Peggy in a Pinch

The is the first I've heard of almost all the actors in this short subject, one of five "Peggy" comedies turned out by a studio I've never heard of. The only talent a modern film fan would be likely to recognize is future Disney stalwart Pinto Colvig, at this time writing humorous titles for short comedies and doing, here at least, a heavy-handed job.

This is a domestic comedy in which teen-aged Peggy tries to recover some incriminating letters her sister has written to a young man before their father can burst in with his revolver and murder them all in a fit of dudgeon. However, while the film starts out with everyone looking normal and spends the first five minutes introducing its cast, by the three-quarters mark it has sped up into the sort of slapstick that Keystone would have done a decade ago, complete with father wielding a revolver that he fires at least a dozen times.

The physical comedy is competently performed, but it's been done many times before and since. If it has any real value, it resides in its demonstration that conventions of slapstick violence had become so deeply ingrained in film by this point that the whole effort is unremarkable.