Two Knights of Vaudeville

1915

Comedy

Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 80%
IMDb Rating 5.3/10 10 268 268

slapstick comedy vaudeville short film

720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
100.41 MB
1280*958
English 2.0
NR
24 fps
12 hr 10 min
Seeds ...
186.31 MB
1442*1080
English 2.0
NR
24 fps
12 hr 10 min
Seeds ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by 5 / 10

"This is no amateur's night. Get out!"

Reviewed by 4 / 10

Probably not all that different from the white comedies of the day....in other words it's not all that funny.

"Two Knights of Vaudeville" is a silent slapstick comedy made with an all black cast, though the company itself was white owned. The film isn't all that different from other comedies of the day in that the humor was very broad and not particularly funny. The best silent comedies would come in the following decade--after films started using scripts and comedy was refined. However, while seeing silent comics act like idiots was the norm, some folks in 1915 were bothered by the film's depiction of the characters.A rich white man accidentally drops some Vaudeville tickets on the ground. Soon, two black men run up and snatch the tickets and soon go to the show along with their lady friend. During the course of the show, the two men behave like total idiots and, not surprisingly, they are tossed out of the theater. So, in anger, they decide to put on a show of their own for their friends.The main problem with the film is that it isn't all that funny. And, I can see why some folks were offended when the film debuted, as the black characters cannot spell ANYTHING correctly and they behave so poorly. While some of the white comics of the time also behaved similarly, this was one of the only depictions of blacks...and it certainly was not positive in any way. Not a horrible short but one mostly of interest to historians...and the average viewer will have little to enjoy here.
Reviewed by 4 / 10

Two Reels of Mediocrity

Two Black men find a couple of tickets to a vaudeville. When they attend the show, their misbehavior gets them thrown out. Instead, they put on their own awful vaudeville show.There's little that is original to this short comedy. Edison had shown Rube and Mandy thinking that the events on a movie screen were not only live, but real, almost fifteen years earlier. The year that this came out, Chaplin did A NIGHT AT THE SHOW, based on the Karno Company MUMMING BIRDS that he had appeared in before his movie career has begun and Larry Semon would do the same thing in 1922's THE SHOW. Likewise, the second half of the movie, in which the characters would offer their own, poor performances is something I have seen far too many times. Our Gang would do several times a year, well into the sound era, when Carl Switzer would warble something awful.So, in reviewing this, it needs the looked at in comparison to other movies which offered the same plots, and it is not very good The "real" vaudeville acts offered in the first half are not particularly good and Jimmy Marshall's and Frank Montgomery's burlesque of them not exceptionally performed.So why did the Black press of the era hate the piece so much? It's a movie that could have come from Keystone that year, starring Roscoe Arbuckle and Al St. John and been lost in the shuffle; this movie even ended in a Keystone-style free-for-all.The letters in the Black rest that damned this movie hated it because its leads were Black. Instead of praising it because Black performers could do the same sort of hijinks that stage Irishmen, Dutchmen and Jews could, they offered the viewpoint that every Black performer represented all Black people. Rough slapstick and coarse humor was the path many an ethnics would tread on its way to a respectable show business career, but the black community would debar this route all on its own.
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