“Big Timers” is a cheaply-made featurette of the “race films” genre that created productions with all-Black casts that were released exclusively to the racially segregated theaters of the Jim Crow era.
The plot is strictly B-Movie silliness transported to a Harlem setting. A pretty singer falls in love with a soldier from a wealthy family, but she is afraid he won’t marry her because she’s the daughter of a hotel chambermaid. When his family comes to Harlem to meet her, her mother pretends she is a wealthy dowager in one of the hotel’s suites. However, the real dowager shows up – and in typical zany movie logic, she stages a musical revue in her suite to entertain the soldier’s family and ensure the young lovers are united.
There are exactly two redeeming features in “Big Timers”: the glorious Francine Everett, who plays the singer and displays a beauty and charisma that made her one of the major attractions of the race films, and an exotic dancer called Tarzana whose bumping and grinding compensates for the inadequacies that burden much of this flimsy movie.
Stepin Fetchit, the Black comic actor whose presence in Hollywood productions was condemned by many critics for perpetuating egregious stereotypes, is top billed in “Big Timers” although he has a small and mostly unnecessary role as bumbling porter. The funnyman shuffles around and mumbles to himself before launching into a brief but bizarre talk-sing number that could be viewed as a forerunner of rap. And if you can figure out what he’s saying in the clip below, more power to you!