"A Clever Dummy" or "The Automatic Figure" is an American black-and-white silent film from 1917, so it has its 100th anniversary this year. The writer is Mack Sennett and no less than three directors worked on this one. The especially shocking thing is that it still turned out so weak. It suffers drastically from one of the biggest problems when it comes to silent film: the lack of sufficient intertitles. You cannot blame them for not including sound as technology wasn't ready yet, but if you make a film and show us people talking non-stop basically from start to finish, but only include an intertitle every 1 or 2 minutes and then that one consists of maybe three words, I would think that the filmmaker is trying to make a fool of us. It is virtually impossible to understand the movie or the plot and this is a negative deal-breaker. This is especially disappointing as the cast includes names like Turpin, Conklin and Beery, all pretty successful actors in the first half of the 20th century and they definitely have the potential to show us better quality in terms of their performances. Then again, there are nonetheless several moments of severe overacting in this one, so I guess the lack of creativity was contagious. There are many films about robots, golems or dummies from the early days of film and this has to be one of the worst. Also clearly inferior to some of the stuff Méliès and others did even 2 decades earlier.
Review of A Clever Dummy
