The Extraordinary Waiter (1902) Online

This film has a black waiter seeming to displease a colonial white customer who is wearing a pith helmet. The waiter is brutally attacked on a number of occasions in comedic fashion with special effects and editing allowing a dummy to be attacked whilst appearing to be the real waiter.

It is unfortunate that the waiter is clearly a 'blacked up' stereotype. A white actor wearing black make-up and wearing clothes which put together with his role of waiter and receiving brutal treatment from his white overlord give a bit of a bad taste of racial stereotyping. However, there is no sound and no action is shown from the waiter that could be described as negative. If anything, the customer is the one shown negatively. At the end they embrace and laugh. This film is crude and of its time but I do not find it particularly offensive. The racial elements do lower its quality in my eyes though.

Technically the effects of using a dummy and editing it with the real waiter are good for the time so this film has some artistic quality but the narrative itself is quite weak. An attack on a deserving or antagonistic character would be more appealing. The attacks on the waiter are quite inexplicable.

While ex-stage magician Georges Melies was perfecting the trick film in France, across the Channel, ex-stage magician Walter Booth was also perfecting the trick film in Britain. Although they often used the same plots and tricks, so much so that it was sometimes hard to tell who had first done what, Booth's films often showed conservative, music-hall attitudes that Melies' did not... or perhaps Melies' French roots seem more modern more than a century later.

In this one, a gentleman in a pith helmet orders a meal and attacks his slovenly Black waiter. It's apparent that the point of the film is the knockabout farce and the fact that the gentleman rips off body parts and tromps on the waiter without doing any lasting damage. Clearly this is accomplished by stopping the camera and substituting a dummy temporarily.

At least I hope so. To the contemporary audience, this would have been a version of a knockabout stage skit, made outrageous in its ferocity by movie magic. Nowadays, we would reserve our outrage for the then-current stereotypes.