In her autobiography, Myrna Loy gives only a few lines to Ham and Eggs at the Front: “a tasteless slapstick comedy that I mercifully recall very little about… How could I ever have put on blackface?” Long considered lost, an apparently complete print with Italian intertitles was recently discovered at the Cineteca Italiana in Milan, though missing the synchronized Vitaphone soundtrack. Loy’s horror at having acted in blackface is understandable, and her assessment of the film anticipates how audiences are likely to receive the film today. Nonetheless, in spite of its “tastelessness” – or, indeed because of it – Ham and Eggs is a film worth consideration, not least for what it reveals about the attitudes of the American film industry to imagined notions of blackness at the end of the silent era.
The film opens at an army training camp in Georgia during World War I, just before an African American battalion is shipped off to France. Once they’re overseas, a German spy, Von Friml, plots to infiltrate the regiment using Fifi, a “Senegalese siren” played by Loy. Though the soldiers are eager to fight, they’re assigned to manual labor at the camp until the two main characters, nicknamed Ham and Eggs, maladroitly prove their worth after locating Von Friml’s radio transmitter. Their success results in the battalion being allowed to enter the fray, and while the protagonists show naïveté in the trenches, they’re valiant in battle. The men of the Black battalion return home as heroes, seen in stock footage with an image of Abraham Lincoln superimposed over a welcoming parade. Back in Georgia, Ham and Eggs seek the attentions of the girl they left behind (Louise Fazenda), who rejects them both for a new beau.
The ending of the Italian print is confusing, as the intertitles suggest that Ham and Eggs believe the woman to be Fifi, yet she is clearly recognizable as Louise Fazenda. The original American intertitles don’t survive, but the film was probably released with dialogue intertitles in a caricatured Black dialect, evidenced by the surviving promotional materials. Given this likelihood, errors in translation might have been inevitable, perhaps explaining the discontinuities in the ending. Or is the ending due to post-production edits? Fazenda was billed as the star – “the colored siren” – while the film was in production, but the part was apparently eliminated, and she only appears in the final scene.
Of course, the confusing ending might have a more insidious cause: it is possible the Italian distributor was unconcerned by the lack of continuity given the use of blackface, presuming that Fazenda in greasepaint could plausibly pass for a similarly made-up Loy. For a sequence predicated on misrecognition, that would suggest an impressive degree of displacement, but for a film that abounds with relentless racial masquerade, perhaps it’s fitting. It’s not merely the use of white actors in blackface that marks the film’s racism; the film’s comedy is structured around a set of gags founded on racist presumptions, including repeated clichés of gambling and razor blades, gags built around superstition and cowardice, and the presentation of Black soldiers as ignorant and naïve in the trenches.
The film’s racist premise, characterizations, representations, and vignettes all come together in a cringeworthy and, at times, unfathomable feature of presumed comedy. What makes the film interesting, however, is its ambivalence about its subject, the instances where the seams of the racial masquerade fray, and the film’s confusing but at times striking presentation of the heroism of Black soldiers. This is not a revisionist reading; the incongruity between the racist presumption of Black cowardice and the soldiers’ demonstrated bravery in combat was exploited by the studio in its marketing materials.
As Loy recalls, the film was intended as a blackface parody of What Price Glory? (1926); it also echoes the Wallace Beery-Raymond Hatton service comedy Now We’re in the Air (1927), especially in a balloon vignette and the unintended heroics of the star duo. Ham and Eggs’ Tom Wilson and Charles “Heinie” Conklin had long histories as blackface performers; while both were character comedians, they also had reputations as heavies. Director Roy Del Ruth was credited for assembling “a cast of famous blackface artists and with them interpreted the peculiarly humorous angle from which the American negro saw and participated in the World War.” Ham and Eggs is decidedly light in its characterization of the Black regiment, but the lead actors’ reputation for both comedic and villainous roles inflected their blackface performances.
Studio publicity seems overdetermined in its insistence on the film’s ingenuity: after listing a range of firsts in motion pictures, the marketing materials ask, “And yet what fan can say that he ever saw a motion picture constructed entirely around the colored race? Why a people so rich in native humor has been neglected in this regard is hard to say. Of course there have been innumerable pictures in which there has been a darky servant or character or two, but never one in which all the characters were of the ebony hue.” Fascinating here, of course, is that it apparently didn’t occur to Jack Warner to produce a film actually starring Black actors. Nor does the publicity material indicate any awareness of (or concern for) the small yet significant Race film industry aimed at African American audiences.
From the sets to the lighting, Warner Bros. emphasized verisimilitude – a strange claim for a film predicated on white masquerades of blackness. The studio also noted the “careful attention paid to details” in the sets, which “were built in exact reproduction of scenes in the chateau country where our negro corps were stationed, from photographs made by the Signal Corps during the war.” (Yonkers Statesman, 19.03.1928)  The technical aspect of filming blackface make-up was also highlighted – the film was marketed, incorrectly, as the first motion picture featuring the theatrical convention. Del Ruth “made a study for weeks of the proper lighting effects for this new medium of characterization.” (News-Herald [Franklin, PA], 23.05.1928) Though not explicit, these discussions indicate how the studio parsed the use of greasepaint vs. burnt cork blackface from the minstrel tradition; indeed, the marketing materials seem to suggest an elision of blackface performance of blackness and actual Black actors. This might have been due to an initial uncertainty about casting choices: while unlikely, it’s possible that the film might have been designed for an all-Black cast, as suggested in tantalizing pre-production mentions, such as in the Washington Post (15.05.1927), which referred to the film as “a colored comedy, with negro actors.” This suggestion was picked up by the Black press, which reported (Afro-American [Baltimore], 21.05.1927) that the production was “employing all colored actors.” Within a few weeks, however, it became clear that the film starred white actors. The reporting then shifted to emphasizing the originality of being the first motion picture “in which all the leading characters of the story appear in blackface.” (Los Angeles Times, 12.06.1927)
The film seems to have drawn a Black audience, perhaps under the presumption that it featured Black leads. The Pittsburgh Courier (16.07.1927), one of America’s leading Black newspapers, pointedly reported on Warner Bros.’ casting of white actors in a “Negro comedy situation with an exclusive Negro locale background.” But like many accounts in the Black press of Hollywood productions, the employment of African American extras – reportedly over 200 – was celebrated. Most of these extras played soldiers, and they’re also fleetingly visible as neighbors of Fazenda’s character. One of the rewards of viewing Ham and Eggs is for these glimpses of performers whose screen time, although limited, points to Hollywood’s missed opportunity for showcasing actual Black talent.
If not exactly redeemable, Ham and Eggs at the Front nevertheless offers a fascinating glimpse into how Warner Bros., and the American film industry more broadly, turned to Black representation –
interpreted through the deplorable use of blackface – as a novelty in the 1920s (Ham and Eggs was released in the US just three months after The Jazz Singer). Its ambivalences about African Americans – as fodder for racist comedy concurrently with the celebratory portrayal of heroism in combat – make the film not easily dismissible. Perhaps it’s this tension which makes the film so thoroughly American in its fraught and unresolved perspective. – Allyson Nadia Field