Crazy to Act

Movies about making "bad" movies rarely entertain, and this film is no exception. The mistakes made when making a poor movie may seem funny to filmmakers, but they just seem like a bad movie to the general public.

This film is worth watching once though, because it contains a rare appearance by Oliver Hardy in a Mack Sennett film. Babe Hardy was soon to be teamed with Stan Laurel and comedy stardom followed. He was working for Hal Roach at the time, and Roach loaned him to Sennett for this one film. This film also has interesting scenes of movie-making practices from the 1920s. The most interesting scenes are a "chase" on Sennett's big revolving stage where many comic chases were filmed. The viewer gets to see how the giant contraption worked, and director worked in a few gags with it.

The silly plot concerns a silly girl, Mildred June, who agrees to marry Hardy's character Gordon Bagley as long as he finances her movie debut and makes her a movie star. The director spends way too much time on the kissing scenes, making Mildred fall for the bland hero Arthur Young (Matty Kemp). The cameraman makes many mistakes, like cranking too fast so that the action appears in slow motion, and tilting the camera so that the beach is a steep slope. Except for the "behind-the-scenes" views of silent-film movie-making, this is a forgettable comedy short.

This is a lame comedy built around a silent movie being made, within a silent movie. This is not successfully done and has few funny moments in the film. A sub-plot involves Gordon Bagley trying to marry the heroine of the "movie", but she prefers the hero, and the rest is predictable.

Oliver Hardy made this film to finish his contract with Mack Sennett, so its below average of any of his solo films, but he was the only one in the cast to go onto world-wide stardom.

This is definitely a "lesser known" comedy short from the 1920s. The only reason I saw it was because it was on a DVD by Kino Films featuring non-Laurel and Hardy shorts featuring Ollie. They are interesting and historically important, but also generally average to below average for the style film. Compared to shorts by Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle and Lloyd, they are definitely a step below them in quality and humor. Also, the accompanying music was pretty poor by the standards of other silent DVDs. I ended up turning OFF the sound due to the inappropriateness of the music to set the proper mood. But, despite this, they are still worth seeing.

This film isn't a great comedy--partly because it just isn't all that funny. However, despite a pretty weak script and cast, the film IS still worth seeing. That's because much of the film is about a group of people making a film. And, you get to see how the films are made and how a studio like Mack Sennet or Hal Roach would have been. So, historically, it's an interesting curio but aesthetically, it's at best ordinary.