It's a Gift

There are some pretty good gags in this Snub Pollard short comedy, and the first part is quite entertaining. After a while, it really runs out of ideas, and it gets to be just a little repetitive. Pollard himself is lively enough to keep it going most of the time, but it's fortunate that they did not try to draw it out any further than they did.

The story has Pollard as an inventor whose newest product is eagerly sought after by the oil industry. The best part of the film is towards the beginning, with the sequence of Pollard in his own gadget-filled home. There is a good variety of gags that would not have been out of place in a Buster Keaton movie, and indeed much of it recalls Keaton features such as "The Scarecrow".

The car gag is quite good at first, although eventually they simply tried to get too much out of it, and at that point the movie starts to lose some momentum. It's still a clever and amusing one-reeler, above average overall, and certainly worth seeing.

Snub Pollard's short "It's a Gift" is inventive in more ways than one. He plays an eccentric inventor who looks as if he could have influenced the cartoons of Rube Goldberg, who was famous for depicting simple inventions done by convoluted means. And thankfully this is a silent, because talking would have just gotten in the way of this very creative pantomime. And I would love to drive one of the those magnet cars for real one day!

Comedy built on gadget gags was nothing new to Snub, nor Hal Roach studio, as they had done it often before with Harold Lloyd in his early 1-2 reel comedies(like in City Slicker or The Chef...). Many of the gadgets here look similar. Nevertheless this solo effort of Snub Pollard is well worth seeing. Actually it's among the best he had done. His usual overacting is not evident in this one, and it also adds some becoming cartoon quality. The short length also helps, as he often seemed having difficulty to handle more than 10 minutes of screen time. It really has some very creative ideas in the beginning.

This is the most inventive that I have seen of Snub Pollard's solo films (he often appeared in early Harold Lloyd one and two reelers.) Snub plays an inventor who has discovered a gasoline substitute which he is called upon to demonstrate. The first part of the film consists of his awakening, breakfasting and dressing with the aid of many labour-saving inventions, reminiscent of some of Buster Keaton's work. He then travels by "Magnet Car", a bullet shaped single-seater powered by a huge hand-held horseshoe magnet which Snub uses to attract other cars going his way. A number of funny mishaps occur. Finally the gas substitute causes a number of automobiles to crash and explode and the inventor escapes by causing his magnet car to sprout wings and take to the air. Not a masterpiece, but an amusing and inventive comedy, well worth seeing.