Billie Ritchie is summoned from the bar, where he has been lighting sausages. Wife Alice Howell has just given birth again. At home he contemplates their four elder children and is displeased with the thought of a fifth. When it turns out to be triplets, he expresses his dismay. So Alice clouts him one. He abandons the family and rescues rich Gertrude Selby, whom he will now marry.

It's another of the evil, disgusting, chaotic, funny shorts that Henry "Pathe" Lehrman turned out with Ritchie. However, in this one, Miss Howell shows herself a match for the comic who claimed that Chaplin was imitating him, beating Ritchie, kicking her children and playing kootchy-koo with a young man, now that hubby has left her and a girl has to take care of herself. At Keystone, most of the women were pretty girls or battle-axe mothers-in-law for the comics to fight over. At Lehrman-Knock-Out, it was a free-for-all, and Miss Howell knew how to make sadists laugh in the clinches.

A deadbeat father abandons his wife after she has triplets; she chases him down and exacts comic justice.

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[link=/name/nm5301405]Mia Goth[/link], [link=/name/nm2858875]Sydney Sweeney[/link], and more modern actors killing the horror game.

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<a class="ipc-md-link" target=_blank rel="nofollow noopener" href="/name/nm5301405?ref_=tt_eds_right-5_lk">Mia Goth</a>, <a class="ipc-md-link" target=_blank rel="nofollow noopener" href="/name/nm2858875?ref_=tt_eds_right-5_lk">Sydney Sweeney</a>, and more modern actors killing the horror game.

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Father Was a Loafer

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