Thrills of Yesterday

SOOO politically incorrect nowadays. Black and white shortie from Vitaphone in 1931. The clips are interesting in that they show early special effects, some pratfalls, film techniques by the biggies way back when. Clearly those "death defying" stunts are shown in front of a backdrop rather than the green screen they have today. The (bad) puns are a mile a minute, and its interesting from a historical perspective. We're all pretty familiar with Harry Houdini's story, but hardly anyone knows Norma Talmadge; her last two films were talkies, so it looks like she didn't survive the switch to talking pictures. According to wikipedia, her popularity was waning, and since those two talkies didn't do well, she "retired" to be at home with her millionaire husband producer, so I guess she didn't suffer too much. I love when turner classics shows these old time shorties in between films. We get to see what people and places looked like back in the day. This was a fun thing to watch, if only for the history angle.

This is a short of about 10 minutes that shows clips of older, silent movies, with modern narration (modern in 1931 anyway).

One of the silent's featured is a William Duncan western short. Duncan made over a hundred of these types of shorts between 1910 and 1920, and it doesn't really matter which one this is.

A second silent covered here is the serial "The Master Mystery" (1920), with Harry Houdini. But hey, he unlocks a door with his feet. That's something.

Another serial touched upon is the Perils of Pauline (1914). Nothing noteworthy was shown here.

The last silent featured in this short is a Larry Semon comedy effort.

All of the silent's are just bits and pieces with a narrator giving "comic" verbal touches. In 1931, the "comic" touches included overt racism which has never really done much for me. Not much to see here except some slightly rare, old silent clips. The "comic narration", if it was ever funny, isn't funny anymore. More for film historians than the average viewer.

Thrills of Yesterday (1931)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

If you're like me then you're interested in checking out each of the shorts that show up on Turner Classic Movies in between the features. After you've done this a few years you'll see that a large number of comic personalities took silent films, added his own narration and tried to sell it off as being funny. Pete Smith was one such personality who did this and later on even John Nesbitt added his own style, although his shorts went for more drama than laughs. This 9-minute short takes a look at various serials and tries to make them funny. Larry Semon and William Duncan are featured and we even get a nice sequence from a Houdini movie. THE PERILS OF PAULINE also gets its own clip. The strange thing about this short is that all the clips shown are actually fairly interesting and will make you want to check out those films. The problem comes with the narration, which is without question some of the worst written jokes I've ever witnessed. One could argue that this type of short was pointless because it's clear studios were just making fun of their silents because they felt no one would ever want to see them again. They just add narration and they could make some sort of money off the silents. When viewed today this short here just comes off dreadfully bad because of how poor the jokes are and especially some politically incorrect stuff dealing with the Semon clips where Chinese people are made fun of.