Shiver and Shake

Just watched this Paul Parrott short on the "American Slapstick 2" DVD. He plays someone coming to a house warming party but then it's thought to be haunted and all hell breaks loose! I'm guessing I saw an uncompleted print as it seemed to be too short and ended abruptly, to say the least. But what I saw was funny enough for my bone except whenever an African-American appears and does the stereotypical "scared" look in order to obviously provoke "laughs". So I say Shiver and Shake is worth a look.

I am not quite sure if I saw the full version of this. As far as I can see, this is listed as 4 minutes on the "American Slapstick"-release, but the version I saw was only 2:50. I might have been watching it at a higher speed, as one of the other reviews mentioned how slow it is (I did not notice that).

Either way: This is a short slapstick film about panic over a ghost. I saw this isolated (and have not seen many other slapsticks of the same kind), and I found it charming, in it's cheap special effects, and old fashioned humor. One of that gags, where a girl is trying to shut a door, that a man has his head stuck in, was funny. And seeing the ridiculous ghost-effect is also charming.

I am curious as to how much of this short is missing, because the ending is a bit abrupt.

All in all: A couple of gags, the charm of it being old, and short enough that even someone with a modern day attention span could watch it. I'm sure reading this review takes longer than watching the darn thing, so take a look if you are interested!

James Parrott is also known as "Paul Parrott" and those in the know may remember him as the director of many of Laurel and Hardy's best films (such as the Oscar-winning MUSIC BOX as well as HELPMATES and PARDON US). However, before directing Stan and Ollie, his brother Charley Chase, the Little Rascals and others, he was a silent comedian himself--having appeared in well over a hundred films!

Sadly, although Parrott was an accomplished comic, this film is far from his best and is rather lame compared to other similar films of the era. Part of this is because the film isn't all that funny and I was not thrilled to see the old cliché of the "scared black man" used for laughs. Back then, seeing a black man acting like a fool when he thinks he saw a ghost was a big laugh-getting but today it is justifiably seen as insensitive (plus not all that funny). An additional problem is that the film was converted to film as the wrong speed. Silent films were hand-cranked at a rate ranging from about 16-22 frames per second but sound films are always played at 24 fps--and without compensating for this difference, silent films usually look very fast. Well, in this case they overcompensated and the characters move like they are acting in molasses. It's just too slow. Finally, there is a huge chunk of the film missing--a common problem with films made on old fashioned nitrate stock (which degrades quickly over time).

The final verdict is that this is one of the more forgettable silent comedies and is only of interest to nuts like me who adore ALL silent comedies. Just don't expect gold with this one! For a better Parrott film, try POST NO BILLS--also on volume 2 of "The American Slapstick" DVD set.