HAM AND EGGS AT THE FRONT (1927) with Myrna Loy

HAM AND EGGS AT THE FRONT (1927) with Tom Wilson, Heinie Conklin and Myrna Loy.

Partial synopsis from The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1921–1930, referenced from the AFI website:

"Ham and Eggs, privates in an all-black regiment, become buddies in training camp and are stationed together in a small French Village....Friml, an enemy spy...has Fifi, his Negro waitress, flirt with the soldiers to get...information...(T)he pair are sent to the front...they are accidentally cast adrift in a balloon, and in parachuting to safety, they 'capture' Friml. They are later decorated for their bravery."

Partial VARIETY review from March 14, 1928:

"This colored version of war life, handled in a comical vein, though barren of novelty...should get a good play in the neighborhoods...It has been well handled in production. Despite that most of the gags have been  previously used, the laughs are there and in sufficient quantity...Usual complications. Action slows up too often...Mere idea of a colored regiment at the front should be sufficient to draw business with proper exploitation."

From the website themakeupgallery (http://www.themakeupgallery.info/racial/afro/ham.htm) which cites Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming by James Kotsilibas-Davis and Myrna Loy:

""In her autobiography Being and Becoming Myrna Loy referred to the way she was cast in exotic roles in her early film and dismissed her participation in Ham and Eggs at the Front as ‘shameful’:

But these exotica started to predominate. My bit as a mulatto in The Heart of Maryland led to a role that I’m very much ashamed of. Zanuck wrote Ham and Eggs at the Front, a blackface parody of What Price Glory? casting me as a spy. How could I ever have put on blackface? When I think of it now, it horrifies me. Well, our awareness broadens, thank God! It was a tasteless slapstick comedy that I mercifully recall very little about.""