Wall Street Blues

Billy Bevan is the janitor and general dogsbody at Andy Clyde's brokerage house, where everyone is in love with the boss' daughter, Natalie Kingston. Loan shark John A. Richardson wants to ruin Clyde so he can force him to have Natalie marry him. With the usual assortment of Sennett comics and three chases save the girl from this horrible fate and let her wed Billy? And which is worse?

It's pretty much a kitchen sink comedy, in which Sennett's staff started with the setting, ran a few gags around that, then had Edgar Kennedy attempt a robbery... and they still had less than a reel of material, so they had to add all sorts of subplots and gags, including two thrill sequences -- Andy hanging on a rope out a window and later being strangled by another rope attached to a car dangling off that cliff b the seaside they liked to dump them over. Plus a chase with autos, an daring airplane rescue.... you name it, they added it in. In the end, they got up to two reels and sent it out, but while there are plenty of gags that were well executed, it's such a hodge-podge affair that it's never more than watchable. Except for Miss Kingston, who is gorgeous.

Billy Bevan stars as a security guard at an investment firm. Many of the things he does to protect the company seem pretty crazy...and funny. But his dedication to the company and his boss are challenged when he learns that an evil man has manipulated the boss into allowing him to marry the boss' daughter. And so, when Billy learns, he sets out on a mission to stop the wedding...all while being chased by a very determined villain (Vernon Dent).

This is a film that certainly will make the PETA-types out there upset. Near the beginning are a couple gags involving a dog....and ultimately it gets blown up (not for real...but in the film). I laughed and laughed...and my wife thought the exploding dog portion was pretty sick...though she did love the other dog gag just before it.

In addition to these insane stunts, the film is chock full of many of the weirdest and most inventive comedy bits I've ever seen. Several employ animation and while they seem very dated today, back in 1924 they were state of the art. Many of the stunts are breathtakingly dangerous as well...such as the car hanging off the cliff portion. Overall, there are so many weird, funny and inventive moments that you cannot believe this film...and you are bound to laugh. I dare you not to!!

In many ways, this Mack Sennett film of the 1920s shows how far the studio had gone since the 1910s. While they were super-popular in the earlier films, stories were practically non-existenet as actors were literally told by directors to 'just wing it' or 'act funny'. Often this mean hitting each other or kicking each other or wildly firing guns at each other. Here in 1924, by contrast, there is a good story and, most importantly, well executed and well crafted stunts and gags. Well worth your time.

This is a very passable Sennett comedy set in a broker's office when speculation on the stock exchange was at its height in what you might call the long run up to the 1929 crash. Billy Bevan plays a janitor who acts as an "honest broker" in warding off the various sharks and robbers and in helping the cashier marry the boss's daughter.

One point of interest is the revival at this time of trick effects in comedies. After the huge fashion for trick films 1901-1905, inspired by the example of Méliès, such things had rather gone out of fashion in the two decades that followed. In the early twenties virtually the only comedian making systematic use of trick effects (usually involving eggs and animals) but by the end of the twenties more and more comics were incorporating such effects.

There seems to have been two major contributing factors - the fashion for daredevil effects (of which Semon had also been a pioneer) and the improvement in overhead and aerial photography (film after film includes a person, a child, an animal or a car hanging perilously, superimposed over an image of streets and traffic or of seascapes below). There are two examples in this film.

The second factor was the enormous advance in animation techniques and the popularity of animated films (animation being itself a direct descendant of the trick films). So, in this film, for instance, we see the cashier doing a drawing that comes to life very much in the style of the Fleischer Out of the Inkwell cartoons.

There has recently been a rather exaggerated fashion for the films of Charley Bowers, which made the most extensive use of trick-filming, but Bowers was very much representative of a general fashion of the time which is observable in many other films. The greatest comic of them all, Buster Keaton. was also an adept of film trickery (as in The Play House or Sherlock Jr.) although this is not personally my favourite side of that multi-talented performer.