The manager of the Palace, a black-owned, black-managed theater in Louisville, Kentucky, wrote to George Johnson that The Law of Nature “took on like wild fire.” Even the white-owned, white-managed Alamo Theater in Washington, D.C., listed the film as the “biggest drawing card” of all of Lincoln’s productions. An ad for the Omaha run described it as a “classy” and uplifting picture with “a wholesome moral”. Like the company’s earlier productions, The Law of Nature proved to be “a fine story,” “an artistic and well portrayed success,” and a “good box-office attraction”. Realizing her folly and the inevitable consequences of her violation of “Nature’s Law,” she returns west to rejoin her family. In that film, which again starred Noble Johnson and included Albertine Pickens, Clarence Brooks, Estelle Everett, Stebeno Clements, Frank White, Elsworth Saunders, and Sallie Richardson in the cast, a woman leaves her rancher husband and children to revisit the glamorous East of her former days but she soon finds herself humiliated, alone, and ill. Īnother Lincoln film, The Law of Nature (1917), soon followed. And in 1917, after both films were shown at the Tuskegee Institute, the Tuskegee Student raved that “such pictures as these are not only elevating and inspiring in themselves, but they are also calculated to instill principles of race pride and loyalty in the minds of colored people”. The film played to capacity houses from Chicago to the West Coast. In fact, as Jane Gaines writes, the implication is that every “Shiftless Joe” can be reformed and can better himself personally and socially, particularly if he adopts the values of the black middle class. Starring Noble Johnson as “Shiftless Joe,” a goodhearted but careless fellow who eventually proves his heroism, Beulah Hall as Clara Holmes, the young woman who takes an interest in his welfare, and Jimmy Smith as Jimmy Warner, who competes with Joe for Clara’s affection, the film was another story of racial achievement: through Clara’s faith in him, Joe improves himself and becomes a good race man. Shown in churches and schools as well as in movie houses, the picture created great demand for a new Lincoln feature, which the company met with Trooper of Troop K (1916), also known as Trooper of Company K, a fictional story about the massacre of the Negro troops of the “famous fighting Tenth Cavalry” during the battle of Carrizal in Mexico. A black reviewer described it as a reflection of “the business and social life of the Negro as it really is and not as our jealous contemporaries would have us appear”. The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition, well received by race audiences, was “the first successful classy Negro feature film produced without burlesque comedy” and it set the standard for Lincoln’s future films. Significantly, as Jane Gaines notes, given the means and opportunity, James goes “directly back to his ‘own people,’ a recurring narrative device in race movies, which restrict action to an all-black world within which everything is won or lost-a circumscribed miniature of the white world.” But James, who strikes oil and becomes rich, proposes to Mary anyway and together they realize all of their ambitions: family, friends, and home. Meanwhile, Doris and George Babbit, the children of wealthy gentleman Sam Babbit, who owns land adjacent to the Burton farm, try to discredit Mary. With a subsidy from the owner, he returns home and starts drilling for oil. Eventually he realizes that the same kind of geological conditions that he is studying exist on his father’s farm. After being rejected for a job at an oil field in California because of his race, he rescues the owner’s daughter and is offered employment as the head of an exploration team. In the film, which was a black recasting of the Horatio Alger story, a young Negro civil engineering graduate of Tuskegee Institute named James Burton leaves his parents’ farm and his sweetheart Mary Hayden to seek his fortune in the West.
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