Techno-Crazy

In the first decades of the 20th Century Technocracy, Inc. Was a social movement that wanted to radically reorganize society to be ruled by engineers and to abolish things like the price system and banks. Briefly popular it has all but vanished (look online for it, though!).

The short film is based on the popular view of the movement's promoters as ridiculous dreamers and offers a view of this obscure group from the outside.

TECHNO-CRAZY has to be one of the strangest comedy shorts of the 1930's. Starring Monte Collins as a young man who dreams of technological progress in society bringing a "technocracy" that's a utopia and Billy Bevan as the Mayor, whose daughter Collins wants to marry, the short begins with a dream sequence where Collins is running a factory on his own and explaining to someone how no one needs to work in this new utopia and everything operates automatically. Collins wakes up from the dream, which leads into various physical comedy sequences at the home of the Mayor, and then with a police officer who keeps giving Collins tickets. Collins then escapes into a "social club" where everyone is a bearded radical (looking like the Russian nihilists and Bolsheviks depicted in clichéd silent movies) and want to bomb the Mayor to bring on "Technocracy." The end is surreal and must be seen to be believed. I'm not sure exactly what this film is parodying. Is it meant to be a parody of communism like the infamous "Hail, Brother"? Whatever it is, there are a lot of funny slapstick sequences, and Monte Collins is a great verbal comedian also, delivering the absurd rhapsodies to technocracy. Mostly, though, this film is of interest because it is so odd. I wonder if a 1933 viewer would pick up on the details of what is being parodied more than I am. It's also worth noting that this predates MODERN TIMES.

"Techno-Crazy" is a comedy short that makes fun of the Technocracy movement, something about which very, very few viewers today might know of or have heard of before. Apparently, some folks back in the day thought that technology and automation would make for a workers' paradise--with 20 hour work weeks, 4 weeks vacation and much more. And, a Technocrat also felt that society would be best controlled and run by the scientific elite. In some ways their views were similar to communists...but that would also be an oversimplification. Regardless, it was a rather radical view of society and production and the film is lampooning its most radical followers.

A young Technocratically inclined young man wants to marry the mayor's daughter. Unfortunately, he falls in with some very radical technocrats who are more anarchists and they enlist the idiot to blow up the mayor...and he's too dull to realize he's being used by them.

This is a strange, silly and occasionally funny little film. Monte Collins and Billy Bevan, two old time silent film comedians, do very well here and the story never is dull!