Roars and Uproars (1922)

• 47%
• 1922
• William Campbell

An extremely rare film from C.L. Chester Productions. The very wealthy and now unfortunately dead Mr. P. Nutt, in revenge for having his brother call him "a crazy inventor," makes his niece his heiress but only on the condition she marry a genius whom the world calls crazy. Habeas & Corpus, attorneys for the deceased, place a personal ad in the newspaper looking for potential suitors. A long line of possible husbands vie for the hand of the lovely Miss Hazel Nutt, each one kookier than the other. This film features actors performing in blackface. Fandor does not condone racist stereotyping, but blackface is nonetheless a significant aspect of American history in general and film history specifically. Early cinema was deeply rooted in vaudeville, where blackface was a popular staple. As film critic Ty Burr wrote in a recent assessment of Al Jolson's THE JAZZ SINGER, "Minstrelsy was the then-accepted cultural mechanism by which the governing white culture could appropriate and tame various representations of black people." The history of blackface is complex (even African American performers donned burnt cork to appear onstage in the early 1900s), and its legacy is far from being resolved. While blackface iconography appears offensive today, it remains deeply telling of the culture from which it emerged.