Love and Surgery

Henry 'Pathe' Lehman had a checkered career. He got his start in the movies by telling D.W. Griffith he was off the boat from Europe, claiming he had been a director for Pathe Freres. While working for Sennett, he was possibly the first Chaplin imitator on film. Within a year he had used his credentials to get his own studio, trying to out-Sennett Sennett. He lost it in a couple of years, but the name continued on through the end of the decade.

Then when the Arbuckle scandal broke, he called a press conference and claimed that he was the fiancé of Virginia Rappe, the girl whose death had triggered the entire event. The lies he told contributed to the rage that surrounded the entire affair.

In the meantime, we have this movie to consider. It stars Billy Ritchie, an ex-Karno comic who claimed he was not a Chaplin imitator and that, indeed, Chaplin stole his character. There is some fun in a rough way, but the bone-breaking slapstick is not tempered by the sort of brilliant editing that Sennett's crews could perform. Ritchie is interesting, but the entire thing is clearly a rip-off.

A two-reel number introducing a new company for the first time in slapstick humor of an uproarious sort. Billy Ritchie and Henry Lehrmann make an immediate hit as a pair of flirtatious "ginks." The first scenes are taken in a park and the latter ones in a hospital. There are some screamingly funny things in this, but the fun is of the roughest sort such as squirting water from the mouth, kicking a woman in the stomach, tearing off a woman's dress and the like. There is no connected plot, but merely a series of rough-house scenes from start to finish. None of the scenes are impossible and this will no doubt prove successful before audiences that are not overly particular. - The Moving Picture World, October 24, 1914