User Reviews

In 1917, Mack Sennett and his Keystone comedy company were at the peak of their popularity. They were the undisputed leader when it came to comedy short films. However, Triangle was about to have financial problems due to mismanagement. Triangle requested that Sennett resume producing one-reel comedies, but Sennett was making so much money with his two-reelers that he refused. Triangle set up their own comedy unit for one-reelers, and Sennett lent is name (and occasionally a few performers) to the unit.

Comedian Raymond Griffith had worked for Sennett for over a year, but he had only appeared in a handful of films. Sennett felt that Griffith's character was too ordinary and not "comic" enough. Griffith jumped at the chance to play in the Triangle Komedies, although he was only the lead player some of the time. Most of these films are lost forever, but this one still exists.

Griffith is a traveling salesman who has a cure for foot calluses. Amazingly, it also works on hunchbacks. When he shows up in a western frontier town, the dance-hall proprietor takes an instant dislike to him. There are lots of fights, a bear who drinks alcohol, a dance-hall girl, and a few gags thrown in. This film is not a classic, but it will make you chuckle a few times.

At this point in his career, Griffith had not developed the silk-hat character that he portrayed in many films in the 1920s. By the 1920s, he had developed into the best supporting actor on the Goldwyn and later Paramount lot. He also began supplementing his acting chores with writing gags for comedy shorts at the Sennett studio, as well as for big-name actors like Douglas MacLean.

In the midst of the large number of awful comedies Sennet produced in this period -- he seems to have been too involved in the production of comedy features, as well as the unraveling of the Triangle Corporation -- there are a few that stand out today as watchable. The films Arbuckle turned out before he left for his own studio are often excellent. The famous TEDDY AT THE THROTTLE is fun because of its script and gags. Here is another one that is interesting, although not for the reasons you might expect.

What is different here is Raymond Griffith. He is dressed as weirdly as the others, but most Keystone comedians look as if they made their fashion choices on drugs. Griffith looks like he mugged William S. Hart and stole his clothes. While the other comedians glare and glower like fiends, Griffith keeps a wary, personable smile on his face most of the time, and expresses human emotions at other time. His movements, although broad, are not demented. He is clearly an actor who is comfortable with film.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this film. Clearly, after he went behind the camera for a few years, and then re-emerged in the mid-twenties, he produced a recognizable comedic human being, but I think he is showing signs of reality here. It is refreshing and pleasing.