This film from the Biograph company is an example of the sort of negative racial stereotypes depicted in early cinema. Its structure follows a familiar pattern of screen comedy of the era of a prank and punitive ending, a formula that dates back to at least, perhaps, the very first film comedy skit, the Lumière brothers' "L'Arroseur arrosé" ("The Sprayer Sprayed") (1895). There, the gag was more innocuous, of a boy being spanked after tricking a gardener into spraying himself in the face with water from a hose. Films became more vicious from there, as this two-scene Biograph short demonstrates. It's also a play on a then-popular idiom--literalizing it as a sort of visual pun. With the trick photography (there's a stop-substitution for the explosion), there's another, less troubling double meaning with one trick in the film being by and against characters within the film and another trick being pulled on the spectator.
In the film, two white men chopping wood plant a stick of dynamite in their woodpile. After they depart, two black characters (white actors in blackface), a sinful deacon and an Uncle Remus type, steal from the woodpile. In the second and last shot-scene of the film, they've taken the wood home, where a mammy type also occupies, for their stove. The dynamite explodes in the fire, thus exposing and punishing them for their theft, as the white men enter the space to laugh at their expense. This minstrelsy representation of African Americans as habitual thieves seems to have been a popular negative stereotype at the time. After this production, Biograph made another racial punitive picture, "The Chicken Thief" (1904), while Edison produced "The Watermelon Patch" (1905). Besides perpetuating the thievery trope, these later films also employ food-based stereotypes of African Americans regarding fried chicken and watermelon.
Jacqueline Stewart begins the introduction to her book, "Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity," with an examination of this film, partly because of the meaning of its titular slang expression that it treats both figuratively and literally. Today, as its Wikipedia entry points out, phrases with similar meanings would be "skeleton in the closet" or "fly in the ointment." In other words, it means that there's something suspiciously concealed, something amiss, something wrong. Supposedly, the figure of speech originated with the actual hiding of runaway slaves in woodpiles along the Underground Railroad. Regardless, its roots are in racism. Aptly and ironically, however, this title may take on a different meaning in how, as Stewart says, such films (and film history) conceal and reveal black figures.
As an early film such as "Something Good - Kiss" (1898) offers, though, a blanket excusing of past racist depictions as being entirely universal doesn't hold true. Indeed, early on, with white filmmakers making films for predominately white audiences, negative racial stereotypes were common, but they weren't accepted by everyone, and by the following decade, including African American filmmakers with African-American casts, took to creating alternate representations on screen. But, here, even the cinematic gaze, as Stewart also illustrates, works to support the racial hierarchy of the picture. The dynamite trick provides a form of white surveillance over the black transgression, allowing the presumed-white audience to both follow the aced crime and identify with the looks and retribution of the white men. There is something wrong in the woodpile of this 1904 film, and it's not the characters; it's the characterizations, the negative racial stereotypes and representation