Cinema Revisited: Dixie Madcaps (1918)
It isn’t uncommon to find silent comedies playing upon stereotypes for humor. Sometimes it is amusing, but mostly it is, at the very least, unsettling. The 1918 silent two-reeler Dixie Madcaps, starring the child comedy team of Jane and Katherine Lee, is one of the more blatant examples of stereotyping.
The short opens with a bunch of black men, clad in undershirts and old slacks, dancing around on the porch of a shack while eating huge slices of watermelon. Suddenly a couple of ghosts pop out of two large watermelons in the patch. An old black man gets so scared he turns white and runs away. The two ghosts are two mischievous little girls who continue to tease "the black folk." They are wearing pillowcases over their heads with faces drawn on. When they reveal themselves, the black people they were terrorizing all laugh and respond like ah, ya got me and go back to dancing in front of the shack with the girls joining in. That is the opening scene in this outrageous comedy.
After the opening scene, the girls then go inside the shack, pull a goldfish out of its bowl and tickle "Old Mammy" until her head rears back and she opens her mouth to laugh. They then drop the fish into her mouth. She swallows it and starts coughing while the girls giggle merrily. Afterward she also reacts like oh you mischievous kids.
Title cards are written phonetically to offer authentic dialog, for example:
"I’se gone join yo flock. I is done stealin’ watermelons!"
"Lawdy brotha, is you been baptized?"
The film eventually moves away from the racially motivated slapstick to a scene in an all-white church where the girls come in with their flea-infested dog. The fleas spread among the congregation and cause havoc. They place a pair of dice in the offering plate, and when the ushers go to count the offering, they begin playing with the dice.
This two-reel comedy is structured haphazardly and is only interesting because of its rather shocking content and for being one of the few surviving films of the sister comedy team of Jane and Katherine Lee. They made a handful of comedies from the late teens into the early twenties before growing out of their roles. The films were quite popular. The critics dismissed them, but audiences enjoyed the children’s antics. Usually their comedies concentrated on their mischief and the slapstick results, so on that level Dixie Madcaps is a pretty standard example. I singled this one out to review because it adds another layer to its context by being perhaps the most blatant stereotyping of smiling plantation negroes that I have ever seen.
In the more culturally enlightened 21st century, a movie like this can only be appreciated from a historical perspective. Dixie Madcaps, can actually be somewhat instructional, can allow us to truly observe a depiction of black people within a comic context that is so extreme, one wonders how the actors responded to the directions they were given. The amount of time it would take to apply full whiteface to the black man scared by the ghosts shows that this wasn’t improvisation, but carefully thought out. While there was notable protest over D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation three years earlier, it appears Dixie Madcaps was far enough under the radar to not make much of a difference. That it remains available today and accessible on DVD allows us to see that there is an uncomfortable side to exploring silent comedy history along with all the wonderful classics, as we witness a depiction of negative stereotyping that might have been far more common 100 years ago.
As far as Jane and Katherine Lee are concerned, they are sort of the portent to later kid comedies, the most famous of which are Our Gang (The Little Rascals). They continued to star in vaudeville during their film career, where they could sing and dance (something not afforded to them in silent movies). Along with short films, the girls also would show up in Fox features with stars like Theda Bara. Jane and Katherine stopped working together by the 1930s, but each remained sporadically active in movies into the 1950s. Jane died in 1957. Katherine died in 1968.