Amos Shelved, but Not Andy

The controversy surrounding the reemergence of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was rendered moot recently when CBS, which owns the 1950s TV comedy series, blocked its video distribution.

Meanwhile, Shanachie Home Video has released “Birmingham Black Bottom,” a compilation of the first all-black-cast sound films that feature the man who would portray Andy Brown on TV, Spencer Williams.

The four vintage shorts that compose “Birmingham” are as problematic as “Amos ‘n’ Andy” in their presentation of racial stereotypes. But they are “found history,” according to Henry Sampson, author of “Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films.”

Originally released in 1929 by Paramount, these vintage shorts are to be distinguished from so-called “race films” that were produced in the 1930s and ‘40s mostly by blacks for black audiences. These were exhibited to white audiences. Octavus Roy Cohen, who wrote the “Darktown Birmingham” stories--a longtime feature in the Saturday Evening Post--upon which these shorts were based, was white. So, too, was producer Al Christie, who in the 1920s and ‘30s headed Educational Pictures, which produced silent and sound two-reelers starring comedian Larry Semon and, in the downturn of their careers, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon.

‘Birmingham Black Bottom” contains the kind of broadly comic racial caricatures and exaggerated dialect that in the 1960s led the NAACP to campaign to have “Amos ‘n’ Andy” pulled from television syndication. The plots revolve around frauds, deceptions and jealousies among characters such as Florian Slappy, Permanent Williams and Privacy Robson.

In “Music Hath Harms,” an orchestra leader shows off his medals for supposed coronet prowess though he cannot play a note. When he is forced to perform a solo, he recruits a band member to play for him offstage (when a rival shanghais the musician, a saxophonist incongruously takes his place). In “Melancholy Dame,” a cabaret owner’s wife demands that her husband fire the sexy star attraction (if he doesn’t, she warns, “there’s going to be a quick call for an undertaker”). Little does she (or the singer’s husband) know that the singer and the club owner were once married.

But, said Thomas Cripps, author of “Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942,” “What was burlesque in 1929 has become a piece of folk art in 1997. It’s a benchmark to show how far we’ve come.”

These films, he added, are also worthy of study as rare film records that rescue from obscurity then-celebrated black actors who, much like Negro League baseball players, were for the most part not allowed a shot at the majors--namely Hollywood studio films.

Spencer Williams is best known as Andy Brown, but he made his debut in these films (he was originally hired by Christie as a sound technician). He was, Sampson said, “one of the most talented and versatile actors, who was constrained by what he was forced to do [on screen].”

Williams portrays the orchestra leader in “Music Hath Harms” and the “world’s greatest colored pianist” in “The Melancholy Dame.” In “Framing of the Shrew,” perhaps the most politically incorrect short on the video, he portrays a lawyer who tries to win a “no account, lazy, shiftless scalawag” alimony from his breadwinner wife.

Like pioneer independent black director Oscar Micheaux, he was unsatisfied with the way blacks were portrayed in Hollywood films and later produced and directed his own, including “The Blood of Jesus.”

Cast members Edward Thompson and Evelyn Preer (who were married) and Roberta Hyson were recruited from the Lafayette Players Stock Company of Harlem, which was performing in Los Angeles at the time. These shorts, Sampson noted, were a departure from their usual fare.

“The Lafayette Players were dramatic actors on Broadway,” he said. “They performed Shakespeare. But they were forced to frame their entertainment within certain stereotypical boundaries to be accepted by white audiences. All that you see on the screen grew out of what was happening on the stage. Motion pictures didn’t invent stereotypes. They only magnified them and spread them all over the world to many audiences who had never seen black people before.”

According to Cripps, these “Christie Talking Plays” were promoted as “the Class of the Market.” Sampson agreed that, in comparison to other films that featured African Americans, these shorts “didn’t fall into some of the most gross presentations. They were well done and well written.”

To historian James Wheeler, some of the content of these shorts is hardly as offensive as the fact that “black performers like Spencer Williams were not given the further opportunity to work in that medium and bring forth their visions.

The offense is that black performers were co-opted, preempted and excluded. For example, various sources indicate that Williams and others involved in these particular films actually wrote, produced and directed some of them, but they have never been given credit.”

Audiences, he said, “should have the opportunity to view them and consider them in the context of the times. If we’re going to have a sense of history in this country, we have to base our feelings on facts. Put it out there and let people judge for themselves.”

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“Birmingham Black Bottom” retails for $19.95. To order directly, call (800) 497-1043. “African-American Film Heritage,” a collection of vintage race films, is available from Facets Multimedia at (800) 331-6197.