We’ve had several threads asking where the phrase “Feet, don’t fail me now” came from.
“Feets don’t fail me now” origin
[Who said “Feet don’t fail me now?”](Who said “Feet don’t fail me now?”)
I have a new entry, earlier than any suggestions in those threads (except for one Feet - do your duty).
On August 18, 1924, the New York Times reviewed a now-lost silent film called Fools in the Dark. It was a spoof on some spooky movies that were having a vogue. I found it because it has an inventor who had invented a death ray. Yes, this was during the 1924 height of death ray claims and the *Times *had already run two dozen stories on the subject over the past three months. Hollywood ground out movies in a week or less and could incorporate news before it faded from the headlines.
Anyway, here’s the pertinent part of the review.
Diploma is a dunce; that’s why he’s ironically named Diploma. Get it? Ha. And it’s worse than that. Diploma is played by Tom Wilson, a fortyish actor well into his career - who also happened to be white. He plays Diploma with burnt cork blackface.
We thought it was bad when we associated the line with black actors who were forced into comic stereotypes, like Willie Best and Stepin Fetchit, but what if its first use in movies was put into the mouth of a white character in blackface? The writers of the scenario for Fools in the Dark were Bertram Millhauser and John Grey, who both had long careers without ever writing anything you are likely to have heard of. I don’t know if they invented the line or stole it, but if the *Times *singles it out as a great bit of comedy it can’t have been very familiar to mainstream audiences. But I suppose anything that got praise in the Times would be remembered.
This use of the line probably has gone overlooked because there’s a typo in it: “fail” is spelled “fall”. You have to search on “Feet, don’t fall me now” to find it, unless you stumble across it looking for some other search term, as I was.