Ten Nights in a Barroom. 1926.

(1/20/00)

This is a film which would be easy to criticize to death. It basically has historical interest in being an early example of "black cinema" or "race films." And if one approaches it without a lot of expectations it is an interesting film to watch.

It starts off introducing us to a bunch of characters and I personally had trouble keeping them straight and remembering who everybody was. It is the story of a man who had been the owner of a mill which he lost to the owner of the establishment in which he drowns his sorrows. He expresses a lot of bitterness towards this man, Simon Slade.

As far as I can see we are not given enough information to evaluate this situation. Did Simon Slade indeed cheat him out of his mill or is he just a big crybaby, blaming other people for his own weaknesses? This is not answered, although the film treats Slade as the villain and his demise comes across as something of a purging of evil, a milder version of the end of Hell's Hinges. His profession of selling alcohol is viewed as inherently bad (and possibly with some justification), a way of preing on man's weaknesses and to top it off he runs gambling games. These games involve cheating, but whether Mr. Slade is a party to that I'm not so sure.

Charles Gilpin's performance as the alcoholic is certainly impressive, especially in the scenes in which he hallucinates. He has a small daughter whom he truly loves and who is able to get him to come home from the bar. The figure of the daughter seems like a cliche, but the little girl who plays her is so photogenic and touching that I was really moved. It is so sad when she wants to be friendly with other girls in the neighborhood, but they turn their backs on her, presumably because of the father.

The alcoholic and the bar-owner get into a brawl which the little girl witnesses. The owner throws a glass at the father, it misses and hits the girl in the head. She later dies. For some reason the crucial moment did not have an impact on me. The reason for that could be that I had seen that scene before in a documentary so it didn't shock me. Or it could have been that it just didn't seem to me that getting hit by a glass would be likely to kill her. And I might be wrong in thinking that. It could also be that this scene was not edited well enough.

The girl calls her father to her bedside and tells him that she won't be able to bring him home anymore and asks him to opromise to never go to the bar again, which he does. Then she dies. It suggests that she was somehow meant to die to bring this man to his senses, a little human sacrifice.

The townspeople turn on Mr. Simon Slade and burns down his establishment. A man we know is a crooked gambler dies in the blaze. The father pursues Simon Slade who attempts to escape by boat, but dies in rapids. The sequence is confusing, as if it weren't all that well edited. The scenes of the townspeople in a state of fury seem kind of static. Slade dies in the rapids.

The daughter's death inspires the father to pull himself together and at the end he is elected mayor of the town.