Hands Up!

I thoroughly recommend this 70 minute feature which showcases Raymond Griffith as a Southern spy attempting to thwart a gold shipment to the North from Nevada. His style of acting is quite sophisticated, reminding me of an American Max Linder. He plays comedy and pathos with delicious layers of understatement followed by bravado. He is truly a forgotten actor in the great tradition of American comedy. How fun it would have been to have seen him in a Lubitsch film.

With all the work of the major silent comedians so readily available, it's easy to forget about the other, less-known clowns whose work isn't as easy to find. Raymond Griffith falls under this category, because so much of his work is lost, and what does survive isn't that easy to see.

What struck me immediately was the endless parade of sight gags in the film. The opening scene with Abraham Lincoln meeting with his cabinet set up a serious tone that is delightfully contrasted in the very next scene, when Ray Griffith rides up to visit General Lee. The sight gags begin immediately, and in this scene reminded me of similar battlefield gags in DUCK SOUP (shells flying through the window, etc). Thankfully, the rest of the film kept up the ingenuity and clever gags found in this scene. Griffith himself is a very fun performer to watch. His characterization of the unruffled gentleman in the silk hat played very well against the overall zaniness of the film. I would really enjoy seeing more of his work. Mack Swain, always great, turned in a memorable supporting appearance here.

The length of the film is perfect for a comedy. It's one thing that pre-WWII comedies had as a major advantage-that they could end after 60 or 70 minutes and not have to hang on a lot of exposition and plot wrap-up for the mandatory 90 minute-plus running time of today.

Many years ago at a film festival, I saw a beautiful print of Paths to Paradise and recall laughing uproariously. . This film – not so much. Of course seeing an excellent print of a film on a big screen and with an audience is quite a different experience from seeing a poorer quality print on a small television set with no audience. So I should probably make a certain allowance when evaluating Hands Up! Griffith plays a likable rogue type who is a spy for the confederacy trying to hijack a wagon load of gold. This gold could give the South the winning edge in the Civil War. A number of the comedy routines are brilliant - most notably the firing squad scene and the bumblebee in the coach scene But the story line between the comedy routines was slow going – his romance with the two sisters was numbing, although it did lead to an unexpected and amusing ending. His trademark top hat was used effectively throughout the movie especially in the mine scene. A little crisp editing in some of scenes could have helped the movie. That said, Griffith did have a flair and manner about him that was quite engaging. We are just lucky to have this film at all; it's a shame that so little of Griffith's work remains.

There appear to be two versions of this film, a full 70-minute version and a half-hour short entitled Injun Trouble. The latter does also seem to have been released as I have seen contemporary reviews which appear to be discussing the short version. It also appears to be the version by the sole unfavourable reviewer here.

An unidentified Raymond Griffith short, A King for a Day (Eén dag koning) appears in the Dutch EYE collection. It is a story of a king and his lookalike in an imaginary kingdom and, although EYE dates it as 1920, it seems to be more likely that it appeared in 1922, when there was a whole spate of pseudo-parodies following the success of Metro's Prisoner of Zenda (others are the Christie comedy Choose Your Weapons and Semon's A Pair of Kings). There were later parodies, Laurel's Rupert of Heehaw (following Selznick's release of the sequel to Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau, in 1923) and Langdon's Soldier Man 1926 (which also contains a neat clin d'oeil towards the 1926 Barrymore film The Sea Beast) but none that I know of before 1922. The film is very similar in plot to Semon's A Pair of Kings and is a rather mediocre slapstick comedy, although there is evidently missing footage. The production company is unknown.

If the name Raymond Griffith is familiar today only to historians and silent comedy completists, blame the fact that his reputation rests entirely on two surviving but rarely shown features: 'Paths To Paradise' (1925) and 'Hands Up!' (1926). Neither comedy can match the sublime heights of invention achieved by Keaton, Chaplin or Lloyd (or, in his brief prime, Harry Langdon), but Griffith was an engaging talent who, given time, could have developed into a master craftsman. The Civil War comedy 'Hands Up!' is more self-consciously offbeat than the earlier film, showing one direction Griffith might have pursued had his career been more successful. Again the playful impostor (a role he could have patented), Griffith plays a Confederate spy (dressed, incongruously, in top hat and tails) sent West to hijack a Union gold shipment. The film is a daring, if not always successful, departure from the conventional farce of 'Paths To Paradise' (with a curious romantic triangle involving twin sisters), but unfavorable (and unfair: the film is more a Western) comparisons to Buster Keaton's Civil War classic 'The General' have doomed it to obscurity. Griffith, and his films, deserve better.