Ora Carew was a blonde actress in silent films who was pretty but not especially talented; she later had slightly more success as a screenwriter. 'Dollars and Sense' is possibly her best film, as it gives her a chance to play two different roles ... one of them male.
The Keystone Film Company is remembered for slapstick comedies filled with pratfalls and pie fights, but some of their comedy films were subtler than this, with a gentler form of humour. Ora Carew and Joseph Belmont starred in a series of Keystone films; she usually playing an innocent country girl, with Belmont as her shy hayseed lover. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Carew-Belmont films were far more popular in rural cinemas than Keystone's more typical slapstick output ... which catered for a more cynical, urban audience.
In 'Dollars and Sense', Ora Carew plays her usual innocent farmgirl, but this time she has a twin brother ... also played by Ora Carew. Ms Carew's attempt to play a teenage boy is not especially successful. She wears bib overalls and clodhopper boots, and tucks her long hair down the back of a work shirt. Not for one moment is she plausible as a biological male in this movie, although she does make some effort to use different body language for her two different roles. But the 'male' twin in this movie comes off more like a tomboy than an actual boy.
For wildly implausible reasons, the plot of this movie decrees that the male twin is forced to impersonate his sister, in a borrowed frock and a horsehair wig. So, for most of the movie, actress Ora Carew plays a teenaged boy who is disguised as a girl. This sort of double-decker transvestism is very difficult to pull off, even for a first-rate actress, and Ms Carew simply isn't that good an actress. Her 'boy in disguise' is clearly a young woman, not a boy attempting to impersonate a girl. Consequently, this movie is more complicated than it needs to be, and less funny. I give Ms Carew due credit for trying to stretch her acting skills in this movie, but 'Dollars and Sense' proves that Ms Carew's talents were not especially notable in the first place.
