The Water Nymph

The Water Nymph (1912)

*** (out of 4)

Historic film as this was the first one released through Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios. In the film Mack takes his girlfriend (Mabel Normand) to the beach where his father (Ford Sterling) is also at. The father doesn't realize that this girl belongs to his son so he begins hitting up on her. THE WATER NYMPH has several interesting aspects to it other than just the fact it was the first from the studio. The funny thing is that there's a sequence where Normand puts on her bathing suit and goes out to jump off a diving board. Apparently this sequence was so popular that it gave Sennett the idea of forming his beauties. It's certainly funny to watch this sequence today because the bathing suit would be like a full dress compared to what we see today. The film has a pretty good, fast pace to it that actually makes it go by rather quickly. I thought Sterling was quite funny in the role of the flirtatious father and Normand comes off good too. Fans of Sennett's brand of humor should enjoy this one even if the majority of the running time just features Normand jumping off a diving board.

Mack Sennett assembles a strong cast for his first Keystone comedy - and the first appearance by Keystone's Bathing Beauties, apparently - in which he plays a young man who persuades his new girlfriend (Mabel Normand) to 'vamp'his father (Ford Sterling) at the beach. Not typical of the knockabout slapstick with which the studio is associated, but it has its charms.

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.

'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.

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.