This five-minute short subject is a rather well orchestrated and a carefully constructed film for the era, although in another five years its film techniques would be hopelessly out of date. Still, for 1905, a film in seventeen scenes with three pans, some cutting to permit actors to jump out of a clinch and and much film running backwards -- to allow the eccentricity of action that the title refers to -- is a fairly worthwhile film.
The modern viewer will notice immediately that the burglars are clearly intended to be Chinese, a casually offered bit of racism that the film-goer of the era would accept without cavil. Doubtless their uncanny ability to leap casually to a second floor window -- an ability facilitated by shooting the actors jumping off the ledge and then running the film backwards -- would also be easily accepted, just as we accept so many of our preconceptions and cite their use in entertainment as proof of their reality.
