Tillie's Punctured Romance

The comedy in "Tillie's Punctured Romance" is admittedly mediocre, but many who love classic cinema will still find this feature worth seeing once just for its cast. Besides Mabel Normand, it has Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler in some of their earliest film roles, plus Edgar Kennedy and Mack Swain in smaller roles, and of course the Keystone Cops. Most of these wonderful performers are not shown to their best advantage here, but it is still a rare chance to see them all together.

The film in itself is only fair. The story-line had possibilities, but Mack Sennett's disjointed, knockabout style just doesn't work very well in a full-length feature. Most of the material is quite predictable after a while, and except for the "Cops", who have a few funny moments, the cast members do not have roles that give them a chance to do what they do best. There are a handful of decent gags amongst the routine physical humor, and a film-within-a-film sequence that comes off all right, but in general there just was not enough worthwhile material to fill up a running time of this length. With this cast, though, it might have made a very good two- or three-reeler.