Two Knights of Vaudeville

Based in Chicago, the Ebony Film Corporation was a white-owned studio that featured a large stock company of African-American actors. Ebony made short comedies primarily for white audiences until Luther Pollard, the only African-American member of the company's board, expanded the company's reach into the black community. His goal was to challenge the offensive stereotypes of black characters on film without alienating white audiences. In Pollard's own words (written in a business letter to a West Coast distributor), he intended to show that "colored players can put over good comedy without any of that crap-shooting, chicken-stealing, razor-dealing, watermelon-eating stuff that the colored people generally have been a little disgusted seeing." He put black talent in leading roles and often parodied familiar stock characters in such short films as A Black Sherlock Holmes (1917), Two Knights of Vaudeville (1918), and Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled (1918). However, Ebony also put their company name on films it acquired from outside producers, some of which resorted to offensive black stereotypes, which undercut Pollar's efforts. The company came under fire from Chicago's African-American community and the studio shut down in 1919 after a boycott of their films. Luther Pollard went on to a successful career as an advertising executive and Fritz Pollard, his brother and casting director, became the first African-American head coach in the NFL. Two Knights of Vaudeville (1918) is a show business spoof featuring two buddies (Jimmy Marshall and Frank Montgomery) who find free tickets to a vaudeville show and can't resist jumping on stage themselves. Since the theater won't have them, they put on their own vaudeville variety show, playing all the acts themselves. The film plays on some of the stereotypes that Pollard wanted to get away from--the intertitles are filled with mangled grammar and the hand-drawn signs and bills for their neighborhood show are rife with the misspellings and backwards letters you would see in a Little Rascals comedy--but if these guys are buffoons, their neighborhood audience knows it all too well and arrives prepared. Mastered from 35mm film elements preserved by The Library of Congress, this one-reel comedy is remarkably well preserved for an orphan film and features a bouncy score composed by Donald Sosin and performed by a small combo. Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled (1918) pokes fun at both mad scientists and the Egyptian mummy craze that followed the discovery of King Tut's tomb early in the 20th century. A young man wooing the daughter of a scientist hatches a get rich quick scheme when he spots a classified ad searching for "a mummy for experimental purposes." While he wraps up a phony for the scientist, two Egyptian agents (outfitted in a crazy mix of ancient fashion and modern style) tracking stolen relics get tangled in the confusion. Director R.G. Phillips manages the many moving parts of this busy comedy quite deftly, and offers perhaps the last glimpse audiences will see of an African-American scientist on the screen for decades. Mastered from 35mm film elements preserved by The Library of Congress. The elements suffer from chemical degradation and nitrate decomposition at the beginning and end of the short but enough of the image survives in those sections to follow the story and appreciate the comedy. Sources: Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907-1917, Moya Luckett. Wayne State University Press, 2014. Early Race Filmmaking in America, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack. Routledge, 2017. "Ask Geoffrey: What's the Story with Ebony Films in Logan Square?," Geoffrey Baer. Chicago Tonight, WTTW, February 17, 2016. By Sean Axmaker