User Reviews

Rastus is taking a nap on a railroad bridge when he is shanghaied and eventually released on a tropical shore. He is captured by Zulu warriors in this split-reel comedy from Lubin.

This one-joke bit of film is offensive by modern standards, but director Arthur Hotaling quite clearly does a workmanlike piece of work on it (whether that makes it more or less offensive is left as a problem for the audience). That is typical for Lubin's product: while among the most technically proficient of the Patents Trust producers -- the founder started as an optician and manufacturer of photographic equipment -- his studio was extremely conservative in subject and cinematic techniques.

This is not a film you have to see, unless, like me, you'll look at any movie.

The film previously reviewed here is not Rastus in Zululand but the very similar 1913 film Rastus Among the Zulus, probably featuring the same African American actor Joseph Outen (this is not a white in blackface). It is rather sad when any film featuring a black actor is immediately characterised as "racist" (the automaticsm of the reposnse itself represents a kind of unconscious racism). In this case both films weer part of a whole series of so-called "coloured comedies" made by Lubin with all-black and mostly black-casts. Many featured the black vaudevilian team John and Mattie Edwards and at least two of them featured the young actor who appears in the 1913 film (and perhaps already in the 1910 version), Joseph Outen. Even if the films and the roles are a shade caricatural, it is great to see black actors at this period given the chance to perform and Lubin is much to be commended for the initiative.

Regarding the differences between the two films, in this film, as the contemporary description makes clear, he is dozing next to a stream whereas in the later film he is dozing next to a railway-track on the dock. In this film he actually enlists as a sailor whereas in the later film he is shanghaied. Otherwise the two films are clearly much the same.