The Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken

The old gag that serves as the premise for this movie was probably a bit stale even at the time. It is, though, more than just a one-shot movie, since it offers a short series of developments that vary the basic idea a little bit each time.

The idea is that the face of the "Old Maid" is so unappealing that even inanimate objects demonstrate their displeasure, as in the old jokes that start something like, "he was so ugly that …". Even before the finale, when her photograph is taken, she has several reminders of this.

It's honestly not really very funny, but at least it is not as mean-spirited as it could have been. It might have been noticeably better with a little more careful planning of the stop-action effects, which don't flow very smoothly, though some allowances also have to be made for it being a pioneering effort in that direction. It's always good to be generous in evaluating these very old movies, but this one just isn't all that good.

An old maid comes into a photography studio for a portrait. There's a clock on the wall and a full length mirror, and you can probably guess what happens to them as she primps.

As the other reviewers have noted, the gags are old enough to be enshrined in sayings that are as old as can be. "A face that can stop a clock" is probably as old as houseclocks. Nonetheless, this early short with Edwin S. Porter and George Fleming directing is enlivened by the lady in the title role, and the gag that caps the expected one is performed with gusto, leg-waving and a showing of undergarments that leave little to the imagination.

Withstanding the political correctness of some modern day viewers, this film is humourous in it's own right. It has the kind of low brow comedy that would have been featured in vaudeville to the derisive laughter of the audience. Vaudeville would have only been a few years old when this film was made, so the idea of an ugly person man/or woman having bad luck in every step of his life would have been sort of fresh. The star in this short is probably a man in drag rather than a real woman. He/She is showcased to be so ugly or unattractive that pictures fall off the wall, the still camera won't work and blows up, the mirror he looks into shatters which is not very well done as the surviving film is dark. The last gag of the mirror shattering was used famously in the 1960s "The Munsters" tv show classic. Every time Herman Munster looked at a mirror reflection of himself, the mirror would shatter. So it's good to see where the origins of this gag came from or at least one of it's earliest incarnations on film.