The Black Hand
"This film was based on an actual Mafia kidnapping that occurred in New York City. Some of the scenes were photographed on sets while others were taken on the streets in the neighborhood where the illegal act took place. The film shows the conspirators writing a threatening letter and mailing it, the receipt of the letter, the kidnapping of the little girl, and the subsequent capture of the gang by the police. The story was filmed in documented sequences, each described by a block lettered title"--Early motion pictures / Kemp R. Niver. "The Black Hand has good claim as the earliest surviving Mafia film, the proto-Sopranos from more than a century ago. At the time, 'Black Hand' was journalese for Italian American gangsters, especially those who victimized fellow immigrants. After one gang called itself 'la Mano Nera' in a 1903 plot against a Brooklyn contractor, newspapers anglicized the name, and other gangs adopted it. Widely debated was whether the Black Hand was one hierarchical organization, a few isolated groups, or merely a name employed by individual criminals to inspire fear. There seems to have been some truth to all three. As with so many of the first American films, the story for The Black Hand was ripped from the headlines. A docudrama about urban crime undone by 'clever' policing, it recounts one recent variation on an old scheme, familiar among Sicilians and carried into the immigrant community. Usually a letter was written to a prosperous small businessman threatening death, kidnapping, or arson if extortion money was not forthcoming. The letters were typically embellished with crude drawings of daggers, skulls, coffins, and black hands. In the incident inspiring the film, a butcher named Pietro Miano (renamed 'Mr. Angelo' here) who ran a shop on Bleecker Street, then the northern edge of Manhattan's Italian Quarter, faced a demand of $700 or his shop would be blown up. (Dynamite was regularly stolen from the city's many excavation sites.) The butcher was not intimidated into silence but, as a public-spirited New Yorker, went directly to the police. The film, basing its staging on an illustration in the February 17, 1906, New York world, shows the police staking out the extortionists in an unusual hiding place. The same day's New York times story, wryly headlined 'They coolly watched, detectives stayed in the icebox to capture Black Hand man, ' recounted the resolution: 'Detective Sergeant Petrosino, who has most of the Italian and Black Hand cases ... went to Miano's butcher shop to wait for the Black Hand man. ... The detectives entered the icebox at 5:30 A.M. ... Testing all known methods for enduring cold, the men drank hot, then cold concoctions. ... Occasionally, they danced. Finally, in the evening, the culprit, one Gioccino Napoli, arrived and was arrested by 'the half-frozen sleuths.' He turned out to live only a block east on Bleecker Street. ... The Black Hand was shot a month later on March 15 and 16, 1906, a mile north of the original events, in the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company's 14th Street studio and in nearby snow-filled streets, and then released quickly to theaters on March 29. Its two starkly contrasting styles are typical of filmmaking at the time: the exteriors have a compelling documentary realism; the interiors could hardly be more artificially theatrical. Lacking close-ups, the film demands that audiences spot background details, such as the note the police slip to Maria, the butcher's kidnapped daughter. The plotline of a child imperiled, especially popular at Biograph, was an addition from other recent Black Hand kidnappings. (Two weeks before the filming, Detective Petrosino had freed an Italian American banker's 14-year-old son.) The kidnapping of the butcher's daughter was staged on Seventh Avenue evidently with a partially hidden camera. The shot's abrupt end as bystanders rush to intervene suggests that Biograph's publicity may not be entirely exaggerated: 'The kidnapping scene was done with such realism that our actors had no little trouble in getting away from policemen and detectives who persisted in regarding it as the real thing.' Manhattan in the year of this film was nearing its highest population (some 2.5 million, up from 1.5 million in 1890, which is its population again today). In just the first five years of the century, more than a million Italians came to the United States. The several hundred thousand residing in Manhattan in 1906 were both a subject of early movies and an audience for storefront nickelodeons, which had sprung up only a year or so earlier. The Black Hand thus has reasons to counterbalance its portrayal of the Italian criminals. The extortionist kidnappers, comic in their inebriation, traditional garb, and broken grammar, cut a poor contrast to the assimilated family, whose butcher shop is depicted as one of the small ethnic businesses that made newcomers feel at home. While affirming the solid citizenship of the family, the film stoked fear that old-world criminality was coming to America along with immigrants, a danger underscored three years later by the assassination in Italy of the policeman who had solved this little case"--Treasures III brochure notes by Scott Simmon
Filme, English, ©1906