Works featuring "ethnic stereotype" (24)

The Aryan/La fiera domada

The title raised the excited hope of going beyond the usual stereotyping and slurs, instead delivering an explicit exposition of racial ideology - taking Birth Of A Nation out west. Unfortunately, this is just a reconstruction of a film previously considered lost. The original may have been more directly concerned with racial ideology, but here Cowboy's main conflict is with women: Cowboy is massively Madonna–whore complexed. This is immediately suggested in the very first scene, where Cowboy's sacred love for his distant mother is juxtaposed with images of him petting and kissing his bestial companion. Then after he deludes himself that a sleazy mining camp on the border is his ideal “town inhabited by men of iron heart”, and that his mother would love a girl he met in a bar there, he is of course vamped. But instead of dumping her, he takes her as his partner he loves to hate as he does a No-More-Mister-Nice-Guy. Finally, he meets The Virgin Mary Jane and he again falls to his delusions as she cons him into believing his White Man's Duty is to give away his riches. He leaves behind his whore to return to his Brotherhood and replay the Heroic Defender role that first got him vamped, before riding off in the sunset to seek his next imagined Madonna to transform into an imagined whore. So goes the life of an iron-hearted Aryan.

The Mystery Of The Leaping Fish

Likely the first, and certainly one of only a few, film references to Sherlock Holmes' cocaine injecting, as described in the original stories. Even though cocaine and opium had only recently became illegal, there was nonetheless a rising tide of moral opposition against them at the time of this film (just six months later, in Chaplin's Easy Street, the self-injector is portrayed as a depraved degenerate) - which makes this film's light-hearted depiction all the more surprising. And while busy coking up, Holmes is tracking down smugglers of that evil menance - opium (which used to be known as “hop”, the name providing the source for the film's puns, gags, and title). Fifteen years later, Alma Rubens died at just 33 - after a long battle with addiction. A film that's somewhat funny, quite silly, and totally bizarre (after all, it's a Tod Browning joint), reportedly “Everybody's Hero” Fairbanks hated it (after all, it has none of his heroics or acrobatics). That's a good enough reason to wholeheartedly embrace it.

A Natural Born Gambler

Fired up to see the legendary comedy of Bert Williams, but only got an historical drama reenacting the racial aspect of the US criminal injustice system. Sad, sad, sad.