Language: Silent, English titles (171)

His Wife's Mistakes

Highlights:

  • Arbuckle's encounter with a revolving door - a year before Chaplin's famous rendition in The Cure
  • The barbershop sketch, with its Pythonesque milking of gags beyond tastelessness
  • The unusual darky meets pansy gag
  • Fatty's use of the elevator to demonstrate the Loonyverse's First Principle of Inversion: any output can be used as input

The Aryan/La fiera domada

The title raised the excited hope of going beyond the usual stereotyping and slurs, instead delivering an explicit exposition of racial ideology - taking Birth Of A Nation out west. Unfortunately, this is just an incomplete reconstruction of a film considered lost until 2008. The introduction states that this version comes from an Argentine mid-1920s rerelease (dates within the film are given as 1923), with titles that “differ quite a bit from the original”. Most segments have not been digitally restored, and lost segments are replaced by photographs.

The original may have been more directly concerned with racial ideology, but here Cowboy's main conflict is with women: Cowboy is massively Madonna–whore complexed. This is immediately suggested in the very first scene, where Cowboy's sacred love for his distant mother is juxtaposed with images of him petting and kissing his bestial companion. Then after he deludes himself that a sleazy mining camp on the border is his ideal “town inhabited by men of iron heart”, and that his mother would love a girl he met in a bar there, he is of course vamped. But instead of dumping her, he takes her as his whore he loves to hate, as he does a No-More-Mister-Nice-Guy. Finally, he meets The Virgin Mary Jane and he again falls to his delusions as she cons him into believing his White Man's Duty is to give away his riches. He leaves behind his whore to return to his Brotherhood and replay the Heroic Defender role that first got him vamped, before riding off in the sunset to seek his next imagined Madonna to transform into an imagined whore. So goes the life of an iron-hearted Aryan.

Where Are My Children?

“All intelligent people know that birth control is a subject of serious public interest. Newspapers, magazines and books have treated different phases of this question. Can a subject thus dealt with on the printed page be denied careful dramatization on the motion picture screen?...In producing this picture the intention is to place a serious drama before adult audiences...”

This somber introduction is immediately followed by:

“Behind the great portals of Eternity, the souls of little children waited to be born.”

And on it goes like this, shifting between pretense of weighty social drama and wallowing in cabbage-patch airy-fairy fantasy, linked by hackneyed melodrama and annoying overuse of cross-cutting, while hammering its messages - abortion is murder, humanity's salvation is birth control (for the poor), becoming a submissive baby factory is the duty of every woman (if she's wealthy) - only approaching realism in its wonderfully dark and depressing ending. Movie in a nutshell: Living with a pompous, self-righteous, hypocritical Dickless Attorney leaves wife with no desire to breed more of his kind. There - 65 minutes saved.