Looked at in the context of history, THE WATER NYMPH, the first release of the Keystone company, is a transitional film. Like Sennett's Biograph films, there is still an eagle on the title card and the characters start out looking normal enough -- mama, poppa, Mabel and Mack, although their movements seem a bit broader than at Biograph.
It is with the second dialogue card that we start to notice the changes. It reads "His father -- a faithful husband when locked in." What is going on here? Where are the easily demarcated characters of the melodrama? Whence the casually offered violence and hand-stroking and how could Mabel wear such a revealing bathing suit? Where did Ford Sterling get that ridiculous tie? We are suddenly no longer in the world of Biograph melodrama, or even the world in which Sennett set his own comedies for Biograph. We are in Sennett's own askew world in which the id, superego and the libido are suddenly laid bare, and in more than the metaphorical sense! The audience sees what they imagine doing -- terribly inappropriate actions, but enormously funny, because this is not the audience of polite stage dramas at a dollar a ticket. It's the rough audience of the nickelodeon and they can't afford that dollar. Their justice is not administered in courts before judges, but in the street when they can get it or at the hands of the police when they can not.
Sennett's world is just as unreal as D.W. Griffith's world, but it is just as carefully and artistically formed. His cameramen are just as good, his editors will soon be superior and his vision appealed to the poor better. The people might be grotesques, but it was the world they knew and if the rich got kicked in the pants more often than the poor, well, they had had it coming for a long, long time.
