Their Social Splash

Pretty Dixie Chene is abut to be married to Slim Summerville besides a swimming pool stocked with baby alligators -- wait for it -- but before the minister shows up, Charles Murray and a drunken Polly Moran manage to cause quite a fuss.

Harold Lloyd is credited as the minister, but I didn't spot him -- just another minor Keystone player waiting for a break that would come elsewhere. Charles Murray is doing his Hogan character, a low fellow who gets into all sorts of mischief that propels the comedy.

Of most interest is an early example of a typical thrill comedy sequence, as Murray and Summerville -- the latter trying to kill the former -- walk across some high steel seemingly several hundred feet above the ground. This fear-of-falling gag would be a perpetual audience pleaser for several decades. If it doesn't look like much here, well, it's early days.

Murray and his company of funmakers appear in this. There is a lot of laughable business in this reel. The mouse crawling up the woman's stocking made a rather vulgar feature, but may be easily eliminated. The scramble over the rooftops and fall into the fountain was exciting and laughable. - The Moving Picture World, May 22, 1915

That's all it took to get this short film on the way. Both Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach didn't like this sort of material, but it was what was selling at the time. A picture a week was the marketing strategy and Lloyd was paid $5 per day for the privilege.

Crazy stuff, but just what the cheap seats wanted at that time. Dixie Chene is pretty and cute as usual, and Charlie Murray goes down a treat with Polly Moran. Typically Sennett, in that someone has to pull a gun, and I wonder if Dixie was another one told by Sennett that he would make her into the next Mabel Normand. Her attempts at being a hair- tearing Mabel seem to fall flat. Only Mabel could be Mabel, and, as Chaplin discovered, only Ford Sterling could be Ford Sterling.

In many of the early films, no inter title cards were used...which means the action was often exaggerated and often it's really hard to tell what's happening. This is clearly the case with this short from Keystone, as I can only guess what is happening most of the time. It mostly seems to consist of a couple clods interrupting a wedding party and there really are no jokes to be had...probably since so many of these Keystone films had little in the way of scripts and Slim Summerville and the rest didn't seem to have a lot of innate sense of humor or timing. Overall a chore to watch....and among the weaker Keystone films I have seen...and I've seen hundreds, if not more.