Photos
Marvel Stafford
- His wife
- (as Marvel Safford)
Zip Monberg
- Casper Catnip - the hotel detective
- (as George Monberg)
Storyline
Featured review
Worth flirting with at least
"The Flirts" is a short that comes from the same film company that produced a series of films starring Billy West as a blatant ripoff of the great Charlie Chaplin's act. West had skipped out on his commitment to the series and the embarrassingly-named Harry Mann to replace him in films that included this one. Mann doesn't quite so much seem to imitate Chaplin so much as West did as to play a kind of generic comedy stock character of the man in a bowler hat and little moustache. The title cards even still identify this as one of the "Billy West Comedies," and the producers take the very un-Chaplinesque step of putting Mann into a kind of comedy team, paired with the moustachioed Jimmie Adams.
The short is charmingly carefree and freewheeling; it's fast, entertaining and rather plot less but keeps moving. Almost the sum total of events is that Mann and Adams area couple of guys who go into a hotel and, in accordance with the title, flirt with some women. They run into some difficulty with the standard hotel detective, and there's a caricature Frenchman who challenges Harry to duel. There are a lot of pretty women in bathing suits who run around, providing the two heroes with some fodder for stunned jokes and looking nice for the audience in the Sennett Bathing Beauties mode. There's a clever gag with a mannequin leg mistaken for real that would later be used to great effect by both Chase and Harry Langdon.
This is directed by Charley Chase, later to star in his own great series of shorts, and I saw it as part of a collection of his early work. The plotlessness affords no opportunity for the intricately-plotted farces that he specialized in, but his natural flair for this style means that "The Flirts" is a tour-de-force of choreographed and typed comic motion, as the two comics and their foils simply move quickly and humorously around the hotel set. As in many of his later films, the wonderful timing of the film-making was almost musical.
There's no story her for the comedy to come from, not really much of any character, and not actually that many gags (though there are quite a few examples of Charley Chase's wonderfully goofy sense of humor), but it successfully pulls off a victory of style over substance and shows us a film that's quite entertaining indeed through its flair and grace of progression in its timing and motion.
The short is charmingly carefree and freewheeling; it's fast, entertaining and rather plot less but keeps moving. Almost the sum total of events is that Mann and Adams area couple of guys who go into a hotel and, in accordance with the title, flirt with some women. They run into some difficulty with the standard hotel detective, and there's a caricature Frenchman who challenges Harry to duel. There are a lot of pretty women in bathing suits who run around, providing the two heroes with some fodder for stunned jokes and looking nice for the audience in the Sennett Bathing Beauties mode. There's a clever gag with a mannequin leg mistaken for real that would later be used to great effect by both Chase and Harry Langdon.
This is directed by Charley Chase, later to star in his own great series of shorts, and I saw it as part of a collection of his early work. The plotlessness affords no opportunity for the intricately-plotted farces that he specialized in, but his natural flair for this style means that "The Flirts" is a tour-de-force of choreographed and typed comic motion, as the two comics and their foils simply move quickly and humorously around the hotel set. As in many of his later films, the wonderful timing of the film-making was almost musical.
There's no story her for the comedy to come from, not really much of any character, and not actually that many gags (though there are quite a few examples of Charley Chase's wonderfully goofy sense of humor), but it successfully pulls off a victory of style over substance and shows us a film that's quite entertaining indeed through its flair and grace of progression in its timing and motion.
helpful•20
- hte-trasme
- Feb 2, 2010
Details
- Runtime22 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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