A family goes to a penny arcade where they watch some old-time picture shows.A family goes to a penny arcade where they watch some old-time picture shows.A family goes to a penny arcade where they watch some old-time picture shows.
Photos
Leo Donnelly
- Narrator
- (voice)
Annette Kellerman
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Mary Pickford
- Indian Princess
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
- Director
- Ralph Staub(uncredited)
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaVitaphone production reel #1518.
- GoofsMom breaks her umbrella in two striking the father for looking at a risque peep show, but in a following shot, the umbrella is intact as she resumes hitting him.
- ConnectionsFeatures The Song of the Wildwood Flute (1910)
- SoundtracksSobre las olas (Over the Waves)
(uncredited)
Music by Juventino Rosas
Played when Annette Kellerman dives into the pool
Featured review
ANTI-NOSTALGIA.
This is one amongst a sub-genre of films of the depression era. Though only a very short time removed from silent pictures, (in this case, only five years) they are treated as relics from a distant eon, as strange and ridiculously quaint as powdered wigs.
Though there are a few of these short subjects that have an idea that the recent past had some great moments to offer, such as the Paramount "Movie Milestones" series of 1934-5, mainly that past is shown as worthy of nothing but contempt. This film is typical of that sentiment, films of then ten or fifteen years ago are mercilessly mocked by an unfunny narrator/heckler. The witless jabs are not up to the worst "Mystery Science theatre" scripts.
To make the aging flicker "funnier" they are manipulated to repeat action back and forth. The "titles" are written to make them even stupider, as here where a film about Indians is used, they're introduced with Hebrew names (like "Chief Potch in the Punim") and the dialogue supplied by the narrator gives them Jewish dialects. (the comic idea that the Red Indians were the lost tribe was a wheezy vaudeville thread by this time.)
The worst offender in this genre was Pete Smith over at MGM, whose "Goofey Movies" sometimes incoherently tied pieces of several old films together and added animation as well.
I can't see where this general contempt for their own products by movie men came from. Did audiences feel this way, or were they being bullied into this mindeset, to better appreciate the new offerings by the men, often the very same men, that had made the items on view here?
helpful•20
- WesternOne1
- Nov 16, 2020
Details
- Runtime11 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.37 : 1
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