The Water Nymph

'The Water Nymph' was Mack Sennett's very first Keystone film, although he had been involved with the film industry earlier at Biograph, working under DW Griffith ... whom Sennett enthusiastically praised decades later: 'He was my day school, my night school, my university.' In the 1990s, film historian Leslie Halliwell reprinted this quote but made the bizarre decision to update the phrase 'night school' to 'adult education centre'.

Although the Keystone films are best known for slapstick and pratfalls, 'The Water Nymph' is an excellent reminder that Sennett offered his audiences other pleasures too ... specifically, female pulchritude. Here we see the inspiration for all the Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties yet to come.

SPOILERS COMING. More as an economic measure than anything else, Mack Sennett casts himself here as the male lead. Young swain Mack (no relation to Mack Swain) calls on fair young damsel Mabel Normand, wooing her in her parents' garden.

Mack's henpecked father is played by Ford Sterling, in his excitable Dutch-comic characterisation. When they show up separately at the same beach, Mack mischievously encourages Mabel to vamp his father, hoping to get Papa to like her. (Right, but he'll like her for the wrong reason.)

Young Mabel Normand is a visual delight in her old-fashioned swimming costume, displaying some lithe agility. There are also some quaint shots of the old-fashioned changing booths that were commonplace on public beaches in 1912, the year of the Titanic. We also see some authentic quayside footage, with an unnamed pier which an American friend of mine has identified for me as Santa Monica.

Besides Mabel, there are several other eyefuls of pretty girls in bathing cozzies, all of them quite pleasant to see. Papa Ford Sterling tries to impress them all at the pier's cafe, waving a wad of banknotes. This is Mack's cue to arrive with Mama, introducing Mabel as his sweetheart to both of his parents ... including Papa, who's been trying to pick her up! Smiles all round.

'The Water Nymph' was in its own time far less funny than later Keystones would be, and whatever humour it possessed has now passed its sell-by date. Even by the standards of 1912, 'The Water Nymph' is dead crude. If I summarised this movie in one word, it would be 'quaint'. But 'The Water Nymph' has a great deal of historic interest, not merely as the first Keystone but also for its honest depiction of working-class Californians at play in 1912 (not the main characters; the background ones). Much of this film's considerable charm can be credited to Mabel Normand, quite athletic here and apparently doing her own dives and stunts. Grandpa got the hotchahs for this movie, and you'll like it too. I'll rate 'The Water Nymph' 7 out of 10.

Looked at in the context of history, THE WATER NYMPH, the first release of the Keystone company, is a transitional film. Like Sennett's Biograph films, there is still an eagle on the title card and the characters start out looking normal enough -- mama, poppa, Mabel and Mack, although their movements seem a bit broader than at Biograph.

It is with the second dialogue card that we start to notice the changes. It reads "His father -- a faithful husband when locked in." What is going on here? Where are the easily demarcated characters of the melodrama? Whence the casually offered violence and hand-stroking and how could Mabel wear such a revealing bathing suit? Where did Ford Sterling get that ridiculous tie? We are suddenly no longer in the world of Biograph melodrama, or even the world in which Sennett set his own comedies for Biograph. We are in Sennett's own askew world in which the id, superego and the libido are suddenly laid bare, and in more than the metaphorical sense! The audience sees what they imagine doing -- terribly inappropriate actions, but enormously funny, because this is not the audience of polite stage dramas at a dollar a ticket. It's the rough audience of the nickelodeon and they can't afford that dollar. Their justice is not administered in courts before judges, but in the street when they can get it or at the hands of the police when they can not.

Sennett's world is just as unreal as D.W. Griffith's world, but it is just as carefully and artistically formed. His cameramen are just as good, his editors will soon be superior and his vision appealed to the poor better. The people might be grotesques, but it was the world they knew and if the rich got kicked in the pants more often than the poor, well, they had had it coming for a long, long time.

Mabel Normand and her sweetheart go to the beach and play a trick on the boyfriend's father.

Normand performed her own diving stunts for this film, which was the first Keystone comedy. Notably, the film precedes, and may have been the direct inspiration for, the Sennett Bathing Beauties performers first featured in 1915. The connection is rather obvious, of course.

This is another early showcase for Normand, who really ought to be seen on the same level as Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton. Arguably she did not make the impact they did, but one would be hard-pressed to think of any female comedian of her era who stood out nearly as much.

I just discovered this silent comedy short on the one-disc DVD set called Female Comediennes. It stars Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand. They're a loving couple but Mack's father doesn't seem to realize this as he seems to be flirting with Mabel while his wife's not around! To tell the truth, both times I watched this, I didn't find it funny but since this was the first for Sennett's Keystone studios, it is an interesting artifact. So The Water Nymph is worth a look and nothing more...

This film (along with a short outtake) is included in the Mack Sennett Collection, which I recently acquired.

Like many other people, I got interested in Mabel Normand primarily by way of her involvement in the 1922 William Desmond Taylor murder case, which has yet to be solved. While Normand seems to have been in love with the much older Taylor, and her cocaine addiction figured prominently in the case, she was never a serious suspect.

Anyway, Normand's swimsuit scenes are rather provocative in this film, and the audiences of 1912 may have been somewhat shocked, but of course it's all very quaint by today's standards. However, I found Normand to be rather on the chunky side, and the armpit hair she displays in the diving board sequence was a bit off-putting, but in 1912 women didn't seem to care about such things (and apparently the men didn't, either).

Still, Normand displays a personable charm that extends far beyond the 100-plus years since this film was made, and for this reason alone it's well worth viewing.