User Reviews

Lee Beggs is a wealthy man. He dines at fine restaurants with beautiful companions. He knocks the basket of fruit that apple-seller Patrick Foy offers him to the ground. While Foy tries to recover them, Beggs walks off, pleased with himself, while urchins grab the now free fruit. A policeman shrugs his shoulders.

Beggs also goes joy-riding. He strikes and kills Foy's five-year-old daughter. While a mob looks to lynch him, the terrified Beggs ducks into a doorway. It's Foy's apartment.

It was a frequent woe of the era, when automobiles were becoming common. Suddenly, they were all over the streets, which had long been common ground for everyone. The law dealt with the problem by labeling people in the streets "jay walkers" and outlawing them. "Vehicular manslaughter" was still a crime, of course. It just wasn't as serious as others.

Alice Guy's Solax one-reeler "A Man's a Man" is somewhat interesting because the poor man in its class division is explicitly stated to be Jewish--not that one would know if the title cards, in the old-fashioned mode of describing proceeding actions, didn't tell us he was. Hence, the film's title, of Jew and Gentile both being men. Albeit, the Gentile in this one is a rich criminal who gets away with knocking over the Jewish vendor's apples intentionally and, then, running over and killing his daughter with his car. The poor man shows mercy, however, in hiding the rich guy from a mob and, a year later, while they're both putting flowers on the late daughter's grave.

Except for the ethnic part, the scenario seemed very familiar, and as it turns out I rather recently saw another film about class and the rich guy running over the poor family's child, Thanhouser's "The Two Roses" (1910). And, these are hardly the only films I'm sure to run kiddies over with those then-newfangled automobiles. So, no points for originality to Guy here in what is an otherwise relatively bland social-problem drama executed in a dated tableau fashion. Its redeeming value being in its historical interest for the representation of Jewish characters, although on that account, too, her fellow French pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès tackled anti-Semitism more head-on and more than a decade prior in "The Dreyfus Affair" (1899).

Plus, according to Guy-expert Allison McMahan (author of "Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema"), "Guy herself depicted Jews as stereotypical pawnbrokers and loansharks in other films." Not surprising given she also made the relatively-commendable early race film "A Fool and His Money" (1912), but resorted to racist gags in other films. McMahan also situates "A Man's a Man" with Guy's "Making an American Citizen" (1912), commenting on how it's surprising, as having immigrated to the U. S. from France, that she didn't make more movies about those identified as foreigners and their Americanization. On the other hand, at least Guy didn't do what fellow female filmmaker Lois Weber did in making a film supposedly against anti-Semitism for which its problems are rather self-explanatory from its title, "The Jew's Christmas" (1913).

In the Solax production of "A Man's a Man," a Jew is represented as a man and not a subject of ridicule. The poor peddler, although he is wronged by a thoughtless and happy-go-lucky mixer, not only forgives, but is big enough to protect the offender from mob violence. The production shows one of the finest managed mob scenes seen on any stage. There are nearly seventy-five people in the mob and they are all good supers, all there for a purpose and strengthen the ensemble. They are led into the Jew's home to lynch a man who has run down a child. The man is in hiding in the Jew's home. Although it is his own child who has been run down, the Jew protects the offender. There is an interesting counter-plot which brings out strongly the emotional and tensely dramatic values of the entire production. - The Moving Picture World, January 13, 1912