On the recommendation of noted silent movie authority and accompanist David Drazin, I watched the Reginald Denny comedy California Straight Ahead last night on YouTube.
Denny was doing his signature 'upper class twit' part (this time a bit sportier than usual) and
there were a lot of good gags and funny parts in the movie.
The out of control circus animals invading a campground was the standout sequence. The bit with the monkey and the daydreaming banker was funny (wasn't that how AIDS was reputed to start?) and the big race at the end was well done with real racing footage mixed in. The gag near the climax with the befuddled banker dodging speeding cars to retrieve the wrong piece of paper was also pretty funny.
But... I just couldn't get past white actor Tom Wilson appearing in blackface as "Sambo".
It wasn't just the subservient shuck and jive, or brandishing the oversized razor, or the lip smackin' chicken references that were so offensive, but also the way the rest of the cast acted toward a character who was essentially the hero's sidekick.
Take the sequence where Tom is forgiven by "the gang". He shakes everybody's hand. He accidentally shakes Sambo's hand and the whites in the background look perplexed, and when Tom realizes he's shaking a black hand he is embarrassed. That's the punchline of the scene!
Immediately after, the gang are all happily dancing to the radio. A pair of (white) hobos mix in and start to dance with them. That's OK with the gang, they keep on dancing, but when Sambo joins in they stop and just watch. Sure, they tap their feet and clap along, but they won't dance alongside a black man "Oh heavens forfend"!
I was also struck by the bit where Sambo and the banker run to catch the back of the speeding diner wagon. When Sambo manages to climb aboard, the girl's parents who are at the railing watching, sort of get out of his way, but when the banker catches the handrail the old couple exert themselves and strain to help pull up the white guy.
Of course, this type of implicit racism was an unfortunate feature of many films of the period, and often it was more cultural bias than malicious intent, but it's still hard to watch and the blackface angle made it somehow even more offensive for me (especially as portrayed by Tom Wilson, D.W. Griffith's own slavering feral scapegoat from The Birth of a Nation).
I'm sorry to say that the almost constant inferred (and, sometimes extreme and explicit) racial overtones really overshadowed the fun of the picture for me.
So, did I enjoy this movie? The best I can say is, parts were funny and it's still worth seeing.
HRH
