A Natural Born Gambler

Vaudeville, Broadway and Ziegfeld Folly comedian Bert Williams was the first black American to sign with a major studio, Biograph Company, to write, direct and act in a movie. His July 1916 "A Natural Born Gambler" is the earliest complete existing movie to contain a mostly black cast.

Biograph Studio's contract called for Williams to produce two movies, "Gambler" and later on "Fish." The studio, which was floudering at the time from losing its top director, D. W. Griffith, realized the box office appeal of Williams, one of the most popular comedians on the stage. The Bahamian-born performer's career spanned three decades, beginning in 1893 when he joined a West Coast minstrel show. Williams was a monumental figure in black entertainment: he was the first Black American to secure a lead on the Broadway stage, was the best-selling Black recording artist before 1920, and was the first Black to get a lead in a completed film, the now-lost 1914 "Darktown Jubilee."

"A Natural Born Gambler" is based on skits Williams had performed previously on the stage. The plot centers on the efforts to raise funds for a fraternal organization by conducting gambling matches at a local saloon. Things spiral out of control from there, where all participants end up in court.

Biography was involved in an earlier effort to produce an all African American cast film in 1913 called the "Lime Kiln Field Day," with Bert Williams. Directed by T. Hayes Hunter, the intended movie contained one hour of raw footage scheduled to be edited and some scenes reshot before the producers Klaw and Erlanger pulled the plug on the project. The Museum of Modern Art stored all the film's scenes and outtakes for decades before it fully restored, edited and showed its version in 2014. The footage is the oldest surviving film that features an all Black cast. The images capture rare scenes of African Americans at play and leisure, unuaual for cinema during this era. Many outtakes show cast and a mainly white film crew working and enjoying themselves together in unguarded moments. As the Library of Congress wrote about the images, "Even in fragments of footage, Williams proves himself among the most gifted of screen comedians."

Williams developed pneumonia during a run of 1921's "Under the Bamboo Tree," and collapsed during a performance in Detroit. The audience thought the fall was part of Williams' act, and applauded as he was lifted off the stage to his dressing room. "That's a nice way to die. They was laughing when I made my last exit," he said in his room. Williams died a week later in his New York City residence at 47 years old.

Yeah, it's pretty un-PC. But Bert Williams was the foundation of modern American comedy as well as a Black pioneer, so with this film (which is MUCH better than his other short "Fish"), you're getting history in the making.

The plot has been dealt with, as well as highlights such as the one-man poker game, the courtroom scene, and the graveyard hijinks. But what most modern viewers don't know is that Williams actually wrote and directed this film and it was actually a compilation of his classic stage routines (based largely on a skit called "The Darktown Poker Club" which also exists in record form) strung together in a makeshift story. The graveyard scene, by the way, is also a Williams' stage gag based on authentic Black folklore.

Bert made two other films, "Darktown Jubilee" (now lost) and "Fish" (mighty weak). This one preserves what made him so appealing on stage to audiences of the early 1900s. Laugh and learn from the foundation.

This is a fascinating film, as the Vaudeville comedian Bert Williams posed as a white man in black face for the film. Little did the audience know that he REALLY was a Black American and painted around his mouth to make him appear to be a minstrel! Oddly enough, the other Black men in the movie actually appear to be Black--not painted up to look that way. In addition, the inter-title cards are written in very stereotypical and offensive "black-speak"--making Williams and his friends sound like idiots (such as "Poka--de rulin' pashon". This is a sad commentary about society and the biography of this mostly forgotten performer listed on IMDb is rather fascinating.

It's all a shame really, as Mr. Williams was pretty funny in the film--particularly during his solo routine at the end of the film--earning it an 8 (as it is funnier than most of its contemporary comedies). In addition, for historical reasons, this IS an important film and gives us a fascinating glimpse into our forgotten past.

Ignore the horrendous dialog cards -- that sort of "dialect" speech was offensive then and it's nearly unbearable now. But do not, do not, DO NOT miss seeing the immortal Bert Williams doing one of his most famous pantomimes -- it's giving nothing away to tell you it's the bit at the end, as contemporary audiences were enticed to the movie with the promise of seeing this routine from the 1911 Ziegfield Follies. Mr. Williams was born into a terrible era and we lost him way too soon; I'm glad that the effort was made to preserve this film (and well preserved, too; the Slapstick Encyclopedia seems to have a complete copy with remarkably little image deterioration) and wonder what sort of wonderful things he might have done had he lived longer.

The most important thing about this film is that it features the great stage comedian Bert Williams, in one of his few motion picture appearances. There seems to be only one other survivor among his completed releases, a short comedy simply entitled Fish, which is hard to find. (Footage from an additional, unfinished Williams film is held by the Museum of Modern Art.) For those interested in Bert Williams and the early history of African-Americans on stage and screen, A Natural Born Gambler is Bert's most accessible film, and a milestone of sorts.

For what it's worth, it's not entirely accurate to refer to Bert Williams as "African-American," as he came from Nassau in the Bahamas, of African, Danish, and Spanish ancestry. He was a light-skinned man whose speech retained his West Indian accent, but he was compelled by the stage conventions of his day to darken his face with burnt cork makeup, outline his lips, and speak in the thick patois of the American black-face minstrel; in fact, that's where his show business career began, in minstrelsy. But according to those who saw him perform (including my grandmother), Bert Williams was touched by genius, and brought a unique sensitivity, pathos, and dignity to his work that somehow transcended the degrading Sambo roles with which he found himself saddled. Williams belongs in the pantheon of great clowns, alongside Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Fanny Brice, etc. His phonograph recordings of comic monologues and droll songs, some of which he wrote, are still funny and worth seeking out.

Sad to report, however, only a pale shadow of the man's talent comes through in A Natural Born Gambler. Perhaps if he'd been allowed more opportunities Williams might have adjusted to film technique and made some comedies which better reflected his capabilities; after all, Chaplin made over thirty films for Keystone before he even began to hit his stride. Or perhaps Williams was a performer who needed his voice for full effect, like Groucho, Mae West, Will Rogers, etc. Unfortunately for posterity, however, Williams didn't live long enough to make talkies. Meanwhile, this film, while an interesting relic of its era, does Williams' reputation no great favors.

I don't know how audiences responded to this film in 1916, but for the modern viewer A Natural Born Gambler offers blatant examples of the cinema's worst African American stereotypes: the black folks we see here (all male, by the way) spend their time drinking, gambling, cheating each other, and running in terror from imaginary "debbils" in a graveyard. The dialog titles preserve the fractured English of minstrelsy, e.g. "De kitty am to pay de expenses ob de game". Our hero, Bert -- who uses his own name for this role -- is a scoundrel who steals chickens from chicken thieves, and eventually winds up in jail. It's a testimony to Williams' likability as a performer that he manages to elicit audience sympathy despite his behavior in the first portion of this film. Only in the final sequence is Bert allowed to cast off the tired conventions of stereotypical racial clowning and be himself, as he performs a portion of a routine he made famous on the stage. Thrown into jail, Bert dreams of a poker game in which he is the sole player. He mimes shuffling an invisible deck of cards, dealing them out, etc., and from his expressions we follow the course of the game until -- even here, in his fantasies -- Bert loses once again. It's a lovely sequence, impressively performed in one long take lasting over two minutes. For this sequence alone, we can be grateful that A Natural Born Gambler was made, and can still be seen.

For those interested in Bert Williams' work I recommend tracking down his recordings before seeing this film. The recordings are available on a variety of labels, and, as noted above, the best of them preserve the man's comedy far better than silent films did -- better than this one did, anyway.