Author Archive: Retro

Tweedledum wears a white suit and is caught in the rain. He stubbornly proceeds on his way and encounters so many accidents that he is forced to return home in a pitiful state.

Through some complications he got himself into involving some oil stocks and his son’s fiancee, Leon is up to his bald head in trouble when he invites the boss to dinner, and has to keep his guests apart.

A woman goes to the dentist for a toothache and is given gas. On her way home on the subway she can’t stop laughing, and every other passenger catches the laughter from her.

Musty is standing around in a state of confusion, so his fairy godfather appears to find him a job as a general factotum at an amusement gallery. Musty serves as a bootblack, a ticket-taker, a target at the shooting gallery and a rope to block off a non-working escalator.

Marcel Perez was born in 1885 in Madrid, Spain as Marcel Fernández Peréz.

Director Larry Semon and a young Stan Laurel costar as prisoners loafing on the chain gang. As both comrades and rivals, their paired movements result in strikingly choreographed slapstick. A climactic chase through the streets of 1918 Los Angeles is packed with the kind of spectacular stunts that made Semon one of the biggest names in silent comedy at the time.

In order to get his daughter away from her suitors, father decides to spirit her away to Bermuda. Our hero, however, stows away on the ship. When discovered, he is credited with catching a crook, thus winning a reward . . . and the girl.

A pleasant little film from crosseyed Ben Turpin. The tape I have with this movie on it contains several other Turpin movies, and from watching them, I believe the reason he didn’t achieve the fame of the great silent comics was because he never really solidified his character. He plays a thief, a milquetoast, a masher, a victim.

A stationary camera looks on as two dapper gents play a game of chess. One drinks and smokes, and when he looks away, his opponent moves two pieces. A fight ensues, first with the squirting of a seltzer bottle, then with fisticuffs. The combatants wrestle each other to the floor and continue the fight out of the camera’s view, hidden by the table. The waiter arrives to haul both of them out.