Tillie Wakes Up

Marie Dressler's considerable acting and comedic talents were not truly realized until the talkies, but here in her third film, she again uses the character of Tillie, which she originated onstage in TILLIE'S PUNCTURED ROMANCE and made her first film (incidentally, the first feature film comedy). Tillie is a comic caricature - quick to innocence, quick to anger. Here she is unhappily married to a business man who flirts with his young upstairs neighbor, a woman who henpecks her husband (Johnny Hines). Johnny decides to end it all but first he will have a last fling. Tillie decides to make her husband jealous by finding a "Romeo." It's all an excuse for Hines and Dressler to go to Coney Island and take advantage of all of the rides, before the forsaken husband and wife come to find them and ask forgiveness. Total nonsense!!!!

The slapstick is practically non-stop. Dressler does her first-time drunk bit as she did in PUNCTURED ROMANCE and the pratfalls are many. Hines' character never gels and Dressler does nothing more than mug outrageously and keep falling down. Her agility considering her age and weight were a constant surprise.

This is a Grade B minor comedy that isn't even particularly funny unless you love pure slapstick for its own sake.

Dressler fans - you won't be amused much.

The same year that Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton invaded Coney Island (1917), Marie Dressler also had a comic romp at that famed playground. In her third and final outing as Tillie, she plays an unhappy wife who decides to have FUN and teams up with henpecked neighbor (Johnny Hines) to have a whirl. When their taxi crashes, they run for it rather than get stuck at the police station. They escape in an ice wagon but then need hot toddies to warm up. After a stein of beer as well, they're both bombed so they hit the amusement park.

No real plot but lots of slapstick action and terrific views of 1917 Long Island and Coney Island. The rides are primitive but good enough to allow Dressler to fall and tumble and mug for the camera. Hines is funny (though certainly no Chaplin, Dressler's co-star in Tillie's Punctured Romance) and is an foil. Dressler was 49 when she made this film; Hines was 22! Not a great comedy, but they are fun to watch, and it's a miracle a print of this still exists. Frank Beamish is the husband, Rubye de Remer the wife, and Nora Cecil can be seen at the ice cream stand, which seems to be an early Tim Horton's.

Dressler may well have been the funniest woman in the history of films, so it's nice to be able to see her early slapstick silents. But by 1918 her film career was gone. She returned at the end of the silent era, had a notable hit in The Patsy with Marion Davies, made the transition to talkies and would win an Oscar for Min and Bill. By the time of her death in 1934 she was the biggest box office draw in the country.

"Tillie Wakes Up" is a sequel or spin-off to Keystone's early feature-length comedy "Tillie's Punctured Romance" (1914) and the now lost (except for one reel, reportedly) "Tillie's Tomato Surprise" (1915). In this one, Tillie and her neighbor solve their marital problems by leaving their spouses for the day. Marie Dressler, as Tillie, looks weary in the beginning; she isn't the grotesque mugger that Mack Sennett made her for "Tillie's Punctured Romance". While both comedies, "Tillie Wakes Up" is very different from "Tillie's Punctured Romance", which probably has to do mostly with the absence of Sennett. Both films make fun of Tillie not being able to hold her liquor and both end with a rescue at sea, but there was much more visual humor in the original film, albeit of the outdated knockabout slapstick variety. The poor shape that the print is in now doesn't help, either.

Here, the attempted humor is largely to be found in the intertitles. Frances Marion wrote them, and it's interesting how often she wielded power over the films she worked on. Unfortunately, it doesn't work this time. The slang and puns just aren't funny, and I don't know why some of the words were underlined and others in quotation marks. Around this time, Marion was busy advancing the career of Mary Pickford, but later, in the early 1930s, she would help Dressler reach the height of her movie career by working together on such films as "Anna Christie", "Min and Bill", "Emma" and "Dinner at Eight". "Tillie Wakes Up" is where that collaboration began, though.

The amusement resorts at Coney Island are the scene of the best portion of "Tillie Wakes Up," a five-reel Peerless comedy, in which Marie Dressler displays her agility, her keen sense of humor and her skill in making funny falls. She is introduced to the spectator as an unappreciated wife, who, in a fit of desperation, gets inside of her best clothes and starts out to enjoy a little of the gay life. The husband of a neighbor joins her in the little excursion, the two dine "not wisely, but too well," and proceed to shoot all the chutes at Steeplechase Park. With the recollection in mind of the reckless abandon and humorous nonchalance exhibited by Miss Dressler in throwing herself headlong into unknown dangers of every description in former releases, it is hardly necessary to record the fact that in "Tillie Wakes Up" the actress dares every danger in her path and furnishes no end of fun for the lover of broad comedy. Much of the material used in the picture has a familiar aspect but is given a new power to amuse by the skill and comic personality of the creator of Tillie. Johnny Hines is a good second to Miss Dressler, and Frank Beamish, Ruby de Remer, Ruth Barrett and Jack Brown supply the rest of the support. – The Moving Picture World, February 3, 1917