollard's management, Ebony produced comedies that, in Pollards, own words, "proved to the public that colored players can put over good comedy without any of that crap shooting, chicken stealing, razor display, water melon eating stuff that the colored people generally have been a little disgusted in seeing. You do not find that stuff in Ebony comedies." They also employed, inter alia, in their films the 40-stroing George M. Lewis Stock Company and Sam Robinson (brother of the great Bojangles). Ebony folded in 1919 and the Chicago Defender's attack (and a subsequent attempt to exclude their films) was probably very largely responsible.
There was, it is true, a problem about showing blacks "behaving badly" even if this was a rather necessary condition of slapstick comedy. Here for instance the two guys are disruptive in a theatre (as were innumerable white comics in similar comedies) but one can se how this presented certain special problems at a time when the Chicago Defender was waging a campaign against an increasing tendency towards segregation in vaudeville theatres.
It nevertheless seems to me wrong to dismiss these early attempts to give screen-access to black performers (see also my review of the Lubin "colored comedy" Rastus Among the Zulus. Lubin also employed important vaudeville artists) and wrong to condemn them simply because they were white-owned. The Chicago Defender made, in my view, a foolish error in hounding Ebony. It is rather the presence of the black performers that should be welcomed (and this comedy is certainly no worse than the average "white" comedy) and their important contribution to US performance culture (particularly on the stage)that should be celebrated.
When we ignore the artists concerned and are content to dismiss the characters as "stupid" - do we talk about "stupid whites" when we discuss Keystone films? - we are not really attacking racial stereotypes, it is actually the performers we are characterising as "stupid blacks" for being involved in the film.
We are, bear in mind, in 1915, the year that saw the appearance of Griffith's racist epic British of a Nation and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The two are not isolated instances; they form part of a perfectly conscious attempt (announced by Thomas Dixon as the basis of his series of books, one of which provided the basis for the Griffith film) to "revise" US history in a manner more acceptable to Southern white supremacists.
Amongst the immediate reactions to the Griffith film was the formation in Chicago (the city par excellence of the Great Migration) of the Historical Feature Film Company (1914) and of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company (1916) by George and Noble Johnson. The latte was, it is true, a more distinguished enterprise (concentrating on "drama") and black-owned. The Chicago venture was more downmarket (concentrating on vaudeville and slapstick comedy)and run by whites.
Nevertheless HFFC was an important attempt to promote African American performers and the artists it employed were anything but insignificant. Of the four who are credited here, Frank Montgomery (who has no entry on IMDb where he is confused with a white actor/director of the same name) and his wife Florence McClain were producers of vaudeville shows with a national reputation. Montgomery himself was a skilled songwriter and choreographer who also worked for white shows. Jimmy Marshall seems to have been a relative unknown but Bert Murphy was a huge Chicago star (a sort of Chicago Bert Williams), both performing solo and, with a certain Miss Francis, as the duo Murphy and Francis.
It is true that this film was attacked by the black newspaper Chicago Defender (regrettably, I think) as purveying the usual black stereotypes but this was very much not HFFC's intention and it was sensitive to such criticism. In 1917 it changed its name to The Ebony Film Company and employed Luther J. Pollard as its President and General Manager. Pollard was anything but a "coloured front man", was an active partner in the business and deplored negative stereotypes. His brother Fritz (who also worked for Ebony) would later found New York City's first black owned newspaper, The New York Independent News.
Under Pollard's management, Ebony produced comedies that, in Pollards, own words, "proved to the public that colored players can put over good comedy without any of that crap shooting, chicken stealing, razor display, water melon eating stuff that the colored people generally have been a little disgusted in seeing. You do not find that stuff in Ebony comedies." They also employed, inter alia, in their films the 40-stroing George M. Lewis Stock Company and Sam Robinson (brother of the great Bojangles). Ebony folded in 1919 and the Chicago Defender's attack (and a subsequent attempt to exclude their films) was probably very largely responsible.
There was, it is true, a problem about showing blacks "behaving badly" even if this was a rather necessary condition of slapstick comedy. Here for instance the two guys are disruptive in a theatre (as were innumerable white comics in similar comedies) but one can se how this presented certain special problems at a time when the Chicago Defender was waging a campaign against an increasing tendency towards segregation in vaudeville theatres.
It nevertheless seems to me wrong to dismiss these early attempts to give screen-access to black performers (see also my review of the Lubin "colored comedy" Rastus Among the Zulus. Lubin also employed important vaudeville artists) and wrong to condemn them simply because they were white-owned. The Chicago Defender made, in my view, a foolish error in hounding Ebony. It is rather the presence of the black performers that should be welcomed (and this comedy is certainly no worse than the average "white" comedy) and their important contribution to US performance culture (particularly on the stage)that should be celebrated.
When we ignore the artists concerned and are content to dismiss the characters as "stupid" - do we talk about "stupid whites" when we discuss Keystone films? - we are not really attacking racial stereotypes, it is actually the performers we are characterising as "stupid blacks" for being involved in the film.
Doubled Representation on Stage and Screen
Cineanalyst19 February 2020
Although unique in regard to being a rare instance in the early history of film to feature African Americans in leading roles, "Two Knights of Vaudeville," otherwise, follows a familiar slapstick scenario of audience members disturbing and interacting with the act on stage. Charlie Chaplin's "A Night in the Show" (1915) is a similar variation on this formula. It was a popular act, I think, because it was a good one rife with self-referential possibilities, as it's essentially a play-within-a-play, with some actors playing performers and others standing in and acting up as our surrogate spectators. Chaplin furthered this by playing dual roles. The first of its kind on screen was probably R.W. Paul's "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901) (remade as "Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show" (1902)), which exploited the inherent doubling theme of cinema to have a patron fight with his doppelgänger upon the film-within-the-film. Perhaps, the best iteration of this trend in silent cinema was Buster Keaton's "The Playhouse" (1921), though, which featured Keaton in every role of the film's first, play-within-the-play part and which expanded the doubling to another narrative in the film that references the doubling in the first part.
In "Two Knights of Vaudeville," the doubling is doubled by the African-American trio, after being kicked out for disrupting the white vaudeville show, venturing to put on their own performance. Whether this truthfully reflects the actual making of the film, including its distribution by the Ebony Film Corporation, which had a controversial history, may be debatable and shrouded in mystery from the loss of historical records (such as details about the company that produced it, who the director was and such). In a sense, I suppose, its making is a partial reflection of both the white and black vaudeville shows. The distributor of it, however, was white owned while being managed by Luther Pollard, an African American, and the Chicago Defender paper led a boycott against the studio and its films' alleged perpetuating of racial stereotypes--leading to its closure in 1919.
Although, largely, "Two Knights of Vaudeville" seems no worse than the usual knockabout comedy of the era, such as one could see in a Keystone comedy or the play on the white character's stupidity in the aforementioned "The Countryman and the Cinematograph," film historian Charles Musser ("Race Cinema and the Color Line") makes the point that those white characters are coded as nonracial--the ubiquity of whiteness on screen rendering individual characters as unrepresentative of their race, thus allowing white audiences to freely laugh at their foolishness. It may not be the same case for a persecuted racial minority, though, whom for one contemporary viewer in particular critical of the Ebony Film Corporation, Musser summarizes that "To her mind, the two knights were badly chosen representatives of black people in general, and she saw them through the eyes of white viewers whom she imagined watching the film. She envisioned their amused contempt and internalized it. She could not laugh at these comic characters, she could only imagine white people laughing at her because she was one of them."
The imitation of a supposed black dialect in the intertitles hardly has the intended affect in this light. Even more offensive are the misspellings for the signage of the black characters' show. And if not stereotypical, the humor tends to be outdated, but "Two Knights of Vaudeville" remains a historically interesting take on a familiar formula.
In "Two Knights of Vaudeville," the doubling is doubled by the African-American trio, after being kicked out for disrupting the white vaudeville show, venturing to put on their own performance. Whether this truthfully reflects the actual making of the film, including its distribution by the Ebony Film Corporation, which had a controversial history, may be debatable and shrouded in mystery from the loss of historical records (such as details about the company that produced it, who the director was and such). In a sense, I suppose, its making is a partial reflection of both the white and black vaudeville shows. The distributor of it, however, was white owned while being managed by Luther Pollard, an African American, and the Chicago Defender paper led a boycott against the studio and its films' alleged perpetuating of racial stereotypes--leading to its closure in 1919.
Although, largely, "Two Knights of Vaudeville" seems no worse than the usual knockabout comedy of the era, such as one could see in a Keystone comedy or the play on the white character's stupidity in the aforementioned "The Countryman and the Cinematograph," film historian Charles Musser ("Race Cinema and the Color Line") makes the point that those white characters are coded as nonracial--the ubiquity of whiteness on screen rendering individual characters as unrepresentative of their race, thus allowing white audiences to freely laugh at their foolishness. It may not be the same case for a persecuted racial minority, though, whom for one contemporary viewer in particular critical of the Ebony Film Corporation, Musser summarizes that "To her mind, the two knights were badly chosen representatives of black people in general, and she saw them through the eyes of white viewers whom she imagined watching the film. She envisioned their amused contempt and internalized it. She could not laugh at these comic characters, she could only imagine white people laughing at her because she was one of them."
The imitation of a supposed black dialect in the intertitles hardly has the intended affect in this light. Even more offensive are the misspellings for the signage of the black characters' show. And if not stereotypical, the humor tends to be outdated, but "Two Knights of Vaudeville" remains a historically interesting take on a familiar formula.
A Comedy Without Any Laughs
Michael_Elliott4 December 2016
Two Knights of Vaudeville (1915)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Really bad comedy about two black men who find a couple tickets for a vaudeville show. They attend the show with a woman but the men are acting so bad and stupid that they end up getting kicked out. After this they decide to put on their own act.
The good news about this short is that it's an early example of actual black actors playing the parts instead of whites in blackface. The problem is the fact that the film is just really unfunny and it honestly doesn't contain one single laugh. I'm sure that the majority of the people who watch this will also be offended by it. The title cards make the black men appear extremely stupid and there's no doubt that there's a touch of stereotypes in play here because of how stupid and uneducated the men are. The problem is really the fact that this comedy just doesn't have any laughs.
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Really bad comedy about two black men who find a couple tickets for a vaudeville show. They attend the show with a woman but the men are acting so bad and stupid that they end up getting kicked out. After this they decide to put on their own act.
The good news about this short is that it's an early example of actual black actors playing the parts instead of whites in blackface. The problem is the fact that the film is just really unfunny and it honestly doesn't contain one single laugh. I'm sure that the majority of the people who watch this will also be offended by it. The title cards make the black men appear extremely stupid and there's no doubt that there's a touch of stereotypes in play here because of how stupid and uneducated the men are. The problem is really the fact that this comedy just doesn't have any laughs.
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