african-american directors series: eleven p.m. (richard maurice, 1928)
Tuesday, February 04, 2025
A true curio, an historic film, and a perfect fit for Black History Month. Richard D. Maurice was (and is) a little-known figure in early film making who founded a film company in Detroit in 1920. The company's first feature, Nobody's Children, was released that year ... there are no known existing prints. The exact release date of Eleven P.M. is unknown, but it came near the end of the 1920s. Those are the only two feature films known to have been produced by the Maurice Film Company. Maurice went on to become involved in railroad workers unions.
Surviving prints of Eleven P.M. are in poor shape, but it is possible to watch the film today. And it's an oddball, silent, filled with imaginative techniques, narrative complexity, and unexpected turns. One can assume a low budget, as many of the actors play multiple parts. This gets very confusing at times ... Orine Johnson appears to play a key character's girlfriend, the girlfriend's mother (those two appear in the same scene, I'm not so sure about that), and the girlfriend's daughter as a grown woman. So much of the film is confusing, as the story jumps ahead years at a time ... sometimes we see a title card reading "A few days later", other times we're left to infer on our own that years have gone by. Generous film historians have called Maurice's film "experimental", and that's certainly possible. However odd the movie gets, you're regularly reminded that there is some talent behind the camera. But having said that, the final result isn't notably better than cult trash classics by the likes of Ed Wood. The acting is variable (and that's putting it kindly), the plot is incoherent (intended or not), and while it's kinda fun to see the hero reincarnated as a dog who gets revenge on the villain, the effects are painful. It's no surprise when, after barely more than an hour of screen time, everything is wrapped up with "it was all a dream".
Eleven P.M. is worth seeing, although its presence on the Slate New Black Film Canon of the 75 best movies by Black directors says more about the few existing examples of silent Black films than it does about the quality about this film. You can watch the entire picture on YouTube.