Posters tell movie history of Mantan Moreland

I didn’t know Mantan Moreland made so many movies, my old auction buddy Janet exclaimed. Neither did I.

We had individually gone through items in an upcoming online auction and were marveling at how many of the movie posters featured Moreland as star, co-star and no star. I learned that he actually appeared in more than 300 films over 30 years. Who knew.

A New York auction house is selling movie posters featuring Black actors from the collection of Larry Richards of Philadelphia. I’m familiar with the collection because about 10 years ago, I wrote a freelance newspaper article about it. Richards was a Philadelphia librarian who amassed a large collection of Black movie posters, lobby cards and other memorabilia before he suddenly died in 2008. His wife Beverly took over the collection, and some of the items are now in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

Guernsey’s Auction House in New York will be selling the items on Sat. Jan. 9, 2021. The sale includes more than 30 Moreland movie posters, lobby cards and window cards from the 1940s. Some of them are duplicates. The auction includes other collectibles not associated with the Richards’ collection.

I am very familiar with Mantan Moreland’s name, but I’ve never seen any of his films. Every image I’ve ever seen of him showed a character with his eyes stretched wide in fear. It was not a nice sight, but he was working at a time when Black folks were considered more stereotype than human.

Moreland was so prolific as a comedian/actor that he sometimes appeared in two to three films a year in seemingly small roles, sometimes uncredited. He was in films featuring “all-colored” casts, such as “Cabin in the Sky (1943),” and “Green Pastures (1936),” both Hollywood films, as well as independent films. He played butlers, con men, porters, chauffeurs, janitors and waiters with “bulging eyes and a cackling laugh,” as described in Wikipedia.

Today, there aren’t many people who may remember such comedians as Mantan Moreland or Pigmeat Markham, and actresses Nina Mae McKinney or Louise Beavers – whose movie posters are included in the sale.

During the 1940s, Moreland was presumably pretty well-known. He was familiar as the chauffeur Birmingham Brown in the Charlie Chan movies. When Shemp Howard of the Three Stoogies died in 1955, he was considered to replace him. Columbia Pictures, though, went with a white actor.

Moreland was equally noted for the “indefinite talk” routine with actor/comedian Ben Carter. In the routine, one character starts a sentence and the other picks it up, providing his own seemingly disjointed answer. The result is a comic thread that meanders.

Here’s a snippet from the routine in “The Scarlet Clue,” a 1945 Charlie Chan movie:

Moreland: “Well, if it ain’t ah… ”

Carter: “Ben Carter’s my name.”

Moreland: “Benjamin Carter. Yeah, boy, it’s been a long time. I haven’t seen you since”

Carter: “Longer than that.”

Moreland: “Yeah.”

Carter: “The last time I saw you you was living”

Moreland: “I done moved from there.”

Carter: “Yeah?”

Moreland: “Sure, I moved over to”

Carter: “How can you live in that neighborhood?”

Moreand: “I don’t know.”

Carter: “Where I’m living I only pay”

Moreland: “It ain’t that cheap, is it?”

The two did not originate the routine; it was created by Flournoy E. Miller and his vaudeville partner Aubrey Lyles. After Lyles died in 1932, Miller brought on Moreland and the two men continued the comedy act. They also performed in low-budget films aimed at attracting Black audiences. Many of the movies on the posters were produced by Toddy Pictures, a white-owned company that produced what were called “race films.”

After Carter died in 1946, Moreland and Nipsey Russell teamed up, carrying on the popular interplay in shows at the Apollo. During the 1940s and 1950s, Moreland performed with Redd Foxx.

Born in Monroe, LA, in 1902, Moreland had always longed to be a performer. He got his first break as a comedian in the nightclub revue “Connie’s Inn Frolics” in Harlem. Connie’s featured some of the best Black entertainers of the day, including Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Billie Holiday.

He was in the cast of the Broadway show “Blackbirds of 1928,” one of six revues that ran until 1933. Bill Bojangles Robinson performed his first staircase tap in that revue. Moreland got his first movie role in 1933. He and Miller were cast as two scared night watchmen in a haunted pawn shop in the film “That’s the Spirit.” He appeared with Ruby Dee in “What a Guy” in 1948.

Moreland became known for his roles in comedy thrillers where he played a nervous easily frightened character. As societal attitudes toward those roles for Blacks began to change, he was not called on as often.

In 1955, he reportedly told a Cleveland newspaper that he would no longer play such demeaning roles.

During the 1960s he worked sporadically – doing a few movies, some TV and commercials. In 1970, he was in the movie “Watermelon Man” with Godfrey Cambridge. Moreland died in 1973.