Italian Love (1920) User Reviews (2)

Everybody's slap-happy...and it's super confusing!

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 10 February 2019]

The opening credits to "Italian Love" is missing...and perhaps a bit of the rest of the film, as the story was very confusing. When it begins, a huge Italian looking buy is slapping his lady around their home. Soon, some other guys show up and they begin slapping her around. Who are these others? Why are they hitting her?

Eventually, she runs away and she soon meets up with a guy who's running from the cops over, well, not much. She and this guy (Billy West) run about...avoiding the cops and the brutal guys who have been slapping her around. Can they evade them forever or somehow defeat them?

Billy West was best known for copying Chaplin's Little Tramp character. The guy he plays in this one looks a bit like this character but isn't quite the same. Why the difference, I am not sure.

If it sounds like I was confused when watching this one, you're right. But what is also important to know is that none of this is particularly funny...which is a problem since it's supposed to be a comedy!

Out of the Cradle, Off of their Rockers

[boblipton · 6/10 · 9 June 2014]

Ethelyn Gibson has run away from daddy Ted Lorch because he wants to sell her to Leo White, King of Little Italy, for his music hall. So she dresses as a man and runs into Billy West in this scattergun burlesque of D.W. Griffith.

Billy has begun his transformation from the best of the Chaplin imitators to his own character. Although he retains the mustache and taste for kicking people in the pants, he wears a nice jacket and a boater hat. Over the next few years he would finally build his own character and then go into the production of comedy instead of starring.

The burlesque of Griffith might not be apparent to anyone not looking for it, since it largely consists of single moving close up shots, titles like "Birth of a Notion" or set-ups that recall movies like "The Musketeers of Pig Alley". They get lost in the funny stuff and you can watch this for the jokes without losing anything. Keep an eye out for a heavily made-up Charley Chase -- still billed as "Charles Parrott" in the director's credit, as the temperance missionary.