The Nickelette

This is another of those we're-so-modern short subjects made during this period, showing how foolish silent movies were. Unlike the series of "Goofy Movies" at MGM, however, it lacks good writing and Pete Smith's snarky delivery of benshi-style, sarcastic narration cut-up of silent movies.

Some times these movies are of interest because they contain the only known survivals of otherwise lost early silent pictures -- Annette Kellerman is one of them. Presumably they might have raided what was left of the Vitagraph vaults for this one, but it looks like more of a Sennett piece. Perhaps someone will identify the original, which would be of more interest to me than this awful short.

"When movies were silent and money talked, a nickel bought an evening's entertainment. Let's enter one of these ancient Nickelettes --" opens this short spoof on silent films. After being reminded to follow good theatre rules, the "Newsreels" play. Here, they're called "Pathetic Newsreels" instead of a "Pathé Newsreels". Get it? ...Okay, next up is, "Where There's Life - There's Hope" starring Rudolph Valentino. These are excerpts from "The Wonderful Chance" (1920) with Mr. Valentino's role enlarged. You can see Rudy trying out some acting bits of business...

Valentino has mastered the "hat tip, head scratch" move. Eugene O'Brien is also identified, but these rummages through old silent films have no real respect for the material; most often, players and films are unidentified fodder for ridicule. After the drama, live entertainment. Then, the second part of the double feature is "You Never Saw Such Sausage" adapted from the play "Salami" by "Fitzugh Lipschitz". This suggested spoof of Ernst Lubitsch's "Salome" resembles neither.

*** The Nickelette (9/21/32) Bert Frank ~ Leo Donnelly, Jack Freeman, Rudolph Valentino, Eugene O'Brien

Nickelette, The (1932)

** (out of 4)

Fair short from Warner explains to (then) current viewers what it was like when movies were just a nickel. The film starts off showing us some of the signs (No Spitting on Floors) we'd see at a theater and then we move onto the type of films and we also get a live musician doing a song. Had this short been an actual documentary it might have worked out a lot better but we basically have another example of a sound movie poking fun at silents. Leo Donnelly narrates some rather poor dialogue aimed at a few different silent movies (including one with Charley Chase). I'm not sure how well these jokes went over in 1932 but they're pretty flat today as is the entire movie. None of the narration is funny and the way their presented isn't any better either. I'd certainly be willing to go along with spoofing silent movies if what they were saying or doing was anywhere near as good as the item they're laughing at. The problem here is that even the worse Chase film is better than this thing so, naturally, this movie just doesn't get the job done.