User Reviews

Buster Keaton's ghost-written memoir 'My Wonderful World of Slapstick' contains a perceptive comment about silent-film comedian Larry Semon: he tended to pack his films with impossible gags that were funny but completely implausible. According to Keaton, audiences laughed harder at Semon than at more plausible comedians (such as Keaton) ... but afterwards were unable to recall what they'd laughed at.

Interestingly, both Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (separately) worked as second banana to Semon before they teamed up. In John McCabe's excellent bio 'Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy', Laurel recalled a scene from 'Frauds and Frenzies' in which he and Semon played escaped convicts: Semon, envious that Laurel was getting more laughs, staged a scene in which Laurel's wrists were handcuffed round a tree ... and then merely left him there, with Semon getting the rest of the film to himself.

When I viewed this print of 'Frauds and Frenzies', I was surprised to find no such scene. In fact, I was surprised to see Semon and Laurel billed jointly, and playing as if they were a double-act starring equally. Laurel is largely missing from the final sequences, but in all their footage together they're pretty much co-stars.

Sadly, too much of the business here seems to be second-hand. Semon and Laurel do a hat-tipping gag that was done better (and earlier) by Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle in 'The Rounders'. The film's basic situation is copied from Chaplin's 'The Adventurer', a classic of comedy. Semon uses a gag here which Keaton used seven years LATER in 'Seven Chances', but the gag is so tasteless that I'm reluctant to give him 'credit' for it: Semon glimpses a well-dressed lady and proceeds to flirt with her, then recoils when he discovers that she's black.

More positively, at least the supporting actors here (the prison warders) are physical grotesques who are funny in their own right, and the film climaxes with a Keystone-style chase. Plus there are some nice exterior sequences in Bronson Canyon.

I didn't understand some physical business in this movie, which an American friend explained to me was the working-class game of 'matching pennies'. The intertitles have some amusingly obsolete slang: Semon's and Laurel's characters are described as 'sofa sheiks', and one character expresses approval by remarking "It's the lizard's eyebrows."

Although Larry Semon's films did well at the box office, he was a poor businessman and went bankrupt during the awkward transition to talkies. Officially, Semon died (at age 39) of pneumonia ... but some evidence indicates that his family staged his death, so that Semon could escape his debts and start a new career under another identity. Semon's goblin-like features are so distinctive that they make this difficult to believe ... and his features are also so grotesque that (for me, at least) they actually undercut his appeal as a comedian. I'll rate 'Frauds and Frenzies' just 5 out of 10. Although Semon was not a front-rank comedian, he did better films than this.

So, what do we have here? One dumb, dumb guy, who happens to be a jail bird, is determined to escape his miserable situation, along with his dumb, dumb friend? Sounds like Laurel & Hardy to me...and while that certainly isn't the case, it certainly isn't an all that far-fetched assumption, either. Made just about the time when Larry Semon's rise to stardom was announced as fact, FRAUDS AND FRENZIES is perhaps best remembered for being one of the very few surviving films of his in which the more familiar Stan Laurel appears; in fact, this seems to be one of the very few works of Semon in which Laurel appears at all. This might not strike one as such an extraordinary event at first, except for Laurel & Hardy die-hards as myself. Laurel had at this point just entered the world of celluloid and was far from having developed the lovable "Stanley" we prefer to remember. However, what is notable with this setting is that Semon and Laurel are paired as a team, not too unlike a more primitive, less polished version of the later duo. By saying less polished, mind you, I do really mean not much polished at all, and the comparison to Laurel & Hardy would probably have appeared irrelevant had not one half of the later team been present. As was to remain the case with Semon for his entire career (explaining why I find it hard to let him truly enter my heart despite his obvious gift for amazing gags), the characters are not given opportunity to be much more than vessels to the situations in which they enter. One never cares for their well-being, nor is it particularly shocking to see the one betray the other towards the end of the film. In this regard, Semon and Laurel resemble the even earlier duo of silent comedy Ham and Bud more than they do Stan and Ollie.

Even so, FRAUDS AND FRENZIES offers several enjoyable bits of business; remember, it might not be such an unhealthy thing to not have to be concerned with the fates of a couple of clowns once in a while, and simply let them be victims of a few coarse and merciless chuckles. The funniest stuff occurs early on, with Semon and Laurel responding in an increasingly incompetent manner to the orders of the jail warden. The gags displayed in these first scenes appear more character-driven, even more "personal" than what usually dominates Semon's work, and I suspect much of this stuff to have been the inventions of Laurel, whose stage experience in Fred Karno's troupe in Britain had undoubtedly made him more observant of a character's potentials in comic situations. Towards the end of the film, however, Laurel is suddenly abandoned to make room for yet another one of Semon's wildly bizarre chases, providing one large-scaled mechanical gag after another. These do indeed come across as quite cartoonish, less charming than what other comedians had done (and were to do) with similar material; as a comparison, when Max Linder, years before, had magically sailed across the sky on a couple of skies, the romantic attitude of his character invited his audience into a fairytale-like state of being, which made the situation real to us despite being very much improbable. Larry Semon delivers no such depth; which is not to say, however, that his astounding gags cannot be very entertaining. FRAUDS AND FRENZIES remains quite funny to this day, and is certainly among Semon's better work.

One final note: it has often been claimed that Semon fired Laurel as the latter, apparently, received more laughs than the star himself. Although not impossible, it should be pointed out that the Vitagraph company, where Semon worked at this time, had to close doors for a while due to a heavy influenza, and that this might have caused Laurel's departure.