Mom (Moms Mabley) runs a boarding house for struggling entertainers,[6][7] similar to the situation decades earlier when Mabley had lived in a boarding house for black entertainers in Buffalo, New York.[8]
When the boarding house is threatened with closure and all the tenants evicted due to non-payments, everyone gets together to put on a show to raise the money needed to save Mom and their home.[9] The plot functions as a showcase[8] for performance and comedy sketches and in the end enough money is raised to fend off the landlord.[6]
Legacy
The film was the first starring role for Mabley and showcased her "vaudeville-circuit comedy and captured her signature stances and expressions."[10] The film was also one of the early iterations of Mabley's "Moms" persona.[11]
In 1994, the National Film Theatre in London featured the film in their "A Separate Cinema" season, which focused on the pioneers of black cinema in the United States.[12] The film was cited as an example of "subversive" low budget black cinema in the 1940s.[12]
In 2022, the American Film Institute showed the film as part of the institute's "NYC's Postwar Film Renaissance" series.[13]
↑Beyond Blaxploitation by Novotny Lawrence, Wayne State University Press, 2016.
↑Cracking Up Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States by Katelyn Hale Wood, University of Iowa Press, 2021, page 33.
12"Homage to films noirs: David Robinson selects highlights from an NFT season celebrating the Pioneers of black American cinema" The Times, pp. 37, issue. 64952, 1994.
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