Ai, Turuna

Monty Banks is promoted to reporter on the newspaper and assigned to interview Henry Barrows, whose son has been kidnapped. It's a huge story, and he has gotten engaged officially to Virginia Bradford on the strength of it, and promised his grandparents a house. The trouble is that it's an April Fool's joke promoted by reporter Ernest Wood. He's jealous of Banks' success with Miss Bradford, and Barrows is angry with him for his last story. So he's sent Banks out to get punched in the nose.

Banks had been successful with a lot of short subjects. The trouble is he came to comedy features late in the game, well after Chaplin, Lloyd, and Raymond Griffith over at Paramount. Also his distributor, Pathe, had bigger fish to fry. So this pretty funny feature didn't attract much attention, nor did the other short comedy features that Banks made over the next two years.

That's a simple explanation, and there is undoubtedly some truth to it. When I put on my hyper-critical attitude, I can see that the first two reels spend a lot of time setting up the situation, and similar care is taken for for getting him past Fred Kelsey as a hotel detective. For a simply drawn lead character, director Edward Griffith spends a lot of screen time on making sure the audience knows what the situation is before giving the audience its first laughs.

Whatever the reasons for its failure, it's still a pretty good comedy, and I'm grateful for the care that David Glass took in reassembling it from several partial copies for his Kickstarter-funded MONTY BANKS, SILENT COMEDIAN Blu-ray set. Banks was probably upset, but he moved to England where he directed several good comedies and married music-hall star and movie's Lancashire Lassie, Gracie Fields. He died in 1950 at the age of 52.