A Reckless Rover (1918) watch online HD

A Reckless Rover (1918)

** (out of 4)

Sam Robinson plays Rastus Jones who when we first meet him in asleep in bed. A police officer comes to his room to try and arrest him so Rastus runs out and soon takes shelter inside a Chinese shop where more trouble happens.

Sadly, a lot of silent films are now lost. Even sadder is the fact that so many films with black actors are lost. A RECKLESS ROVER isn't a very good movie but at the same time it's still great that it's exists since it does feature an all black cast of actors. The story itself is pretty simple but there's just nothing here that makes the Rastus Jones character all that interesting or entertaining. The story and style is pretty much what you'd expect from a comedy of this era but there's just nothing funny that really happens. Robinson was quite good in his role and he at least held your attention throughout.

Quite a late comedy from the Ebony Film Corporation, a white-owned Chicago based company (originally formed as The Historical Feature Film company in 1914 and which specialised in slapstick comedies with all-black casts. Ebony attracted strong criticism from the local black press (The Chicago Defender)and even found itself subject to a boycott that led to its going out of business in 1919. While it is understandable that many African Americans objected to any kind of racial stereotyping, it would perhaps have been more sensible to concede that this was difficult to avoid entirely in low comedy.

This was however a time when there was a growing split amongst African Americans themselves (broadly North/South and middle class/popular). The populists had lost their champion when Booker T. Washington died in 1915 and the far more severe intellectual tone of E. M. Du Bois or, in Chicago, of Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, was now dominant. And when populism found a new champion it was the controversial and divisive Jamaican polemicist Marcus Garvey.

In fact Ebony was by this time largely black-run (by President and General Manager, Luther J. Pollard) and made a serious effort to avoid the more typical stereotypes which filled white films and to which African Americans particularly objected (none "of that crap shooting, chicken stealing, razor display, water melon eating stuff that the colored people generally have been a little disgusted in seeing."). The point remains moot since Rastus in this film is displayed both a bone idle and light-fingered. But it is for all that an attractive performance by Sam Robinson, younger brother of the great Bojangles, and the most racist element of the film are in fact the intertitle pages with their *blackface" style cartoons.

It was however a positive thing that "race films" should cover the entire spectrum of film-making and that there should be films that were slapstick comedies as well as those that were "dramas". This also allowed Ebony to give work to a large number of talented black vaudeville artists, several of whom were already well known stage performers. The disappearance of Ebony in 1919 (and the highly serious Lincoln Motion Picture Company did not last much longer) was no real service either to African American performers or to African Ameican audiences.