Short Kilts.
When Philip J. Fry talked about “headaches with pictures”, he was referring to ideas: but he could just as easily have been talking about the lamentable 1924 Stan Laurel short, Short Kilts.
Man, man. It’s hard enough to convince folk that people in the past weren’t really all that different from people nowadays: how could you ever show this to anyone and explain that, eighty years ago, it was thought to be funny? The idea of a roomful of people howling uproariously at this garbage is as creepy as Robert De Niro’s obnoxious, cigar-chomping guffawing at Problem Child in Cape Fear.
It’s not that this movie is merely bad -bad movies often have an appeal of their own- but that everything about it smacks of such glaring and almost wilful incompetence. Its endlessly cluttered scenes of people packed around a table seem to aim at the old Keystone shtick of cramming as much mayhem into every corner as possible; but this was ten years on, and where the Keystones at least had vivacity and anarchic freedom, Short Kilts instead is confusing and claustrophobic. It is so like the hapless improvisation of high-school comedy troupés that only the fact that it is from before the sound era stops us from expecting it to conclude with the actors staring at each other in awkward, idealess silence before someone steps shyly forward to announce “The. End.” We. Wish.
No candidate for digital restoration, the poor quality of any recording you’re likely to see of it renders this hapless, disorganised mess of movement even more painful to watch. The visual equivalent of unleashing a storm of five-year-olds upon an unattended percussion section. Avoid like the plague.