Hands Up!

It's very hard, even for a German count, to be aristocratic throughout the entire day; that is to say, maintain without a blink a rigid pose as well as a haughty glance and accordingly, watch transcendent Teutonic silent pictures.

Having this in mind together with the fact that laughing is a capital sin for a genuine German count, one must allow for the fact that aristocratic flesh is weak and from time to time is prone to the sin of privately watching some of those superficial American comedies such as "Hands Up!" directed by Herr Clarence G. Badger in the silent year of 1926.

The film is set during the American civil war. Herr President Lincoln has problems for financing the war but pretty soon he will have excellent news regarding this: a gold mine in Nevada has been discovered so the longhaired North will have financial support in order to defeat the conservative South. Of course, Herr President Lincoln puts his best man in charge of such an important mission.

But meanwhile a Southern soldier ( Herr Raymond Griffith ) is sent to the West as a spy in order to retrieve the gold for the South ( this time the American East was forgotten for this picture… ). It's not an easy mission for the Southern spy; he must face many difficulties, the most terrible being that two Northern sisters will fall in love with him.

"Hands Up!" was stars the not well-known American comedian, Herr Raymond Griffith, who was almost forgotten since the old silent days although recently his few surviving films are screened again for the joy of silent rarities admirers.

This Herr Graf can define Herr Griffith's style as an imitation of earlier famous silent comedians (especially Max Linder to whom he bears a physical resemblance as well). gobbling up all these in order to create a not very original character, although effective in comic terms.

In "Hands Up!" there are certainly many hilarious moments wherein Herr Griffith's character shines particularly, focusing every gag and the picture itself around his persona, a character that it seems extrapolated, inserted in a wrong context ( a top hat modernistic gentleman in the American civil war ) adding in this way a surreal, weird atmosphere to this silent comedy.

"Hands Up!" works pretty well for Herr Griffith even though his antics are somewhat predictable and not very original.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must look for gold in his mines of the Ruhr.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com

If the name Raymond Griffith is familiar today only to historians and silent comedy completists, blame the fact that his reputation rests entirely on two surviving but rarely shown features: 'Paths To Paradise' (1925) and 'Hands Up!' (1926). Neither comedy can match the sublime heights of invention achieved by Keaton, Chaplin or Lloyd (or, in his brief prime, Harry Langdon), but Griffith was an engaging talent who, given time, could have developed into a master craftsman. The Civil War comedy 'Hands Up!' is more self-consciously offbeat than the earlier film, showing one direction Griffith might have pursued had his career been more successful. Again the playful impostor (a role he could have patented), Griffith plays a Confederate spy (dressed, incongruously, in top hat and tails) sent West to hijack a Union gold shipment. The film is a daring, if not always successful, departure from the conventional farce of 'Paths To Paradise' (with a curious romantic triangle involving twin sisters), but unfavorable (and unfair: the film is more a Western) comparisons to Buster Keaton's Civil War classic 'The General' have doomed it to obscurity. Griffith, and his films, deserve better.

With all the work of the major silent comedians so readily available, it's easy to forget about the other, less-known clowns whose work isn't as easy to find. Raymond Griffith falls under this category, because so much of his work is lost, and what does survive isn't that easy to see.

What struck me immediately was the endless parade of sight gags in the film. The opening scene with Abraham Lincoln meeting with his cabinet set up a serious tone that is delightfully contrasted in the very next scene, when Ray Griffith rides up to visit General Lee. The sight gags begin immediately, and in this scene reminded me of similar battlefield gags in DUCK SOUP (shells flying through the window, etc). Thankfully, the rest of the film kept up the ingenuity and clever gags found in this scene. Griffith himself is a very fun performer to watch. His characterization of the unruffled gentleman in the silk hat played very well against the overall zaniness of the film. I would really enjoy seeing more of his work. Mack Swain, always great, turned in a memorable supporting appearance here.

The length of the film is perfect for a comedy. It's one thing that pre-WWII comedies had as a major advantage-that they could end after 60 or 70 minutes and not have to hang on a lot of exposition and plot wrap-up for the mandatory 90 minute-plus running time of today.

I thoroughly recommend this 70 minute feature which showcases Raymond Griffith as a Southern spy attempting to thwart a gold shipment to the North from Nevada. His style of acting is quite sophisticated, reminding me of an American Max Linder. He plays comedy and pathos with delicious layers of understatement followed by bravado. He is truly a forgotten actor in the great tradition of American comedy. How fun it would have been to have seen him in a Lubitsch film.

There appear to be two versions of this film, a full 70-minute version and a half-hour short entitled Injun Trouble. The latter does also seem to have been released as I have seen contemporary reviews which appear to be discussing the short version. It also appears to be the version by the sole unfavourable reviewer here.

An unidentified Raymond Griffith short, A King for a Day (Eén dag koning) appears in the Dutch EYE collection. It is a story of a king and his lookalike in an imaginary kingdom and, although EYE dates it as 1920, it seems to be more likely that it appeared in 1922, when there was a whole spate of pseudo-parodies following the success of Metro's Prisoner of Zenda (others are the Christie comedy Choose Your Weapons and Semon's A Pair of Kings). There were later parodies, Laurel's Rupert of Heehaw (following Selznick's release of the sequel to Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau, in 1923) and Langdon's Soldier Man 1926 (which also contains a neat clin d'oeil towards the 1926 Barrymore film The Sea Beast) but none that I know of before 1922. The film is very similar in plot to Semon's A Pair of Kings and is a rather mediocre slapstick comedy, although there is evidently missing footage. The production company is unknown.