User Reviews

Leon's wife arrives home late and he's angry. She loves to dance and he hates it...so she goes out dancing alone and leaves him home. Later, he goes to a bar and gets loaded...and decides that he should take dancing lessons. Unfortunately, he's mixed up with a dance expert....and all the women taking dancing lessons imitate his inebriated 'dance'.

This is an okay short....at least until Leon Errol starts dancing...then it's much funnier. Not a brilliant short in any way, but clever and worth your time.

One of rubber-legged comedian Leon Errol's better short comedies;it starts off in over-familiar vein,with Leon arguing with wife,getting drunk on the town,but has a superbly funny final sequence in a dance studio,with loads of girl students mistaking an inebriated Errol for a teacher,and following his every move.The scene is very well directed and choreographed,and compares favourably(but not quite)with the mirror sequence in the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP(1933),here done the opposite way! The film's title refers to a popular dance at the time:'The Jitters' most certainly led to another popular dance,'The Jitterbug'.

One of the support cast is comic actor Jack Rice,better known for playing Edgar Kennedy's brother-in-law in his series of two-reeler's.He plays a nightclub waiter here,getting drunk with Leon before his unintended dance tuition goes astray!

I'd never heard of Leon Errol until The Jitters came on BBC 2 recently so I taped it to see what it was and wasn't disappointed.

After an argument with his wife, Errol gets drunk and decides to take up dancing lessons. The best part of this short is where Errol is mistaken for a dance teacher by some ladies and they copy all his drunken antics. Their real teacher then turns up and the ladies get their revenge on Errol.

One annoying thing about this is that Errol has a broken cigarette stuck in his mouth throughout the movie.

Though not brilliant, The Jitters is good for a laugh.

Rating: 2 and a half stars out o f5.

This Leon Errol short, The Jitters, recreates in part one of his most famous eccentric comedy dancer routines from the Ziegfeld Follies 20 years after he first performed it. Many folks don't know that Leon Errol was one (if not THE) most important stage comedian of the 1910s. Not only did he create a racial breakthrough when he chose to partner in comedy skits with African American comedian Bert Williams in four Ziegfeld Follies but Errol was one of Ziegfeld's frequent directors of the Follies. Errol went on to star in and direct a number of very successful Broadway revues and stage musicals before making silent films (mostly lost). Determined to maintain a freelance control of his film career, Leon likely realized that he was considerably older than most comedians that studios were willing to invest and promote them into 1930s and 1940s stars like Joe E. Brown, W. C. Fields and Bob Hope. Although Leon's birth date is given as 1881, it could well be 1876--otherwise he would have been 14 or 15 while studying in medical school in Australia! The Jitters is one of his best and funniest shorts: 2 one-reel comedies melded into a two-reeler that displays Leon's talents to perfection.