The Water Nymph

Mack Sennett got his start directing films by directing short comedies for American Biograph--D.W. Griffith's studio. However, with "The Water Nymph", Sennett has branched out with a studio of his own--Keystone. He not only directs this groundbreaking film but co-stars in it with Mabel Normand.

This film begins with a VERY bad idea. A young man (Sennett) has a girlfriend (Normand) that his parents have never met. As a joke, the man suggests later to his parents that they go to the beach. Then, he arranges for his girlfriend to go there and make eyes at his father (Ford Sterling)...to 'vamp' him. The problem is that the plan works too well and soon Dad is chasing about with Mabel.

Talk about a bad idea... However, it is clever and moderately funny. Not a brilliant comedy by any means but a decent start for the fledgling studio.

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.

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.

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.

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.