User Reviews

Neal Burns is such a hard worker than he has driven his father, Lincoln Plumer, into retirement. Plumer thinks Burns works too hard, and to distract him has arranged for his friend's daughter, Vera Steadman, to convince Burns that she is a gold digger and Plumer wants to marry him.

Heavens! The entire thing, therefore, is a series of practical jokes. As a motivation for movie comedies, this would have been a bore a dozen years before. True, Burns takes his prat falls in medium long shot well enough, but the Christies had spent the last half dozen years of the Teens decrying slapstick as mechanical, unmotivated and lacking all real drama. Then they spent most of the 1920s turning out slapstick comedies proving that very point.

That's why, of the four major slapstick producers of the 1920s - Sennett, Roach, Jack White and Christie - I rank Christie last. There are those who like the purely mechanical approach to comedy. I'm not one of them.

This is a decent little 2-reeler that has Burns as a workaholic for his father's business. Even his father thinks he takes his work too seriously when he neglects to show up for a luncheon with Vera Stedman. So the father plays a trick on him and says that he is now engaged to be married to the woman. Thinking it will ruin the business, he finally leaves the office to try and stop the marriage. The story on this one seems to be a bit thin, and the chaos and chases that ensue, just dont seem plausible. This is an extremely rare film, but it is available on a dvd put out by Rare Silent Films out of Slayton, OR. They have made many hard-to-see films available on dvd, and the sales go toward saving more that could be lost to us forever. -BD