‘The Flying Ace,’ Silent Film With All-Black Cast, Gets a Soaring Score

A big-money heist. A war hero. A doe-eyed love interest. A climactic aerial chase.

The silent film “The Flying Ace” has all the ingredients of a riveting action movie, but it may be most remarkable as a historical artifact. Made in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1926 by a white director, the movie depicted Black characters without malice or prejudice during Jim Crow.

“The Flying Ace,” which was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2021, is seldom screened. On Saturday, though, the Jacksonville Symphony will present it with a new score collaboratively created by six leading Black composers, led by Carlos Simon.

The project spotlights Jacksonville’s past as a moviemaking center in the years before the industry consolidated in Hollywood. “It’s not perhaps something that people would associate with a city like Jacksonville,” said Courtney Lewis, the symphony’s music director. “For us, as an orchestra, to be able to have this project that grows organically from the history of our own city is so exciting.”

“The Flying Ace” was a product of Norman Studios, founded by Richard E. Norman, who had been a magic lanternist, movie accompanist and soda-pop entrepreneur before becoming a film director and distributor. A white man born near Jacksonville in 1891, Norman worked in the movie industry in the Midwest before returning home with a new focus: race films, catering to Black audiences. From 1919 to 1928, he was one of a few white filmmakers to direct movies with all-Black casts. His included westerns like “The Bull-Dogger” (1921) and “The Crimson Skull” (1922) as well as the desert-island drama “Regeneration” (1923).

Of the 30-odd production companies operating in Jacksonville during the silent film era, only the Norman Studios site — now a museum — remains. And of the company’s seven race movies, only “The Flying Ace” survives in its entirety.