Special Delivery (1922) User Reviews

Nothing Special

[boblipton · 7/10 · 24 April 2006]

This Al St. John short was directed by his uncle, Roscoe Arbuckle, anonymously, after his acquittal for the manslaughter of Virginia Rappe caused him to be banned from performing. Yes, I know. It doesn't make sense.

The plot is so simple that the movie can be followed despite having Czech titles: St. John plays a bicycle messenger who is supposed to deliver a letter -- well, his stage act was as a trick bicyclist. Along the way he gets mixed up with some spies who want to steal the letter and some lions. It ends up with a nicely done bit of thrill comedy as he perches high atop a flagpole while one of the spies chops at its base with an axe.

The movie lacks much in the way of structure, being little but a series of gag in a straightforward time sequence, without much in the way of subtext to connect them -- fairly primitive for this period and within a year or two Arbuckle would be writing and directing far more sophisticated comedies with lots of subtext -- the hilarious CURSES! or the elaborately doubled vision of THE MOVIES. Perhaps in the aftermath of the trials, Roscoe had fallen back on producing 'em fast and cheap to pay off his lawyers and to start rebuilding his life. If so, he worked to his and St. John's strengths. It's very funny.

Zoo-zoo's pedals!

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 10/10 · 25 April 2006]

After the scandal that drove him off the screen, Roscoe Arbuckle continued to work behind the camera as a director and gag constructor under the pseudonym William Goodrich. By coincidence, he directed two unrelated movies -- a short and a feature -- both called 'Special Delivery'.

This is the first, and it's hilarious. Al St John is a bicycle courier for the Swiftfoot Messenger Company. He is given an envelope containing a valuable postal order, to deliver to a fair damsel. Off he goes on his bicycle. But a gang of thieves are determined to steal the postal order, and they place every conceivable obstacle in his way.

SPOILING SOME GAGS. St John (a former Keystone Cop, and Arbuckle's nephew) had perfected his trick bicycle act in vaudeville. Here, he performs a dazzling repertory of tricks aboard his velocipede. Just occasionally in this short film, there is some camera trickery that enables St John to perform an impossible gag. When he whistles for his bike, it gets up and comes to him all by itself (courtesy of stop motion). Although this gag is well-photographed, I resented its presence: when camera tricks are inserted, the audience naturally begin to wonder if any of St John's daredevil stunts were faked too. (They weren't.) Later in the film, we get another camera trick that genuinely impressed me, when the leader of the thieves coshes St John. The rest of the screen image continues to move normally while St John and his bike remain stock-still in freeze-frame, heeled over at an angle that St John couldn't possibly maintain without trickery. The join between the freeze-frame and the moving image is seamless. There's also a clever streetcar sequence, anticipating the climax of Harold Lloyd's 'Girl Shy'.

Eventually, St John careens into a packing case outside a shopfront called the Lion Cleaners, which I assumed was a laundry. ('For cleaning lions', I muttered to myself.) Got it in one! There are three freshly-cleaned LIVE lions inside the case with St John, and his frenzied reaction is a sight to behold. There are several gags involving a lion's tail or a lion's paw: it's quite obvious that these are really props manipulated by a stagehand, but the gags are funny anyway.

This movie rates a 10 out of 10. Why can't modern comedians do this sort of thing?