Flying Aces and Lost Girls

I was really excited for day-two of the festival, perhaps more than any other day, because it would afford the rare opportunity for me to see The Flying Ace, a 1926 independent feature film with an all-black cast. I was initially intending only to see this film, but was able to persuade a friend to join me for another film. More on that later.

First thing first, I met up with a local friend and had lunch at Baghdad Cafe, which is always a good way to start the day. After catching up with him for about an hour, we went our separate ways and I got in line. The audience was almost entirely white; in fact, I can recall spotting only two African American audience members. It would be nice to see the film reach more members of the black community at some point, but the fact that this movie survives at all is miraculous enough on its own.



This screening was my first exposure a very-cool feature of the festival: beautifully curated slide shows themed after each film to break up the monotony of sponsor advertisements. In this case, we were treated to cards with facts about race films, and each one was followed by a poster or still from a particular film mentioned there. Titles included Within Our Gates, The Colored American Winning His Suit, The Love Bug, The Bull-Dogger and The Trooper of Troop K.

(Side Note: Every one of these slide shows had at least one typo. In this case, Trooper of Troop K was identified as Trooper of Company K. When I point this out, I don't mean any disrespect to the creator of the slide show, Meghan Pugh, who did a terrific job. I have made that exact same mistake . Blame it on that amateurish indie movie with a similar title)

As with all the other screenings, this one got started late. We were treated to a short by Georges Méliès with an English title that went something like Professor Crazybrain and His Flying Machines (if you want to try finding it on the IMDBs, get on there and pack a lunch). I never seek out Méliès movies necessarily, since they all rely on the same gimmicks (painted sets, double exposure, acrobats, roman candles - sounds like New York's hottest new club). Still, they can be fun and manage to be surprising, and this one was cute enough.



Before The Flying Ace could roll, it needed an introduction (of course). Starting things off, a fellow named Mike Mecham or Mechan (I can't read my hand-writing) took the stage to talk about the restoration of the film. It was preserved by the Library of Congress in 1980, but the print we would be watching was brand new, and completely re-timed. In fact, it had just been struck that Wednesday (this was a Saturday) after his colleague Ken Guban (again, guessing on the names) made more than 2000 timing changes. Everyone applauded.

Two women from the Norman Film Museum, Annw Byrd and Carolyn Williams, took the stage next to tell us about the film. First, Ms. Byrd (an adorable little old white lady) explained how Jacksonville had once almost become the film center of North America because of its year round sunshine and diversity of locations. Problem was, film companies kept doing annoying things to cut costs like, say, pulling fire alarms to draw free crowds or starting riots when they needed riot scenes. The results of the 1917 mayoral elections in Jacksonville, coupled with the still-prevalent notion that the movie business was less-than-respectable, ensured that most companies were run out of town. By then, Edendale and Universal City were film centers anyway, and had milder weather and even more locations like, say, mountains?

Allowed Ms. Byrd: "We're real sorry about that today."

Independent productions, including many black films, were still made in Florida, and Carolyn Williams spoke to us about that. In particular, we were told that the buildings where the film were shot still exist (as part of the Norman Film Museum) and that the character played by Kathryn Boyd was based on a real aviatrix, Bessie Coleman. She also advised us to pay attention to the 'colorism' in the film, with light-skinned heroes and dark-skinned villains and buffoons.

The lights were dimmed and the picture began. Right away, there were some glaringly amateurish features to it. Five main characters are introduced right after each other in the first scene, without much in the way of setting them up or making us care about them. There are lots of redundant dialogue titles. The intertitles make use of very mannered language, giving us dialogue such as "Just keep mum and no-one will molest me." True to Dr. Williams' , the darker-skinned actors play the villains; one of them plays a bumbling, corrupt police officer (film history's only black Keystone Cop?) who speaks in an... interesting form of slang. Let's just say that his intertitles use lots of apostrophes.

Here's the basic plot. A railroad paymaster comes to town and lets everybody know that he has the entire payroll in him. He is kidnapped, along with the money, and everyone thinks the cute little old station master, Mr. Sawtelle, is responsible. On a side note, the local man with mysterious income has his eye on Ruth, Sawtelle's beautiful and... young-looking daughter. The feeling is not mutual, even after a long scene where he shows her his plane and points out all the controls and steering mechanisms; by the end of this interlude, any of us in the audience could have operated that plane.

A local boy-turned-railroad detective-turned-World War I fighter pilot comes back into town at that moment, keeping his uniform on the entire time, lest we forget how noble he is. He's played by somebody named Laurence Criner. Picture, if you can, Francis X. Bushman from his Essannay days, and then turn him slightly black, and you hopefully will have some kind of mental picture of Laurence Criner. Needless to say, Ruth likes him A LOT more, and very soon he sorts out the plot by the local bootleggers (sorry, I'm spoiling it) to steal the money and frame Sawtelle. There is a climactic chase by air and a plane to plane transfer that was all filmed on the ground, but is still relatively effective.

The Flying Ace of a silent talkie, but it's still a solid piece of storytelling. The cast is a mixed group. Laurence Criner seems to come from the Milton Sills School of Acting, and Kathryn Boyd has a limited range of expression, but all the other serious parts are played in a restrained manner, and the comedic interludes between Peg and the cop are played well, and not intrusive to the larger story. The writer/filmmaker Bret Wood summed up the appeal of a film like The Flying Ace when he wrote about, and did a great DVD commentary for, the Dwain Esper masterpiece Maniac: Like a work of folk art, it has beauty and dignity in its rough simplicity, and to behold it, with all its flaws, can be much more rewarding than a glossy studio film of the same era.



Later that day, I met up with another friend and we saw Diary of a Lost Girl with Louise Brooks. That phenomenal experience deserves a blog post of its own. For now, in the words of Annette Hanshaw, That's All.

Images from The Flying Ace were found here.