Tangled Tangoists

Bunny and Flora Finch attend a reception where they are compelled to be wall flowers because they are unable to tango. Determining to learn they go to a teacher (unknown to each other), and become proficient. At the first opportunity they make a hit. Then they have a tango wedding. The witnesses, justice, desk, chairs, office railing and even the pictures on the wall get to doing it. One year later in the middle of the night they tango a pair of twins to soothe them to sleep. This picture is a cracker-jack. - The Moving Picture World, May 9, 1914

This is a fine late John Bunny-Flora Finch movie helmed by their usual director, George Baker. John and Flora meet at a ball, but neither can do these modern dances, so they sit out... and run into each other later at a dance studio. Bunny exudes his usual Pickwickian charm. Miss Finch gets involved in a nice bit of physical comedy when her gawkiness makes the dance lesson less than successful.

What is interesting about this movie is the antiquity of some of the movie techniques used. True, each studio went its own way more or less and true, when you had such enormous star power as John Bunny had, you didn't need to use the latest techniques. Nonetheless, there are keyhole mattes, dancing sets and even images of what people are thinking, placed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. All these had largely fallen by the wayside.

Still, when you're there to see the performers, as long as the shots of them doing their business are in focus, that's all you need. A great movie.

I've seen several of the short comedies John Bunny made for Vitagraph during the period of his stardom, and this one may well be the jolliest. It's pleasant story, simple and straightforward, and gives both Bunny and his frequent co-star Flora Finch plenty of opportunities for surefire comic shtick. They have a nice rapport, and seem to be enjoying themselves. I was a little sorry to learn they disliked each other behind the scenes (according to Vitagraph co-founder Albert E. Smith), because they pair so well, especially here. You'd never suspect they "cordially hated one another" in reality. Oh, well. On screen, in any event, they make a good couple.

At the time this short was made, the popular team of Vernon & Irene Castle had launched a ballroom dance craze, so widespread it was much parodied by comedians. (Another example from the period is the short Fox Trot Finesse, starring Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew.) The plot of this film, Tangled Tangoists, plays like an extended plug for a dance studio; in fact, if Arthur & Kathryn Murray had been in business in 1914, this would have served as an ideal comic "infomercial."

Our story begins at a fashionable party, where everyone is dancing. Everyone, that is, except Miss Finch, who sits sadly by herself. And yet when a gentleman asks her to dance, she refuses; the problem, we learn, is that she doesn't know how. When Mr. Bunny arrives and is invited to dance, he gestures to his girth and shakes his head "No," indicating he considers himself too heavy. Bunny and Finch sit together, and promptly hit it off, but confess to one another that they cannot dance. The next day, Finch heads to a dance studio and enrolls for a lesson. Needless to say, her clumsiness is played for all it's worth. Meanwhile, Mr. Bunny makes the same decision, and, coincidentally enough, arrives at the very same dance studio. He and Finch take turns spying on one another, and each is much amused at the other's ineptitude on the dance floor. Time passes, however, and the next time there's a soiree, Mr. Bunny and Miss Finch prove to be the hit of the party, dancing together with grace and vigor. And when they decide to get married, the duo and their entourage DANCE into the courtroom!

This is a charming comedy, one that builds to a genuinely funny, unexpected punchline at the wedding sequence finale. I'd say the only shortcoming—and it's a minor one—is that the brief scene which follows the wedding comes as something of an anticlimax. But even so, this is a delightful short, one that makes it clear even now, more than a hundred years after it was made, why John Bunny and Flora Finch were such a popular team.

This is a particularly charming "Bunnyfinch" and is fascinating for the mix of styles that it displays but they are all styles very much in use at the time it was made.

The other reviewer is wrong in supposing that keyhole shots and superimposed insets for daydream flashbacks had "fallen by the wayside" The mid- to late-teens is actually the prime time for such effects and the film is entirely of its time in that respect. Just as it is the prime time for films about the tango, then in full fashion.

For keyhole shots see for instance Sur les Rails 1913, One Good Turn 1913 (a particularly elaborate use) Our Dare-Devil Chief 1915, The Italian 1915, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse at the Circus 1916, Hævnens nat 1916, Madame de Thèbes 1915, One Too Many 1916, Won by a Fowl 1917, Villa of the Movies 1917, Bright and Early 1918, Dunces and Dangers 1918, Never Touched Me 1919, Pay Your Dues 1919, Die Austernprinzessin 1919, The Breath of a Nation 1919, Lightning Bryce 1919, From Hand to Mouth 1919, The Kids Find Candy's Catching 1920, Dans les griffes de l'araignée 1920. Seen rather too often by this time, they die out gradually during the early twenties.

Superimposed insets are equally common but particularly abound in the films of Cecil B. DeMille, who distinctly overuses them. There was a fashion at this time for what you might call the mini-flashback (quite literally a flash and intended precisely to convey the character's state of mind)and this could be irritatingly overused (The Italian is a good example)

In one respect the film is a sense regressive although it was also typical of the period. The highly questionable fashion for the close-up at this time encouraged something a return to the "facial" (see my note on The Italian 1915), an old vaudeville technique, emphasising the facial expressions of the performer. Bunny and Finch's extremely photogenic ugliness rather lent itself to this and there are some absolutely typical examples of such close-ups (often purely there for "facial" effect) in the film. The mini-flashback referred to above was a complementary development.

What is entirely "modern" is the absolute ease that both actors display in front of the camera and which made for a naturalness and fluidity of movement on screen that is the most noticeable feature of the best Vitagraph films of these years. Griffith, by contrast, still tended to arrange actors in straight lines across the screen or to bunch them together unnaturally and keeps characters "on set" with very little sense of "off-screen". That element - on could see it both as "stagey" and "for the camera" - is not present in the Bunnyfinches. Characters move, turn, interact, enter and exit in an entirely natural fashion as though the camera was not there. Which, paradoxically, also allows Bunny to address the camera when he chooses without it seeming unnatural. This effect is aided by the careful mise en scène, another typical feature of Vitagraph films. This too was a grave weakness of Griffith's films and a good deal of the famed Griffith "cutting" is actually necessary only to compensate for poor mise en scène.

Vitagraph made rather unexciting films ("action" was Griffith's forte) but they were the most admired US company abroad because of the naturalistic style they had developed. And Bunny and Finch were absolute models of naturalistic relaxed acting that set a standard for the coming generation.

The "rocking sets" here are not of course intended naturalistically and are comic effects entirely specific to the "dancing theme". The film, at the end, veers deliberately towards the absurd with the proposal-scene in the "rocking" carriage neatly mediating between the naturalistic scenes of dancing and the absurdist "dancing" wedding. "Rocking sets" were however perfectly standard to suggest the movement of ships, both in docufiction (In Nacht und Eis 1912 dramatising the Titanic disaster) and in comedy (most famously perhaps in Chaplin's The Immigrant 1917).