User Reviews

THE ANARCHIST'S MOTHER-IN-LAW is an early film for Viggo Larsen, who directs and stars in this one. It is a very nice slapstick comedy for the era, as wifey's mama catches hubby with the upstairs maid.

Denmark was probably the leading nation for film production in this period, and this is a spiffy little comedy, containing much of what Mack Sennett would be doing seven years later, if with slightly less sophistication. Still, there's a fine fall, lots of running around, a couple of pans of water and, since this is an Anarchist's mother-in-law, you know there is going to be some high explosives somewhere in the proceedings. Really, this is an amazingly advanced film for 1906.

"The Anarchist's Mother-in-Law" was an early production for the then-new Nordisk studio. Through the 1910s, Nordisk was Denmark's biggest movie producer--a period that was arguably the golden age of Danish cinema due to their unusually significant international influence and market share. During the 1910s, directors like Carl Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen and August Blom and stars Asta Nielsen and Valdemar Psilander emerged. At this early stage, Viggo Larsen was Nordisk's regular director. Given that supposedly the first Danish fictional film ("Capital Execution" ("Henrettelsen", 1903)) was made only three years before this one, "The Anarchist's Mother-in-Law" is well made for the time.

This short comedy tells an intelligible narrative in nine scenes without the aid of title cards. In it, the "anarchist" husband is caught canoodling the maid by his wife and his mother-in-law (played by a man in drag). The mother-in-law, then, chases him through the home and outside after he jumps through a window. The final scene has the anarchist planting a chair and pan of water for the mother-in-law to trip over and has him blowing her up with dynamite. This film is intelligible because it relies upon early international comedy trademarks: violent and broad knockabout humor, punishing a cheating husband, the man in drag and the chase. Thousands of early films were made with variations on this formula. (I've been especially interested in the history of early chase films, and have commented on IMDb on many of them from various countries.)

"The Anarchist's Mother-in-Law" also features a primitive jump cut once to transition between scenes and again for trick effects.