Cinema: Dark Laughter

Last year a well-to-do, cinema-struck minister named James K. Friedrich formed Cathedral Films, made a religious picture, The Great Commandment, for some $130,000, sold it to 20th Century-Fox for $200,000. Also working on The Great Commandment was jovial, jug-shaped Jed Buell, who has done a little producing of his own. His Harlem on the Prairie, the first all-Negro western, grossed $50,000.

Last month Producers Friedrich and Buell put their picture-smart heads together. Buell organized Dixie National Pictures Inc., started organizing the Dixie National Film Exchange, Inc. to peddle films to 400 U. S. Negro movie houses. Biggest investor in Dixie Pictures was the Rev. Mr. Friedrich.

Last week South Central Avenue, Los Angeles’ Harlem, was acrawl with some 2,000 dusky cinemaddicts crowding into the Lincoln Theatre to preview Dixie Pictures’ first offering. It was called Mr. Washington Goes to Town, although none of its all-colored cast impersonates anyone named Washington. Made by its white producers and scripters in six days for some $15,000, and stuffed with every old gag and situation known to movies, it soon had its howling, fun-filled audience rolling in the aisles.

The Picture. Mr. Washington Goes to Town opens in jail. Prisoner Wallingford (F. E. Miller) is bandying hoary quips in end-man idiom with Prisoner Schenectady (Manta Moreland). Sample: “Pork chops is the fondest things I is of.” Then Wallingford reads in the paper that Schenectady’s uncle has died and left him a hotel. So Schenectady falls asleep. The rest of the picture is his riotous dream.

He dreams he is a bellhop in the hotel. Weird guests arrive—a black man in white tie and tails with a gorilla, a headless man carrying his head, a magician who scares Schenectady by materializing a goldfish bowl on his head, a “Lonesome Ranger” astride a goat, an invisible man who keeps appearing, and Brutus Blake (Maceo B. Sheffield), who holds a mortgage on Schenectady’s hotel. Most of the horseplay centres around Brutus, who tears up floors and walls hunting for hidden gold, scares the chambermaid, gets chased by the gorilla, by his wife, makes love to lovely Lady Queenie (Margarette Whitten), the hotel’s beautician. She runs around tripping over chairs, showing her well-turned calves. One line brought down the house. Says Queenie sidling up to Brutus: “Hello, honey.” Sniffs Brutus: “Honey? Why, that’s evenin’ talk.”

The dream ends when a jailer evicts the prisoners from jail. Wallingford suggests that now they can find Schenectady’s hotel. Says Schenectady: “I just come from that hotel. I don’t want nothing more to do with it.”

One woman customer went into such hysterics she had to be led out. On hand was Producer Zanuck’s assistant, Poloist Aidan Roark. But he was blacked out by the burlier presence of the picture’s villain, enormously popular colored Cinemactor Maceo B. Sheffield. Also present was Producer Friedrich’s Scripter Dana Burnett. The surges of surflike laughter told both scouts that the canny Parson Friedrich had scored again.