A Fool And His Money: Earliest Surviving American Film Featuring All-Black Cast (1912)

A recently rediscovered Alice Guy Blaché film, ' Fool and his Money (1912), appears to have been aimed at largely black audiences and featured an all black cast. The film is a comedy about what happens when a working class black man suddenly comes into a windfall of money. Perhaps the alternate title, 'Darktown Aristocrats' best captures the fact that the humor derives from placing black actors in bourgeois settings and clothing. The jokes are around the issue of sudden prosperity. We see Sam (James Russell), the main character recklessly spending his money on clothes such as a top hat and tails, as well as an automobile and chauffeur. He becomes engaged to a light-skin black woman, Lindy, and at a reception is bamboozled in a card game. The "slick Mr. Tighe" and his friends cheat Sam out of his money. In one scene a barefooted black man is passed a card under the table with his foot. When Lindy learns that Sam has been swindled, she transfers her affections to Mr. Tighe, the man who "won" all of Sam's money.

Alisen McMahan argues in an excerpt from her award winning book, "Alice Guy Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema" the film is certainly racist, but it also reflects "the dream of assimilation" associated with both immigrants and the black middle class. For Blaché "assimilation meant taking on the stereotypes of the adopted culture." Blaché was a French immigrant to the United States which did not prevent her from replicating racist stereotypes of the American culture.

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF), part of New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT), was established in 1995 to preserve American films in which women have played a significant creative role. Since its founding, this important initiative has supported the preservation of over sixty films made between 1912 and 1990, including the works of such germinal cinematic figures as Mary Ellen Bute, Gunvor Nelson, Storm de Hirsch, Maya Deren, and the pioneer of all women filmmakers, Alice Guy-Blaché. The only fund of its kind in the world, WFPF is dedicated to saving the cultural legacy of women in film history and publicizing the need for film preservation.

A Fool and His Money: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm2-eSvnyxg