The Mechanical Man

Director: Andre Deed
Writer: Andre Deed
Cast: Andre Deed, Valentina Frascaroli, Mathilde Lambert
Country: Italy
Year of release: 1921
Reviewed from: R0 DVD (Alpha)

This has to be one of the most amazing films that I have ever seen and I am mystified as to why it is not better known. And by ‘better known’ I mean: I had never, ever heard of this. How could this be?

There are some silent sci-fi/horror films that everyone has seen, such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Metropolis. There are others that people might or might nor have seen, such as Der Golem, The Student of Prague or the John Barrymore Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And there are plenty which are ultra-obscure, of which I have on occasions been privileged to see a copy, such as You’ll Find Out, the 1914 A Christmas Carol and Ultus, Man from the Dead. And of course there are scores which no-one has seen because they are lost forever.

But how could a silent film this extraordinary, this groundbreaking, this cool have escaped my attention so completely that, when I spotted it in Alpha Video’s catalogue, my initial thought was that it must be a modern pastiche of a silent film. There was no way that there could be a 1921 Italian film about a giant robot because if there was - well, I would have read about it somewhere.

But no, bambinos, it does exist. Well, about a third of it does.

This fragmentary version runs 26 minutes at a sensible projection speed, being 740 meters of a film which originally measured 1,821 metres. As such, it would make precious little sense, even with translated intertitles, if Alpha had not thoughtfully added an opening precis derived from contemporary reviews.

The villain of the piece is Mado (Valentina Frascaroli), a female criminal mastermind who escapes from prison by injecting herself with a drug that causes her to appear critically ill. She is transferred to a hospital where she causes a fire and escapes during the confusion, dressed as a nurse.

In the missing footage that preceded this, Mado and her gang had apparently killed an inventor who had designed (but not built, presumably) a huge, remote-controlled robot. The detective who arrested Mado, Ramberto (Fernando Vivas-May) sets out to track her down again but also has to search for the inventor’s kidnapped niece, Elena D’Ara (Mathilde Lambert). Also searching for Elena is our romantic lead, ‘Modestino, called Salterello’ (writer/director Andre Deed) who refers to her father, Professor D’Ara (Gabriel Morceau) as his uncle and is therefore presumably the son of the murdered inventor, as well as Elena’s sweetheart. (‘Salterello’ is a type of dance, derived from the Italian ‘saltare’ meaning to jump or leap.)

Deed was a little chap, not much over five feet and looking and acting a little like Marty Feldman but without the protruding eyes. He does a lot of Keaton-esque, athletic/comic falls and jump (hence the character’s nickname) and it’s clear that his role is played for comedy, which sits oddly in the film where little else seems to be intended to be funny. That might mean however that this was originally intended as a comedy; after all, many of the best film comedians, from Bob Hope to George Formby, were hilarious precisely because everyone and everything around them was played relatively straight.

Anyway, Elena is recovered with the help of a gypsy woman (I think) but is in a trance-like state, from which she recovers at the sight of Salterello’s ‘hilarious’ clowning. However, it seems that while kidnapped and hypnotised, Elena gave Mado the instructions of how to build a giant robot, ‘The Monster’ goes on the rampage, smashing its way into houses and stealing valuables. In one scene we see Salterello hide in a wardrobe which the robot picks up above its head and carry to the edge of a high balcony; he slips out and escapes just before the wardrobe is smashed to pieces.

When Salterello and friends escape in a car, the robot gives chase, which is quite impressive given that until now it has lumbered along at a very slow walking pace. The chase is brilliantly executed using clever editing and double exposure to show the mechanical monster running along at 30 mph or so, plus some shots which were evidently achieved by attaching the top half of the robot costume to a frame on the back of the car. Then the robot suddenly stops dead as Mado’s control panel, back in her secret hideout, suffers a short circuit. Mado and her gang later collect the robot and ship it back for repairs.

The film’s climax comes at a masked ball in the opera house where Elena is the guest of honour. Someone turns up dressed as the robot which has terrorised the city and everyone thinks it jolly amusing as the costumed giant waves and breaks the tops off champagne bottles. But Elena’s companions are worried - what if that really is the mechanical man, being controlled to act in a friendly, amusing manner in order to lull them into a false sense of security? And so it proves to be.

Fortunately, Professor D’Ara has built his own version of the robot and sends this to the opera house where the two mechanical monstrosities tangle in a fiercesome battle, though truth be told they manage to do little except hold onto each other and shuffle round in a circle, making the exciting confrontation look more like the last dance at the giant robots disco.

At the very same time, Salterello (dressed as Napoleon, by the looks of it) rushes out, steals a police motorbike and heads off for Mado’s hideout, the location of which he has somehow divined. He is followed at high speed by Roberto (in drag!) in a car, who has proof that Salterello is innocent of something that he was arrested for (possibly the original kidnapping of Elena) - although our hero of course thinks that he is about to be re-arrested. In Mado’s hideout, Salterello causes another short circuit and this one backfires through the control panel and kills the evil genius. Mado is one of those supervillains, found in various 1920s and 1930s sci-fi adventures, who never removes her mask. Even in the first scenes we saw, when she was in prison, she still had her mask on. Now Roberto and the cops unmask her and find that the notorious Mado is actually... ah, that would be telling.

Meanwhile, in the opera house, the short circuit in Mado’s robot causes it to explode, bringing chunks of masonry crashing down to destroy both machines. In an epilogue, we see Salterello bidding goodbye to his cousin and uncle before flying off in a large biplane.

What an amazing film! Though chopped about, the quality of the Alpha footage, located in an archive in Sao Paolo, Brazil apparently and released on DVD in 2005, is pretty damn good. There is some terrific tinting, including a neat scene of Mado in prison which is blue but turns yellow when she strikes a match. The new intertitles (English translation by Liz Corra) are tastefully and artistically presented and two shots of a newspaper and a handwritten letter have been replaced with unpretentious, new, computer-generated shots with the headlines and script in English. So full marks for presentation, Alpha, and credit to Rachel Gutches for an effective score which incorporates some crude electronic sounds when the robot appears.

And what a robot! While it is not quite the 20-foot colossus depicted on the DVD sleeve, it is a good eight or nine feet tall and appears even taller next to the diminutive Deed. Designed to look as if it is made of plate steel, held together with industrial rivets, the costume nevertheless allows the uncredited actor a degree of movement in both arms and legs. The robots has glowing headlights for its eyes and acetylene torches in its hands which allow it to steal a safe in one scene and burn a hole through a locked metal door in another.

There surely can be no precedent for such a huge, mechanical monster - and when it starts carrying Elena in its arms, just before the climactic confrontation, it looks like every iconic 1950s robot, alien or monster. There are a couple of very brief shots of the robot right at the start of this fragment, which are taken from later in the story, and for a while, as I watched a tale about detectives and dinner parties, I wondered if that was all we were going to see - but no, we do get lots of robot footage and even some great (but ultimately disappointing) robot-vs-robot footage.

Almost nothing has been written about this film it seems. I have nothing in my magazine archives and all that I can find on the web, apart from sites listing the Alpha DVD, is a PDF document (now removed), in both English and Italian, about an Italian version, L’Uomo Meccanico (which is listed as 30 minutes so is presumably the same fragment, though with a different score). This lists one additional actor, Giulia Costa, who plays Countess Donadieff. The article points out that Karel Capek’s play RUR, which introduced the word ‘robot’ was written in 1920 and first performed in Prague in 1921, and that this film was passed by the Italian censor on 1st November 1921 but not released until 25th October 1922. Intriguingly, it seems that a ‘ballo meccanico futurista’ was held in Rome in June 1922 featuring a very similar robot costume to the ones in this film. The silent screen’s most famous robot, Maria, did not appear until 1927.

This surviving print was shown on the big screen at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival as part of a robot retrospective which also included screenings of Westworld, Demon Seed, Deadly Friend and the three Avengers cybernauts episodes! Apart from the cast and Deed, the only other credit is cinematographer Alberto Chentrens whose other work includes a 1922 Italian version of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea.

Andre Deed is described on the back of the DVD as a protege of Georges Méliès, with whom he worked on films such as Dislocation Mysterieuse, a 1901 two-minuter in which Deed’s limbs detach themselves from his body. In 1904 Pathé poached Deed from Méliès in order to learn the secrets behind the director’s special effects.

Deed was born Andre Chapuis in 1884 and worked as a music hall entertainer before making his screen debut. From 1908 until the mid-1920s he starred in a series of knockabout comedies as the tastefully named Cretinetti, who was renamed Boireau in his native France, Turibio in Portugal, Toribio Sanchez in Argentina and Foolshead in the USA. Some of these also featured Valentina Frascaroli who was married to Deed. The Inaccurate Movie Database lists 111 films for him although some of these may be duplicates as it gives Boireau and Cretinetti titles as separate pictures. Some of these had fantasy elements including one film in which Cretinetti dies but causes so much comic havoc in Heaven that God throws him out! Deed also starred in La Panna degli Aeromobili, a 1915 science fiction film about flying cars.

Nevertheless it’s clear, even from the limited availability of English language resources, that Deed was for a few years a huge star in France and Italy (he was lured from Pathé to a studio in Turin in 1909, returned to France in 1911, then moved back to Italy again); I have also seen it stated that he was the first actual ‘movie star’ ie. a personality identified by, and popular with, the movie-going public. His anarchic, surreal, effects-heavy early work was certainly popular with James Joyce who screened his films at Ireland’s first cinema, which opened in 1909.

Andre Deed died in obscurity in 1938 but his work has recently been rediscovered by film historians and there has even been a book about him (in Italian, sadly).

Though missing a lot of footage and displaying little lasting comedy, The Mechanical Man is a must-see for anyone who loves early science fiction movies. Alpha’s disc pairs the film with The Headless Horseman, a 1922 version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow starring Will Rogers.

MJS rating: A

review originally published 31st October 2005

The Kingdom of Shadows

Director: Ross Shepherd
Writer: Ross Shepherd
Producer: Raj Sulaman
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (FFF 2005)
Official site: www.paravelfilms.com

At the 2005 Festival of Fantastic Films I was once again roped in by my old mate Steve Green to help judge the competition for short amateur films. Steve had single-handedly whittled the wide selection submitted to a dozen movies which were then marked for various elements by a panel consisting of myself, Headpress editor David Kerekes and director Norman J Warren (Satan’s Slave, Incident).

The overall winner, by a considerable margin, was this original and charming fantasy; we all three scored it highest and as such its combined score was considerably in advance of the (very good) films which received commendations.

The title refers to a famous quote by Maxim Gorky on seeing his first film, a Lumiere production: "Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. ... It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.” Various books and documentaries on early cinema have also used the phrase.

In Ross Shepherd’s student graduation film, an eight-year-old boy named Alex becomes bored at home, ignored by his parents. Exploring the loft he finds a large cardboard box, full of tangled bird’s nests of 35mm film. Then crawling inside, as a young boy is wont to do, he finds himself entering another world; it’s a sort of The Lion, the Witch and the Carton.

This is the world of the silent film - and it is really silent. Alex finds himself unable to make any sound whatsoever and coloured grey, and everything around him is equally monochrome and silent. He finds people in Victorian clothes at a railway station but they don’t respond to him. Crawling back through the tangle of film, he re-emerges at home and tries to tell his parents what happened. His mother dismisses her son’s tales as nonsense but his father (Keith Eyles: Bloodmyth, Ten Dead Men) is intrigued enough to look in the box himself.

The Kingdom of Shadows is a lovely-looking film with an interesting and worthwhile point to make, made for the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. The acting is good, including a nice appearance by Dennis Chinnery, the veteran actor who was in Plague of the Zombies and numerous Doctor Who episodes (as various characters) as well as the False Profit segment of Nightmares. He plays one of the Lumiere Brothers, who appear in a prologue set in 1948, the year that the first brother died, and again later in a less substantial form. Shot on 16mm, which is increasingly rare nowadays, the silent sequences have been digitised into monochrome and provided with a few suitable fake scratches. Cinematographer James Watt does sterling work in both colour and faux black and white.

A deserving winner in Manchester, I hope it goes on to greater things at other festivals. And let’s keep an eye on Ross Shepherd and see what he can do in the future.

A smashing little film which is thoroughly professional and delightfully entertaining.

MJS rating: A
review originally posted 7th September 2005

High Treason

Director: Maurice Elvey
Writer: L’Estrange Fawcett
Cast: Jameson Thomas, Benita Hume, Humberston Wright
Year of release: 1929
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK conference screening

One by one, I’m tracking down and seeing those pre-war SF movies, ticking them off my list. I’ve seen Secrets of FP1, I’ve seen Son of Kong, I’ve got The Tunnel sitting on my shelf waiting for me, and now I’ve seen High Treason. That still leaves Just Imagine and Die Frau im Mond, but I can wait.

Unfortunately, High Treason turns out, after all that, to be rubbish. The film was shot in 1929 in two versions: one silent and one using that new fangled ‘talkie’ process. The BFI has prints of both but unfortunately the sound elements of the talkie version are in such a poor state that they’re unusable. So this screening at the 2003 conference of the International Association for Media and History was a Beta tape of the BFI’s silent print.

Basically, this is a very simplistic anti-war story. There are two power blocks: the Atlantic states, which seems to be the USA and the British Empire, and the European states, which is Johnny Foreigner. We open at a manned border crossing, which is puzzling in itself because, like, where is this border? Later on it’s made clear that one end of the Channel Tunnel (A tunnel under the English Channel? Futuristic nonsense!) is in Atlantic territory and the other on European soil. So it’s not as if we’ve re-established our rightful ownership of Calais.

So where is this border crossing? Wherever, there are guards there, playing cards and nearly starting a war when one of them cheats. Then an odd-looking car turns up with a couple who are accused of smuggling booze (or something) and this creates a border incident which leads to possible war.

Our three main characters are Atlantic military officer Michael Deane (Jameson Thomas: Charlie Chan in Egypt and an uncredited role as a doctor in Universal’s The Invisible Man), his sweetheart Evelyn Seymour (Benita Hume: Tarzan Escapes) and her father (Humberston Wright, who was Dr Petrie alongside Fred Paul’s Nayland Smith in an early 1920s series of Fu Manchu pictures). As war looms, helped along by a bunch of ‘professional agitators’ who plant a bomb in the channel tunnel, knowing each side will blame the other, Evelyn and Michael find themselves on different sides. (I love the idea of ‘professional’ agitators. Is there some sort of union or something? Can you take a City and Guilds in agitation?)

Dr Seymour and his daughter run the Peace Corps, a worldwide organisation devoted to peaceful resistance, apparently consisting entirely of women except for Dr S (dirty old git!). We see them suiting up, including some scandalous shots of young ladies in their underwear. One woman is desperate not to go and is allowed to leave because she has a child at home (er, wouldn’t that apply to a lot of the women?), making her apparently a conscientious objector to the Peace Corps. The Corps’ main office is full of young women at desks, while Dr S sits at the front controlling a big pipe-organ-like affair which continually racks up how many members there are in all the world’s major cities.

Anyway, war looms closer, Michael has to fight, Evelyn doesn’t want him to. Hordes of white-clad Peace Corps women clamber all over biplanes, preventing them from being used, and eventually the problem is solved when Dr Seymour assassinates the Atlantic President (Basil Gill: the 1937 TV version of Journey’s End). Yes, very peaceful that. The film winds down (and down and down) with a tedious courtroom sequence in which Dr S is tried for murder, but he smiles beatifically because he knows that he averted war.

What a load of tosh. Old and rare is not always good, and here it’s downright terrible. Characters are one-dimensional and uninteresting, there’s no depth to the plot whatsoever, and the political views espoused are both naive and contradictory. To be fair, I suppose it wasn’t inopportune to think that, the First World War having been caused by intransigence and dogma on the part of out-of-touch political leaders, the next war might start that way too. In 1929 it wouldn’t have been obvious that it would start by some charismatic but insane politico blaming his country’s suffering on Jews, then annexing the Sudetenland and invading Poland. The year of High Treason, incidentally, is never specifically identified on screen, other than being post-1938. Various sources cite it as anything from 1940 to 1955.

Director Maurice Elvey’s amazing career goes back at least as far as a 1913 version of Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red Barn, taking in two versions of Hindle Wakes (1918 and 1927), Vice Versa (1916), the infamous lost-but-rediscovered 1918 biopic The Life of David Lloyd George, The Clairvoyant (1934), The Tunnel (1935), the early British colour picture Sons of the Sea (1939) and a whole series of Sherlock Holmes pictures in 1921. He directed his last film in 1957 aged 70 and died ten years later; the Lloyd George film aside, he has a reputation as a dull, workmanlike director and I can see why. The most notable other credit for writer L’Estrange Fawcett (what a great name!) was the 1930 fantasy comedy Alf’s Button. A young David Lean worked on the film as assistant director while art director Andrew Mazzei later worked on a couple of early Hammer thrillers - Wings of Danger and The Last Page.

Also in the cast are James Carew (Midnight at Madame Tussaud’s, Mystery of the Marie Celeste, The Tunnel), Alfred Goddard (Non-Stop New York and the 1937 King Solomon’s Mines), Wally Patch (The Ghosts of Berkeley Square, I’m All Right Jack, a 1937 version of Dr Syn, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, various comedies alongside George Formby, Arthur Askey, Max Miller, Gert and Daisy and Old Mother Riley - and even Cathy Come Home), Milton Rosmer (a 1948 version of The Monkey’s Paw and the title role in - who knew such a thing existed? - a 1921 British version of French horror classic Belphegor), and allegedly Raymond Massey (Arsenic and Old Lace) and Rene Ray (later the author of the novel that The Strange World of Planet X was based on).

The special effects vary enormously. Some of the cityscapes are not bad, with miniature planes flying over, though there’s a very amusing couple of shots where a miniature autogyro is seen to take off and land vertically! There’s also some archive footage of contemporary ‘state of the art’ planes which is historically interesting. Aside from the car seen at the start, there’s no really imaginative design. One particularly stupid scene has couples doing a ‘futuristic dance’ to the sound of an automatic orchestra, which in the unimaginative, prosaic way of these things is all the actual instruments - trumpets, drums, etc - being remotely controlled by a chap with various knobs and buttons. Dear oh dear.

One of the reason for the prominence of aeroplanes is that High Treason was (very) loosely based on a play by Noel Pemberton Billing, an aircraft fanatic and designer who founded the Supermarine company. This screening of the film was preceded by some archive documentary footage of Pemberton Billing, relaxing at home and driving a bullet-shaped car which he designed and built himself.

Pemberton Billing seems a fascinating bloke: an MP, a writer, an inventor, a designer and a social reformer. He founded, in the late teens, a dodgy sounding organisation called The Society of Vigilantes which was devoted to promoting ‘purity of life’ in Britain. This body seems to have flourished briefly, with several thousand members, before disappearing. But ‘PB’ remains most notorious not for the Society of Vigilantes, not for founding the company which built the Spitfire, not for High Treason - but for winning a libel case based on the word ‘clitoris’!

Gentle readers should avert their eyes now. It seems that back in those unenlightened days, when it was well known that lesbians were mentally and medically retarded freaks of nature, one of the distinguishing features of a follower of Sapphos was thought to be an abnormally large clitoris. Pemberton Billing wrote an article in one of his many publications in which he discussed a well-known actress and her performance in Wilde’s Salome. The article was headed ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ and the implication - though never overtly stated - was that this particular actress was a lezza.

The actress sued for libel. But PB’s lawyer argued that ‘clitoris’ was an obscure medical term - that he had shown the article to several dozen well-educated people and none of them had known what the word in the title meant. The judge concurred, adding that he had also mentioned the title to people to be met with blank looks. The average (well-educated, upper class) person in the street simply did not know what a ‘clitoris’ was. But the actress must have understood - in order to be offended.

Since she was not a medically trained professional, the only other way she could possibly have understood the title enough to take offence would be if she actually was a lesbian! Implying that she was a tuppence-licker could not be considered libel, because the mere fact that the implication offended her proved that she obviously was one! A stunning piece of argument, which has kept Noel Pemberton Billing’s name alive in the minds of feminist historians ever since.

Anyway, back at High Treason, let’s be honest, this is rubbish and only a curiosity. Comparisons with Metropolis are daft and lazy; Lang’s film is infinitely superior in terms of both design and story, despite being made several years earlier. The one notable and intriguing aspect of the film is the use of televisions and videophones. Moving images are seen on flat screens sticking up from desks. The images fade in and out, there are no obvious matte edges, people and objects move in front of the images - I cannot for the life of me work out how these are done. It’s a terrific effect. But sadly, it’s not enough to save High Treason from being crap.

Watch it once, just to say you’ve seen it, but don’t expect to enjoy it.

MJS rating: C-
review originally posted before November 2004

A Christmas Carol [1914]

Director: Harold Shaw
Year of release: 1914
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (British Silent Cinema Weekend 2001)

Not the first version of Dickens’ classic, but certainly one of the earliest which still survives in a viewable print, this is a terrific one-reeler which combines all that’s best about silent cinema with the real spirit of Dickens’ story.

The plot is, perforce, heavily condensed, but then it was never the most complicated story in the first place: Scrooge is a miser; Marley’s ghost visits him, followed by the three spirits of Christmas who show him visions of what was, is and may yet be; Scrooge repents his miserly ways; the end. Perfect for a 15-minute silent film.

What really impresses here are the effects - double exposure ghosts as good as anything being done fifty or sixty year later. Not just a novelty, hoping to impress audiences by their existence, they are seamlessly integrated with the main action and must have amazed audiences back in 1914. Cinema advanced quickly in its early days. This was made only 20 years after the Lumieres were screening their train station film in the Cafe de Paris, yet already all the basics of plot, pacing and cinematography are there.

To those for whom A Christmas Carol means singing and dancing and jokes, it’s worth remembering that it is a ghost story and supposed to be creepy, which this film undoubtedly is, even 86 years later. Although one might think that British audiences in 1914 would have wanted something to cheer them up, in fact what they wanted was a traditional Christmas ghost story with a strong moral message - and that’s what they got.

Various lists of Christmas Carol film adaptations exist around the web and most don’t even mention this film, directed in the UK at Twickenham Studios by American ex-pat Harold Shaw, formerly a director for the Edison Company. (Shaw made a version of Trilby the same year which seems to be much better known.) Sadly, unless the BFI digs out this print for another festival, it’s likely to remain unseen (though hopefully not for another 85 years...).

MJS rating: A-
review originally posted before November 2004

Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies

Director: Del Lord
Writers: Jefferson Moffitt, Frank Capra
Producer: Mack Sennett
Cast: Billy Bevan, Andy Clyde, Lillian Knight, John J Richardson
Year of release: 1925
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK video (Artsmagic) 

Wow - here’s an almost completely forgotten Mack Sennett comedy which manages to cram both science fiction and a haunted house scenario into 15 minutes! Billy Bevan stars as Hiram Case, assistant to inventor Burbank Watts (Andy Clyde) who has invented a method of powering automobiles (the ‘lizzies’ of the title) via radio waves.

Watts’ daughter Winnie (Lillian Knight) is wooed by gasoline magnate T Potter Doam (John J Richardson) who becomes furious when he is put out of business by Watts and Case refitting all the town’s cars for radio power. Of course, this is all an excuse for lots of high-jinks as apparently driverless cars career around the street, knocking people and things over in typical Mack Sennett fashion.

Interestingly, Watts also has a ‘radioscope’ - a sort of remote viewing proto-TV on which he can view this distant destruction of property.

Halfway through, we find Watts and daughter living it up at a celebratory fancy dress party, while a sound-asleep Case ‘guards’ the lab. Doam and a black assistant named Dabney White break in to cause trouble but instead find themselves ‘haunted’ by a variety of ‘ghosts’, including partygoers dressed as a devil, a skeleton, a gorilla and some big-headed monsters. Further confusion arises with Case struggling under a sheet, a parrot (also under a sheet) and Doam covered in flour. When ‘Dabney White’ gets held at gunpoint by the ‘skeleton’, he gets so frightened he collapses into a pile of soot!

The radio waves and some sound effects are animated onto the image, and a throbbing toe (when Case shoots his own foot, mistaking it for an intruder) is represented with what must be the first ever bladder prosthetic - fifty years before Rob Bottin reinvented the technique for The Howling!

Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies is also known as Bedtime Stories and was released in 1978 (presumably on super-8) as Super Power Automobiles. It was released on VHS in the UK in 1995 by Artsmagic, along with two other Sennett/Bevan/Clyde comedies, Wandering Willies and Ice Cold Cocos. The print quality is watchable, given its ancient nature, but the music is just a random selection of generic silent movie accompaniment. The film is also available, with different music and possibly a better print, on the DVD collection Slapstick Encyclopedia.

Apart from the four principal cast, there are no credits (on this print at least). However, director Del Lord later worked with the Three Stooges, including many more ‘ghost’/’horror’ comedies, while this film’s ‘scenario’ was co-written by no less than Frank Capra, who worked extensively with Sennett in the silent era. Although various sources mention the radio controlled cars, the ‘fake haunting’ section of this fun comedy seems to have escaped most people’s attention, which is a shame as it is an early example of both the SF and horror genres.

MJS rating: B+

Review originally published before November 2004