Wet Paint

This is a lost film, and would not have been seen anywhere on this planet since 1930 or so at the latest. It is completely impossible that the reviewer saw it, so why is it still here?

It would be nice if the film did exist, but like most of Griffith's work, that's not the case. If one wanted one could see, for example, HANDS UP or PATHS TO PARADISE or TRENT'S LAST CASE and write reviews for those. What would possibly motivate someone to write a review of a movie they never saw? What is the satisfaction in that?

I believe that many of these reviews, all coming from the same (notorious) source, have since been taken down. Why is this still here?

"Wet Paint" is a mess. The blame should probably be divided between Arthur Rosson (a lacklustre director) and Lloyd Corrigan, who wrote the script. Corrigan had a long Hollywood career as a scriptwriter, director and character actor (he usually played plump little milquetoasts), but he was never especially successful in any capacity. Raymond Griffith was a gifted comedian, but the weakness of this film proves that Griffith needed a good script and strong direction.

This 1926 movie's title is an alcoholic pun: "wet" being a slang term for "drunk" during America's Jazz Age, and "wet" also being a 1920s political term used by those who favoured the repeal of Prohibition. Quite a bit of imbibing goes on in this film.

The characters in this movie have no names (a fairly common trait in silent films). Worse luck, the movie consists of several situations strung together with no real storyline. Griffith plays a lovelorn bachelor seeking feminine charms; Helene Costello plays his likeliest quarry. The climax is a bit like that of Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jnr", with Griffith riding a runaway vehicle that has no driver.

Griffith is sporadically funny in a few scenes, and so is Henry Kolker as a hot-tempered husband. The various comedy sequences in "Wet Paint" might have worked better if they were divided up into several unrelated comedy shorts. As it is, this film's a failure.