Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts (1915) User Reviews

For 1915, it's pretty good and aviation buffs will love it.

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 1 May 2008]

For 1915, this is a pretty good film and the special effects, though very crude by modern standards, are excellent for the time. The quality of this film would compare favorably to the types of film shorts Chaplin was doing at the time.

Perennial silent comic Chester Conklin stars as a representative of his government trying to buy a plane away from a rival government. While there isn't as much slapstick in this Sennett film as you might expect, the action is pretty good and you get to see very rare scenes featuring a Curtis biplane and one other vintage plane--and aviation buffs will enjoy this.

When men had funny mustaches.

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 5 April 2017]

This is planes, trains and automobiles, 1910's style, with forgotten funny man Chester Conklin pursuing a young lady and inavertedly stopping a saboteur. It's all fast and funny, with some of the sequences looking like ancient animation. Fun for its silly plot, antique special effects, and especially for Conklin, this shows what silent comedy master Mack Sennett did best: make people laugh, and like the song in "Mack and Mabel" says, "We were just making a buck." What survives of these century old masterpieces today does indeed make the whole world laugh. Without the artistry of these one and two reelers, we would never have advanced to where comedy is today.

Great Stunts and Editing

[Michael_Elliott · 17 September 2012]

Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts (1915)

*** (out of 4)

This Keystone comedy features a total of zero laughs but it's still very much worth watching. The plot is pretty simple as Chester Conklin plays a government man who's sent to buy a plane but when he gets there he realizes that a rival is also wanting to buy it. That's all I'll say about the "plot" because there's really not too much of it but DIZZY HEIGHTS AND DARING HEARTS is very much worth seeing for a number of reasons. The biggest is that the final ten-minutes or so is pretty much an action picture as all sorts of crazy things happen. There are all sorts of aerial shots that look rather great considering it was 1915 but they also mix this with models and various other techniques to tell the story. It's obvious how some of the special effects were done but that doesn't take away from the fun. This includes some bits where Conklin is dropping some bombs from the plane. We get a shot of the bombs falling through the air and then we see their impact on the ground. This is where the model use comes into play because we see all sorts of things get blown up. We also get a daring rescue towards the end of the film when a man is stuck on a tower that is about to fall. All of these scenes are wonderfully directed but the editing is perhaps the best I've seen from this period outside a D.W. Griffith film. Film buffs will certainly want to check this one out.

Airplanes Don't Carry This Keystone To Heights Of Humor

[boblipton · 4/10 · 27 May 2019]

Who would ever suspect bumbling Mr. Walrus, as played by Chester Conklin at Keystone, as a deadly secret agent? And who in the world sends him uncoded messages about the nation's security, when the train conductor might be an agent of an unfriendly foreign country, or even Al Christie?

It's a rushed and not particularly funny Keystone, with the airplane chase intended to carry the film, as David Anderson tries to buy the new plane before Conklin can stop him. There's some okay footage of a plane flying upside down, which was possible, but more likely achieved by taping over the upper half of the lens, filming the ground sequence, rewinding, taping over the bottom half, and shooting the plane with the camera upside down. It would have been a challenging thing to do, but well within the ability of any good cameraman,

And that's the point. There's a lot of camera trickery in this one, and it's fairly obvious to me. That cuts down on how funny it is. I believe a contemporary audience would have noticed it too.

'plane nonsense

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 9/10 · 14 December 2004]

The output of Mack Sennett's Keystone studio has been unfairly stereotyped as mindless slapstick: a steady diet of custard pies and pratfalls, climaxing in a chase. Although many Keystones did conform to that formula, many others did not. Some notable exceptions were the rural comedies starring Ora Carew and Joseph Belmont, featuring a much gentler sort of humour.

'Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts' is a Keystoner that varies the formula, placing more emphasis on daredevil thrills. There is some slapstick here, but most of it occurs within a framework of aerial thrills and bravado stunt work (much of it crudely faked, yet thrilling in its audacity). There are laughs here, but the movie is more interested in astonishing us ... and it does so, delightfully.

Chester Conklin, one of Sennett's second-string comedians, plays an unnamed foreign agent, bidding against a rival for an experimental aeroplane. Cora Anderson plays the daughter of the owner of the Eagle aviation company, who is a fine aviatrix in her own right. She's aboard the craft when Chester skyjacks it. There are some trick shots here, blatantly phony yet very impressive for 1915. Another pilot pursues Chester and his hostage. The ending will please you, although it won't surprise you.

Along the way, there are some unexpected laughs and some impressive stunt work. One sequence features the blatant use of a dummy, when Chester gets caught in the aeroplane's spinning propeller ... but the 'body' that revolves is obviously a stuffed mannequin. The pacing of this comedy is rapid-fire, faster than usual even by Keystone standards, and the editing is far superior to Keystone's usual fare.

As I've mentioned the pacing, here's a good place to clear up a misconception about silent comedies in general and Keystone comedies in particular. There is a modern perception that all silent slapstick films (especially Keystones) were intentionally projected too quickly, to speed up the actors. Although there was some intentional undercranking (to increase the interval between frames, and thus accelerate the action), this was rare and was usually reserved for stunt sequences. The misconception arose because modern projectors run at a faster speed than silent-era projectors, and for several decades these old films were always shown at an unnaturally rapid speed. Videotape technology (and now DVD) gives us an opportunity to correct this error, restoring these classics to their intended projection rate.

'Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts' is thrilling, funny and outrageous, and I'll rate it 9 out of 10. Well done, Mack Sennett and Chester Conklin!