The cleverly-titled "Burstup Homes' Murder Case," while the earliest film parody I've yet seen of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective character, was quickly followed up by such parodies as the race film "Spying the Spy" (1918) and, my favorite, "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" (1916) starring Douglas Fairbanks from a scenario by Tod Browning and titling by Anita Loos. Nowadays, we get "Holmes & Watson" (2018) and "Enola Holmes" (2020), and they tell me cinema has progressed--pfft.
In this one, the gumshoe bursts up a couple's home after Mrs. Jellybone mistakes her husband's wig mannequin head combined with some blood of his from a cut for her husband having been decapitated. Meanwhile, Mr. Jellybone has snuck off to a poker game with the boys, and Detective Homes pins the murder on an innocent bystander. Although the Sherlock Homes parody is slightly amusing--the bit where he scares a girl with his ridiculous disguise and habit of sneaking up on people while staring into his magnifying glass admittedly made me chuckle, and the business of his lighting his two pipes with a light bulb is a silly introduction--it's Blanche Cornwall as the "Twentieth Century Woman" Mrs. Jellybone who steals the show. The real laughs are when she starts seemingly cursing after discovering her husband's inadvertent deception and followed by her calm fierceness as she stands behind her man after discovering the advertent deception of sneaking out to gamble--clearing out the room of the other men before surprisingly hugging him as her relief from him being alive outweighs her annoyance at his wayward ways. Just exceptional acting for a 1913 one-reeler.
I also recommend adding a reading to one's viewing of this and another Guy Solax one-reeler, "Canned Harmony" (1912) with Barbara McBane's essay "Imagining sound in the Solax films of Alice Guy Blaché: Canned Harmony (1912) and Burstop Holmes' Murder Case (1913)." In the author's commentary on this title, she compares the "Twentieth Century Woman's" addresses to the camera to the mimed speech in contemporary suffragist films ("What 80 Million Women Want" (1913) comes to mind), to go along with the wife's already then-supposed-mannish dress and apparent dominance in the marriage. Not too surprising given that Guy had already parodied feminism and gender-bending at Gaumont with "The Consequences of Feminism" (1906), a scenario she reworked in the now-lost Solax production "In the Year 2000" (1912). McBane also discusses other instances of imagined sound in the silent film, such as in the second scene and second of the film's through-mirror shots where Mrs. Jellybone first talks facing the camera, as well as the husband's response to his pal's whistling to call him to the poker game after a phone call fails. Plus, McBane attempts to find further reflexive commentary on filmmaking in this use of sound and in the disembodied head as reflecting the disembodied nature of film itself.
(Note: Although the booklet for the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers set claim this one is a 2k restoration from 35mm elements, it's a worn print that is especially blurry and contrasty in some parts as though it were a reduction print. Nevertheless, Burstup Homes's fake nose remains obvious.)
