Lime Kiln Club Field Day

This is the oldest surviving American film with an all black cast. What does the title mean? According to Wikipedia - "The Lime-Kiln Club was a fictitious fraternal organization of African-Americans created by writer and journalist Charles Bertrand Lewis for the Detroit Free Press in the late 19th century." Apparently, the Detroit Free Press would print articles that were considered humorous in their day about this fictitious club, using African American dialect and featuring negative stereotypes.

In 1913 Biograph made this unfinished film with an all black cast featuring a black middle class holiday in a kind of amusement park. Bert Williams, a Caribbean American actor, is the star. He is shown on a date at the park with a lady played by Odessa Warren Grey. They are featured eating ice cream at the concession stand, then riding on a Merry Go Round and enjoying a lollipop while on the ride. The entire production, as restored by MOMA, runs about an hour. What I saw of it was under ten minutes in length.

There are no title cards in what I saw, but none are really necessary. Oddly enough, in every scene, you can see part of the African American cast dancing in the background. Williams wears blackface in this film and usually wore blackface in his vaudeville acts because the white public would not tolerate an actual black man in the lead of a movie or an act during the early 20th century. So by wearing blackface he paid tribute to the ruse, thus allowing the rest of the cast to take their roles unchallenged by anybody - both controversial and pragmatic.

This film actually does have one member of the cast who is white. There is a man walking about on the ride who then jumps off, smokes a cigarette, and generally just loiters about during the Merry Go Round scene, with his attention on the ride. He is probably supposed to be the ride's operator.

This film has been restored by MOMA and is in excellent condition. Youtube has a short introduction by a curator who explains a few things about the film, if you are interested. What I liked was seeing the beautiful clothes worn by everybody in the cast. They are even wearing gloves here! I wonder what they would say about midways today with people wearing shorts, flip flops, and old tee shirts to the fair?

This film represents one of the great tragedies (and one of the great mysteries) in US film history. By 1913 when the theatrical agents Klaw and Erlanger commissioned Biograph to make this film, the African American community in the US was becoming difficult to ignore. In the world of entertainment, the distinctive styles of music and dance of black Americans, the minstrel-shows but also the comedy had become decidedly fashionable even amongst whites and in the vaudeville theatres their importance could scarcely be gainsaid.

Amongst the most innovatory of black comedy routines was that of "the Two Real Coons", the black-face duo of Bert Williams and George Walker. In 1909, amongst other things they produced a half-hour show based on a long-running and highly popular if mildly patronising series of stories penned, in a somewhat caricatural African American patois by white journalist Charles Bertrand Lewis called "Brother Gardner's Lime Kiln Club". In that same year (which was also the year in which Booker T. Washington founded The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Williams split with Walker to begin a solo career which would make him both the first black star of the Ziegfield Follies (1912-1919)and, as a singer, the most successful black recording artist of his time.

Amongst whites, Southern whites at that (he was born in South Carolina), Sam Corker (1874-1914) is a rather forgotten ally of African American performers. He organised many travelling minstrel shows and, as early as 1896, had been involved with A Trip to Coontown, the first black production to use only African American writers, directors, and producers, and the first black musical comedy to make a complete break with minstrelsy. In 1906 he acted as road-manager for the tour of Williams and Walker's ground-breaking musical comedy, In Dahomey (1902), the first African American production to have appeared on Broadway.

Cinema was much slower than theatre in recognising the importance of African American talent. Heretofore its main contribution in this respect was associated with another domain completely where African Americans were proving their worth - boxing. The key figure here was heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. When former white champion Jim Jeffries was persuaded to come out of retirement in 1910 as "the great white hope" in opposition to take on (and be very thoroughly beaten by) Johnson, the fight was a sensation.

The film of the Johnson-Jeffries fight was in all probability the most popular US film before The Birth of a Nation. Note, on the other hand, that there was a concerted campaign to try and ban the film, that it led to race riots in some places and that, shortly afterwards (1912) Jackson found himself under arrest on trumped-up charges of sexual offences under the newly-passed Mann Act.

With Jeffries undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and Bert Williams starring for a second year at the Ziegfield Follies, 1913 was a natural time for film to recognise the cultural importance of African Americans. The commissioners of this film were themselves associated with the Frohman Corporation and with the Ziegfield Follies while Sam Corker seems to have been the moving spirit behind the project.

We now know that some 60 minutes of film were shot (twice as long as the original stage version). Had this film been finished and released, it would have meant that a major production with an all-black cast) would have been amongst the earliest full-length films made in the US. The restorers of the film believe that it would have only played in a few local nickleodeons but this is unlikely. Commissioned by Klaw and Erlanger, it was almost certainly destined for the extensive vaudeville circuit that they and Frohman controlled. Its release would have been a major event.

What on earth could have induced Biograph to abandon it? It is true they may have been taken aback by its length. Biograph, like most of the older companies, did not believe an audience would sit through a film for more than half an hour) but this hardly seems a reason to abandon so many feet of precious celluloid that had been already shot.

Biograph must have come under heavy pressure from somewhere to abandon the film and it deems probable that this was connected both with the fact that Biograph's principal director, D.W. Griffith, was by now working on his own epic,painting a very different picture of African Americans and for that Woodrow Wilson (a former school chum of Thomas Dixon who had written the novel on which The Birth of a Nation is based) had just become US President.

Like the reactions to Jack Johnson's success in the ring, the abrupt aborting of this film bears witness to the degree of fear (albeit a fear tinged with fascination)with which US whites, at all levels of society, regarded the increasing cultural prominence of African Americans and underlines (if it needs to be underlined) to what extent The Birth of a Nation, far from being historical melodrama, was, like the refounding of the KKK, part of a systematic response to that emancipation.

From early childhood I've been fascinated by American popular culture of the first half of the 20th century, that is, from the ragtime era to the Vietnam War, give or take a decade. By "popular culture" I refer not only to the movies of the period, but the music, live theater, comic art, fashions, and politics. And after a lifetime of learning and absorbing all I can about these subjects, I'd have to say that this film, an unfinished, never-released feature from 1913 starring the legendary comedian Bert Williams, is far and away one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

It's amazing, first, that such a project was launched at all. Williams was a highly popular performer of the musical comedy stage and in vaudeville, but he was also a man of color in a deeply bigoted world. For a black man of his era to appear in anything but a brief, menial role in motion pictures was risky; to actually star in a feature- length movie, supported by a cast of mostly African-American players, was almost unimaginable. And on top of that, although he assumed his familiar stage persona for the film, complete with black-face makeup over his light complexion, Williams boldly portrayed not a servant or a lackey but an independent character, a clever and affable fellow (albeit something of a con artist) who credibly courts a beautiful young woman. I've seen many films of the silent era involving African Americans, but never have I encountered a romance involving black characters handled with such warmth and finesse. Come to think of it, I've never encountered anything remotely like this, handled any way whatsoever.

Others have written about the somewhat mysterious circumstances under which this film was made, and speculated about how and why the project collapsed. That the footage, now known as 'Lime Kiln Club Field Day,' can be viewed in the 21st century, and in such superb condition, is perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the whole story. The surviving material runs about 55 minutes or so, including alternate takes of the same scenes. Watching it today we can get a sense of how the feature, had it been finished and released, might have looked. The plot revolves around Bert, who belongs to a fraternal lodge called the Lime Kiln Club. Our hero is courting an attractive young lady (played by the very appealing Odessa Warren Grey), but he has two rivals for her favors. At the club's annual field day, a huge picnic with carnival-style attractions, Bert comes up with a moneymaking scheme: after he accidentally spills liquor into a well, he convinces his fellow citizens that this is in fact a "Gin Spring." He profits from his mistake, and uses the proceeds to court his lady love.

That's the gist of it, but, as with the great comedy features of Williams' friends and contemporaries, such as W.C. Fields and Eddie Cantor, plot is not what's important here. There are many highlights to savor, including a parade to the fairgrounds featuring a marching band, group activities such as a foot-race and a greased pig chase, a spirited cakewalk, and a ride on a merry-go-round. This last sequence, beautifully filmed, is perhaps my favorite. It consists of a nicely framed, extended shot of Bert and his lady, as the landscape sails past in the background. Bert produces a lollipop from his pocket, and peels off its paper wrapping, pantomiming "She loves me, she loves me not," before handing it over to her. They share it, and then he leans off the merry-go-round long enough to grab the brass ring! It's all in one take, and sweet as can be. Later, Bert walks the lady home, and they share a kiss at her doorstep. (Alternate takes suggest that the filmmakers might have chosen to edit the scene using a shot where she refrains from kissing Bert, and that the kiss is something he fantasizes about.) The cakewalk is also great fun, as we watch each couple promenade down the aisle and demonstrate various dance styles, from wildly athletic to sedate and dignified.

Until this footage was recovered, restored, and publicly screened, Bert Williams was something of a ghostly figure, remembered—if at all—through the reminiscences of those who saw him on stage during his heyday. Some of his phonograph recordings are still amusing, and give a sense of his style, but his movie career was truncated and unsatisfying; only a brief sequence at the end of A Natural Born Gambler was worthy of his reputation. Now, however, we have almost an hour of previously unknown material, which gives us a rich sense of the man's talent and charisma. When I saw this footage at the Museum of Modern Art last fall I was thrilled, and others there seemed to feel the same way. It was greeted at the end with prolonged, passionate applause.

What more can one say? One of Mr. Williams' best-known, funniest songs repeats the phrase "You're gonna get something you don't expect!" He could have been addressing posterity, and talking about this film. It's kind of sad to think about the people who put so much energy into making this movie, all of whom went to their graves thinking it was gone forever, nobody would ever see it, and all that effort was for nothing. Today we know otherwise, however, and posterity gets the last laugh. I am so grateful this film survives, finished or not. It provides us with a priceless look at a once renowned but unjustly forgotten comedian, his colleagues, and his vanished world.