Snub Pollard comedies are, to put it kindly, of somewhat variable quality (his independent productions in 1926-27 being sadly amongst the worst) but, given a well-written and coherent script, he was a very capable comic. After serving, along with Bebe Daniels, as support comic to Harold Lloyd in the early "glasses" shorts, he got his chance in 1916, following Lloyd's nasty studio accident of that year, to star in his own series with Marie Mosquini as his co-star. When Lloyd returned to work, he was eager to move onto feature films and uninterested in reviving the old partnership with Pollard and Daniels, so Snub continued his solo career and some of his best films belong to this period (1922-1923). It's Gift (1923) is fairly well known and Sold At Auction (1923) is also worth watching but my own personal favourite is The Old Sea Dog (1922, which like this film and like Sold At Auction, was directed (and presumably written)by Charley Chase.
It is a great shame that only a three-minute fragment appears to survive of this film because it has every sign of being a particularly good sample of Snub at this period. Films that regard cinema through the eyes of the contemporary cinema-audience are always fascinating and often make for distinctly superior comedies (Mack Swain, for instance, excels himself in the 1916 Keystone film A Movie Star) but this particularly one is a little unusual in that it concentrates on the sheer discomfort of the cinema and the impossibility of getting to watch the film comfortably. Even the surviving fragments contain some telling gags and the use of the on-screen footage (the film being watched or rather not watched)is very imaginative. I particularly like the trompe l'oeil moment when the screen-view switches to an overhead shot (still rarely enough used in 1922 even in the normal course of filming) to emphasise (falsely but wittily) the impossible angle-of-view from the balcony-seats.
It is a great shame that only a three-minute fragment appears to survive of this film because it has every sign of being a particularly good sample of Snub at this period. Films that regard cinema through the eyes of the contemporary cinema-audience are always fascinating and often make for distinctly superior comedies (Mack Swain, for instance, excels himself in the 1916 Keystone film A Movie Star) but this particularly one is a little unusual in that it concentrates on the sheer discomfort of the cinema and the impossibility of getting to watch the film comfortably. Even the surviving fragments contain some telling gags and the use of the on-screen footage (the film being watched or rather not watched)is very imaginative. I particularly like the trompe l'oeil moment when the screen-view switches to an overhead shot (still rarely enough used in 1922 even in the normal course of filming) to emphasise (falsely but wittily) the impossible angle-of-view from the balcony-seats.
