Something Good — Negro Kiss
About Something Good — Negro Kiss
In one shot, Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, a well-dressed couple, hold hands, swing their arms, kiss, and laugh. A longer version adds a short prelude of wooing and refusal before the kiss. William Selig made it in Chicago as a comedy vignette, a take on the 1896 film The Kiss.
Cast & crew
More about Something Good — Negro Kiss
William Selig directed, using his version of a Lumière cinématographe. Selig Polyscope sold it, including through the Sears & Roebuck mail-order catalogue. Suttle, a theatre composer, and Brown, his vaudeville partner, were part of the Rag-Time Four, a cakewalk act. Wikidata times a print at 49 seconds. The 2017 find is described both as a 20-second nitrate negative and as a 29-second version. A 49-second version was identified in 2021.
Themes
Background
It was made while most American film comics were still using blackface caricature. Suttle and Brown play the kiss as themselves, in their own clothes.
Making
Selig shot the couple as a music-hall turn rather than as a staged caricature, and sold prints of more than one length.
Look
Selig's cinématographe holds a single setup. The longer print is framed a little farther back, and the two stand on opposite sides from the shorter negative.
Preservation
Treated as lost until 2017, when a nitrate negative was identified from a Louisiana estate sale. A 49-second version was identified in 2021 at the National Library of Norway. Selected for the National Film Registry in 2018. A longer copy is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- It was listed for years among lost race films.
- The 2017 copy turned up at an estate sale in Louisiana and was identified by an archivist from the University of Southern California.
- The 2021 copy was in a reel at the National Library of Norway, from Leksvik, misfiled as a Lumière film. The reel had been in a barn.
- On the same strip as one of the finds was Selig's The Tramp and the Dog (1896).
- The USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive claims copyright in its restoration and published that version on Vimeo.
- The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2018.
Scenes
- They swing their joined hands, kiss, and laugh at each other.
- In the longer print, the kiss comes after a short refusal.
Influenced by
- The Kiss (1896)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Something Good Negro Kiss Extended.webm)
