The Flying Ace (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/17/2018

The Flying Ace was our fourth film from 1926, and the first to feature an all black cast. In fact this is probably the first film we've seen in this project that features African Americans in any kind of capacity for more than a minute or so. It was directed by Richard Norman, a white man who specialized in making so-called "race films." Obviously mainstream Hollywood had minimal interest in those kinds of films in the late twenties, and this film was made at Norman's own studios, in Florida.

The film's plot involves a WWI flyer, played by Laurence Criner, who is tasked with solving the theft of a large sum of money from a local train station. The female lead is played by Kathryn Boyd, and initial suspicion falls upon her character's father. Not unlike a Columbo episode, it is revealed to the audience fairly early on who the criminals are, though some of the details of the crime are filled in over the course of the film. And in many ways this does seem like an episode of a detective show -- both because of its short running length, and because of its evident low budget. In some ways it also reminds me of 1912's The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs, which we saw back in 2016 -- but of course that film was made more than a decade earlier, which was an eternity in terms of the development of movies during this era. The earlier film was innovative for its relative sophistication and realism, and for its use of a film within a film. The Flying Ace by contrast does not feel particularly innovative from a film-making standpoint, but it was of course pioneering in that it gave black actors an atypical chance to appear on the big screen in non-stereotypical parts, and black audiences the chance to see them. I don't know whether the kids were able to recapture a bit of that feeling or not. None of the actors in this film had the opportunity to really become established movie stars, though Laurence Criner popped up regularly in Hollywood movies for the next few decades. This of course continued to be a problem in Hollywood, and is a problem today as well, but as we head into the thirties and forties, I'm hoping we'll get a chance to see Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, and a few of the other rare black movie stars from the early days of sound.

Next week we see our fifth film from 1926, Tell It to the Marines, the third film in which we've seen Lon Chaney. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT