Ten Nights in a Barroom

The Colored Players Film Corporation's Ten Nights in a Barroom is a Prohibition-era temperance drama with an all-Black cast, and one of only two surviving features from the Philadelphia company (with The Scar of Shame). Roy Calnek adapts T.S. Arthur's 1854 novel: Joe Morgan (Charles Gilpin, the original Emperor Jones on Broadway) is swindled out of his mill by saloonkeeper Simon Slade, drinks himself into ruin, and is reborn after Slade's thrown glass kills Morgan's little daughter. He stops drinking and is elected mayor. Gilpin's performance was praised in the Black press as the real thing itself. The saloon as extractive capitalism; it survives because the George Eastman Museum kept the 35mm.