Horrific though in many respects the US studio system was (and remains, in its various continually reconstituted forms), it is hard not to admire the way that enterprising nobodies (often total louts) could break into the big league with an absolute minimum of resources. Warner Brothers was virtually "poverty row" before it took the canny decision to go with "sound" when other studios were reluctant.
The odious Cohn brothers launched their C.B.C. Film Sales Corp. on the basis of almost nothing - Jack Cohn's notion of a sort of insiders' gossip column - the Screen Snapshots and Hollywood Snapshots - and the Hall Room Boys, an unextraordinary but always neatly adequate series of comedy shorts.
The "Snapshots" idea was really the money. Not only did it prove popular with the public but it could pose as a service provided to the other studios (it publicised their stars and their current films) and to the industry as a whole. It very deliberately offered a squeaky clean image of stars, with their families, their pets, their mothers and fathers that was deliberately intended to counter the bad publicity brought by the various scandals of the twenties).
The Hall Room Boys were equally economical and were solid, risk-free fare that could hardly fail to repay their cost.
Contrary to the myth that capitalism encourages adventurous spirits; it quite conspicuously does the opposite. It favours ruthless, unimaginative men (nearly always men) who stick to simple formulae and rely more on good timing than on inspiration. The success of Columbia, formed in 1924 after just 4-5 years of CBC's Snapshots and Hall Room Boys, is the living proof. The Hall Room Boys series was made with whatever actors were available to the Cohns at the time and the characters (Ferdie and Percy in the original comic strip to which the series only has a passing resemblance) were sometimes called James and George, sometimes James and Eddie...
They came out at a time when Pathé was greatly expanding its home-viewing market for the new "Pathé-Baby" and Pathé was more than happy to recycle these comedies on 98.5m for which they were ideal (another example of the Cohns' clever timing) - most the surviving examples are in fact only known in 9.5m Pathex versions - and which in turn gave them, like the Roach comedies, which were distributed by Pathé, an international market.
In the French versions Ferdie and Percy became Anatole and Jules and other names were doubtless used in Italian, Spanish and German versions.
This film is a good example. It was re-titled Anatole kidnapper/James and George Kidnappers on Pathé-Baby/Pathex. The pair are elegant down-and-outs in a park where a mother and her baby are having a picnic. Their dog steals the picnic basket for them but when the woman complains to the policeman on duty, they have to hide their booty. Unfortunately the dog keeps giving the game away.
A little later the bay wanders off and, having been splattered by oil from a car exhaust, is mistaken by a black laundress for her baby who has also wandered off. The baby's parents, meanwhile, advertise a generous reward for whoever finds their child and Ferdie and Percy (James and George) see the ad and decide to go in search. They are none too scrupulous about the babies they pick up. At one point they do actually have the right baby but the black mother drives them off and only afterwards realises her mistake when her own offspring returns.
They arrive at the house of the parents, each with a separate baby, neither of them the correct one and the father, who is short-sighted, is about to pay the reward when the mother returns and, recognising Ferdie and Percy as the men from the park, accuses them of the kidnap. They make off with the police in pursuit.
At which point, they are embarrassed by the arrival of the baby - the right one this time - who joins them in their hiding-place and they do everything they can to make the baby go away. Eventually they succeed in offloading the baby on a blind beggar playing the violin on a street corner.....
Cheap, well-written, coherent, unadventurous stuff.
