Priscilla Dean promises her mother to go fetch her drunken father from the city in this short comedy from 1916 that can be seen on the Harpodeon.com site. In the course of her mission she runs into a motley batch of Keystone-type comedians in ill fitting clothes.
Now that Mack Sennett had shown the film industry how to do slapstick comedy on the screen, there was no shortage of production companies willing to hire people to do the exact same thing. Although Sennett had a keen eye for talent before anyone else spotted it and consistently higher behind-the-screen talent -- his editorial department would remain the best in the business through the end of the silent era -- he also felt that he didn't need to pay his performers much. He famously lost Charlie Chaplin, but others had already abandoned him for more lucrative offers. As a result, there were plenty of fine comedy units, frequently run by people he had trained, or just by people who had seen what could be done and figured they could do as well.
Here's one of the competitor's product. It is an amusing, if derivative work that relies on all the things that Sennett had already done. It's a bang-up compendium of melodrama tropes, including tying people to railroad tracks. The best part of it is that the titles are variations on sentimental ballads of the era.
It's very watchable, even today, even though it breaks no new ground in screen comedy.
