The Bakery

A hilarious slapstick comedy from Larry Semon's best period, with a sight gag every few seconds, stunt work that still amazes, and several scenes that show magnificent comic timing. Also, it's interesting to see Oliver Hardy (several years before teaming with Stan Laurel) playing the villain, as he did in many Semon comedies.

It's hard to believe that back in the early 1920s, Larry Semon was one of the top movie comics--as he is practically unheard of today. In fact, I think the only reason I found this short on DVD was because like many of Semon's films, his co-star was Oliver Hardy and this film was part of Passport Video's "The Laurel OR Hardy Collection"--films featuring one or the other before they were permanently teamed in 1927.

While I have never been a huge Larry Semon fan, I have seen a few dozen of his films and appreciate that he CAN be exceptionally funny and his stunts amazing to watch. Unfortunately, this is not the norm, as most of Semon's films are rather mediocre for the genre. However, I was very, very happy to see that this was not a typical Semon film but one where all the action and plotting worked perfectly--producing one of the funnier comedy shorts of the 1920s I have seen. While it lacks the sophistication and polish of the best of Keaton and Lloyd, for laughs it's hard to beat this film. I particularly loved the scene where he tried to get the mouse off the customer--you'd have to see it to believe it. Plus, in this film the stunt-work is very high energy and amazing--particularly the huge falls through the trapdoor from one floor to another. I don't know how they did this dangerous work without someone being killed!! Funny, high-paced, and coming together like a true work of art, this is Larry Semon at his absolute finest.

Larry Semon is, sadly, likely the most historically overlooked of all the "silent clowns".

Critics panned his films later in his career, due to his refusal to change from tried-and-true slapstick formulas, and he was soon forgotten in the public eye after he died too young of tuberculosis.

Also, whomever may get a chance to actually see one of his flicks, be warned they are often not "PC" in today's world, containing racial stereotypes, etc.

HOWEVER...

"The Bakery" is pure fun from the start, with pies, lard, soot, food, flour, and whatever else happens to be handy flying thruout! This silly romp is very worth seeing, if you can find it (a very hard thing to do).

Other than Oliver Hardy playing the same type of villain as Eric Campbell, I see nothing else that resembles Chaplin in the least. Chaplin was never as physical in his comedy as Semon was. "The Bakery" is thin on plot like most all of his films but if you're looking to laugh a plot does not seem that necessary. And laugh you will as this film has some of the best sight gags ever put on film. The mouse sequence is one of the funniest in the film, as well as the owner falling into a vat of dough one story below. The teetering ladder across a fence into the motorway just missing large oncoming trucks is pure genius! This film really is one of the best from Semon then at the height of his career with Vitagraph. While Chaplin would often milk a single gag to unbearably long lengths in many of his films, Semon would move quickly through all his usual gags. The 1921 review of this film claimed it brought the house down at the Rialto during its premier...it's easy even today to see why. If you're a Larry Semon fan you may also want to check out "The Show" from 1922 or "School days" from 1920, which were also released from Vitagraph.

"The Bakery," I am led to believe, is a fairly typical film of the once-popular comedian Larry Semon, and I am beginning to get the impression that one has to be in a very particular frame of mind to enjoy a Larry Semon film. You can expect a plot (or even a sequence of events, really), you can't expect to get an impression of the character of anyone you see, and you can't expect anything subtle or sophisticated. Larry Semon was brilliant in a very narrow field -- creating and executing wacky sight gags.

So "The Bakery" exclusively makes use of that talent, and it's full of wacky sight gags, and pretty much nothing else. They are united only by the fact that most of them are generally connected to the setting of a bakery. Those sight gags are certainly well done, though -- many of them involve huge set-piece stunts, elaborate props such as the spinning pie display here, or seemingly impossible tasks such as training a monkey methodically to unravel a scarf on camera.

Of course, Semon was notorious for racist humor, and we don't get through the film without a joke based solely around the fact that white people have been covered in soot. The pre-Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy, often Semon's second banana, is hidden somewhere this film beneath a huge moustache, playing a shifty bakery employee who steals money. He plays the slapstick well, and mixes his villain persona with some of the put-on chivalrous gestures that were his specialty. Semon himself, when not mid-stunt, projects the impression of the classic whiteface clown.

An audience who meets this on its own terms and is prepared to enjoy some big, crazy, creative stunts will get a lot of smiles from this -- as long as they don't look for any of those extra elements that sometimes make other comedies good.