Take that Griffith
(originally posted on IMDb 19 August 2004)

I might spoil a few of the gags for anyone who's reading this before having seen the film, so WARNING: Spoilers herein.

Mack Sennett received his apprenticeship under D.W. Griffith when they both worked at Biograph. "Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life", "The Bangville Police" and surely many other Keystone shorts spoof D.W. Griffith's last-minute rescue flicks; this film is particularly a parody of "The Girl and Her Trust" (1912). I've read that Hank Mann, who was the chief Kop for a time, conceived the Keystone Kops, the company's greatest legacy. Mann likely did so after watching French chase comedies, which often featured odd-looking policemen foolishly chasing, amongst other foolish chasers, after some fool. Additionally, mal-driven automobiles, often disobeying physics, were a popular theme in French comedies, as far back as those by Georges Méliès, as well as by Briton Robert W. Paul and others. Trick-shots, fast-motion and such were also mainstays of slapstick by the time Mack Sennett founded Keystone.

Apparently, "Hoffmeyer's Legacy" (1912) was the first appearance of the Keystone Kops, but "The Bangville Police" of the following year is said to have popularized the inept gang of policemen. The Keystone Kops appear in this film, but without model-Ts. I appreciate that Keystone heightened the anarchy and disrespect for authority and materialism prominent in farce, and the vast influence it has had on subsequent films. Nevertheless, the outstanding contribution that Sennett and Keystone made to comedy wasn't that their films disobeyed physical laws and rationality of our world (that was nothing new); it was that they disobeyed the laws of the world within film. Sennett is able to reproduce the suspense of a Griffith film, even add to it (the double exposure effect, or matte shot, for a last-second rescue), but in how Sennett gets to the climax is anti-Griffith--contrary to film conventions. For example, another poster complained of a lack of causation in this film: where's the villainous rival's motivation for abducting Mabel and attempting to murder her? One might as well ask why the villain went to the trouble of trying to run her over with a train when he could have simply shot her. It's an easy answer: shooting Mabel wouldn't have been funny, shooting the Keystone Kops was.

It's the best gag in the film. After poking fun at Griffith and disobeying film conventions, here, Sennett diverted from the conventions of his own films--the Kops don't rescue anyone, and they die. Sennett was a lousy goof of an actor, though. Unfortunately, he and racecar driver Barney Oldfield, who has no sense of the camera or acting, are the rescuers in this picture. Mabel Normand, of course, knows what she's doing. Fred Sterling is a surprise, though; I knew he was as professional as anyone at the time, but, here, he has created a forcible character in a short time. As far as I know, it could be the first great creation of an outlandish villain, who schemes irrationally elaborate plots, continuously minds strutting his perfervid dastardliness, while making sure we know he's positioning and posturing for the camera. Sterling's villain here and other such Keystone characters must have been a great influence on subsequent comedies, especially cartoons, such as the Looney Tunes franchise. The props are cartoon-like, too. Where would we be if it weren't for the cliché of a woman constrained to train tracks in dire need?

This is an enriching experience if you've seen what it copies and spoofs and know what it influences. It's worth watching, while making the related unsatisfactory films worth watching, as well.

(Included on my list of 25 Best Films of the 1910s.)