Crazy to Act

Movies about making "bad" movies rarely entertain, and this film is no exception. The mistakes made when making a poor movie may seem funny to filmmakers, but they just seem like a bad movie to the general public.

This film is worth watching once though, because it contains a rare appearance by Oliver Hardy in a Mack Sennett film. Babe Hardy was soon to be teamed with Stan Laurel and comedy stardom followed. He was working for Hal Roach at the time, and Roach loaned him to Sennett for this one film. This film also has interesting scenes of movie-making practices from the 1920s. The most interesting scenes are a "chase" on Sennett's big revolving stage where many comic chases were filmed. The viewer gets to see how the giant contraption worked, and director worked in a few gags with it.

The silly plot concerns a silly girl, Mildred June, who agrees to marry Hardy's character Gordon Bagley as long as he finances her movie debut and makes her a movie star. The director spends way too much time on the kissing scenes, making Mildred fall for the bland hero Arthur Young (Matty Kemp). The cameraman makes many mistakes, like cranking too fast so that the action appears in slow motion, and tilting the camera so that the beach is a steep slope. Except for the "behind-the-scenes" views of silent-film movie-making, this is a forgettable comedy short.