The Fainting Lover

"The Fainting Lover" is a short from Mack Sennett made for Educational Pictures. I found it on YouTube....though I see absolutely no reason whatsoever for you to look for it as well. Why? Well, because it lacks one things comedies really need...laughs!

The film finds the Professor (Vernon Dent) wowing everyone at a party...so much so that Bert (Wade Boteler) loses his girlfriend to him. Later, big laughs occur (??) at the wedding as Bert cries loudly (and badly) throughout...disrupting the wedding. Other such non-funny moments include Andy Clyde acting out a fishing trip for guests...and what could have been cute is really annoying as it seems to go on and on and on. As for the guests, they tire of his routine and walk away...mirroring how the audience probably felt as well. The bottom line is that none of this is funny....as if Sennett somehow forgot how to make people laugh.

Wade Boteler thinks he's going to marry Andy Clyde's niece, but the wedding features Vernon Dent in a German accent; Boteler's role is to disrupt the cermeony with his weeping and wailing in this poor Mack Sennett short.

Sennett's comedy empire had contracted mightily from the 1910s, and here he is, directing this insufferable, laugh-free short, something he had left to far more capable hands for more than a decade. He soon would be out of independent production, still with his own logo, but effectively a line producer for Paramount. Even his occasional successes, like the W.C. Fields shorts, now recognized as classics, were seen as abject failures at the time.