Amour, vitesse et fanfreluches

A typical Keystone number, featuring Ambrose, Chester Conklin and Mack Swain. The action is ridiculous throughout and leads up to a rousing finish. This is one of the best of its kind. - The Moving Picture World, February 13, 1915

Although this has a manic pace that builds up to an involved chase sequence, this Keystone comedy ends up not being particularly interesting or entertaining. The characters are plain, and there often seems to be little reason for some of the story developments. The gag ideas likewise are fast-paced but often unimaginative.

Mack Swain stars as a jealous husband who takes in a wounded hunter, only to become outraged at the hunter's advances on his wife. Before long a chase is underway, and soon after that the Keystone Cops join in. The chase sequence tries to involve some incongruous means of transport competing with one another, but aside from that, there are a lot of other similar comedies from the era that work much better than this one does.

This is one of my favorite films from the old Keystone studio. It has action and comedy but most of all, SPEED AND THRILLS. It's a fast moving, fun romp through 1915 southern California, with a stunning climax on a bridge. (Well, at least stunning for the time). If you want to see a Keystone comedy from the 1910's, this should be it! You can only get it one one video, (as far as I know). It's on a video called the "Keystone Cops", one of the volumes in a series called "Hollywood Gold" I Found it in a Suncoast Video, and a Sam Goody so I guess it could turn up in any video store. So look around!

Chester Conklin and Mack Swain did a lot of comedy shorts for Sennett (Keystone Studios)--even up to the days of talking pictures. But, in most of the films that people are familiar with, they are "second bananas" (supporting actors). Because of this, it's interesting to see them starring in a film and not supporting actors like Chaplin or Arbuckle. And, despite not having this star power behind the film, it's a pretty good one--better than most of the Keystone films I have seen, in fact. The movie is essentially a chase movie (a very common theme) and some of the stunts were pretty amazing and even cute at times. All these worked together to make a surprisingly watchable film even in the 21st century.

Love, Speed and Thrills (1915)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

I recently read Leonard Maltin's book on short subjects and there was an interesting theory shared by Mack Sennett. He was under the belief that you could make a very bad movie and as long as the film was fast enough no one would notice. That might have been true back in the day but in 2011 I was clearly able to see how bad this movie was and even at the fast pace. The film has Ambrose accidentally shooting Walrus so he takes him back to his house to help him recover. Walrus eventually goes after Ambrose's wife and before long the two are fighting and the Keystone Kops are called. This was the twelfth and final Keystone Kop short and I think I've seen around four and five and I'll admit that I haven't liked a single one. If you are a fan of the series then you might feel I'm too hard on this movie but if you're not a fan then I think you'll agree with me. The "direction" by Sennett is pretty rough to begin with but it really doesn't help that nothing here is funny. We get countless fights, stunts and fast-paced action but none of it ever equaled a laugh and more often than not the attempted humor comes across rather forced. The final few minutes of the film has a big chase going on with many obstacles but once again I simply didn't find it funny.