Dixie Madcaps (1918)

movie

(6)

Country: USA
Genres: Comedy, Short
Release:
Director: Tefft Johnson
Writers: N/A
Language: None | English
Stars: Jane Lee , Katherine Lee
Runtime: min
Awards: N/A
AKA: Dixie Madcaps , Dixie Madcaps (United States of America)
Plot: I have several times protested the knee-jerk criticism of racist stereotypes in films featuring African American actors and actresses where it seemed to me that the films were giving genuine opportunities to the black performers and have argued that it was their performances that should command attention not always the negative aspects of the characters they were obliged to play. This seems to me true for instance of the films of Larry Semon featuring the comedian Spencer Bell (often pretty much a full partner of the star and provided with some autonomous routines) and of films with all-black casts even where, as with Lubin's "colored comedies" or the Ebony Film Corporation's films (see my reviews of Rastus Amongst the Zulus, Two Knights of Vaudeville and A Reckless Rover).I am cautious too of labelling films racist where they involve irony, do not conform to the white supremacist agenda and may turn out to contain significant compensating values (see reviews of the 1914/1927 versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin and of the rather surprising 1927 Topsy and Eva).Here however I am in a sad dilemma. This film does indeed offer scope for black actors and actresses (quite a number of them), there are no whites in blackface and the scenes involving the black performers occupy a fair percentage of the film. Nor does it altogether conform to the Dixon/Griffith picture of the South.Yet, as the other reviewer has already pointed out, the racism here is quite dreadful an d it is difficult to see that any kind of irony is intended. To point the comparison with, for instance, the Ebony films, I have elsewhere quoted Ebony's black General Manager to the effect that their intention was to "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." Here there is no chicken stealing and razor display but the other two stereotypes are well on display along with the superstitious fear of ghosts, the poor command of the language, the hypocritical pastor, the "mammy"......The little white girls (two little Scottish girls in fact who were briefly child stars) direct their inane practical jokes purely against the African Americans even if they remain less than reverential in the all-white church. They even go so far as to steal from them at one point and to oblige their black "mammy" to eat a goldfish at another. In the last half of the film they are back in their own cosy, segregated world and about to be sent off to boarding-school.The African American actors and actresses have plenty of screen-time but little opportunity to do anything interesting with it. They perform ably enough and, even if their names are not known, the film would be nothing without them but are totally trapped within the caricature. It is a film they might have been wiser to have had nothing to do with.
IMDB:tt1402462