Revelator_

Reginald Denny plays a clueless rich playboy who, through a series of convoluted events, inadvertently convinces an orphaned little girl that he's her daddy. Farcical complications ensue, since he's about to be married, to a woman who's out for his money, and a nosy cop has imposed a rather attractive nanny on Denny's household...

Out of the seven Denny comedies I've seen this is the third best, coming in behind "What Happened to Jones" and "Skinner's Dress Suit." There's some dispute about the direction; Denny says Fred C. Newmeyer wasn't up to scratch, so he had to take over.

If so, I wish Denny had been allowed to direct himself more often. The film is a finely crafted comedy machine that perfectly shows off Denny's gifts as a subtle farceur who can say volumes with the slightest lift of an eyebrow. I assume Denny also supervised the editing, which is just as adroit in its comic timing.

As "Pudge" the orphan girl, little Jane La Verne gives natural performance; she's adorable without being cloying (kudos again to Denny's direction). The film avoids excessive sentiment by acknowledging how comedically inconvenient her irresistible emotional neediness is. Droll intertitles and a fantasy sequence also mock the sappier conventions of melodrama. I would have liked to have seen a little more of Barbara Kent as the nanny, and the film could have done more with its shipboard climax, but "That's My Daddy" pulls of the trick of being sweet instead of sappy, and funny too.

Reginald Denny believed that his lesser comedies were directed by Harry Pollard, whose sense of humor was too broad for Denny's style. After having seen "I'll Show You the Town" and a few other Pollard-Denny films, I agree.

The plot, cobbled together from bits of old farces, is an excuse for Denny to get mixed up with four women. In a nightclub scene he has to dine and dance with three of them, and afterward there's a chase scene involving the fourth woman and two outraged husbands. But the build-up to these sequences is far too long and Pollard's direction lacks pace. The cutting is similarly leisurely; if tightened up the film would be much funnier. A good farce requires speed! The gags are predictable, aside a from wonderful bit of dancing in the club. The film is still funny but doesn't gel in the way Denny's best comedies do.

This is Lotfi Achour's second feature, and I hope he makes many more. Most of Red Path is subjective, seen from the standpoint of an adolescent boy trying to live through an unimaginable trauma and lay its ghost to rest. His family's own attempt at closure is fraught with danger; living at the edge of Jihadi-roamed wilderness, far from the reach (or care) of the state, they're on their own.

The images, rendered by Achour and cinematographer Wojciech Staron, are haunting and poetic, literally elemental in the use of water, lightning, and rock. The film switches from visceral to lyrical as deftly as it shifts between neorealism and magical realism. The landscape--bleak, scrubby plains broken up by occasional imposing mountain; brutal rock formations yielding the precious remnant of a stream--is practically one of the main characters. As for the human ones, the main cast was so good I had no idea who was a trained actor and who might be a gifted amateur. Ali Hleli, as the young lead, is perfect. And so is the film's varied tone. Despite its bleak subject matter, Red Path is too artful to be heavy going.