Forgotten comic Jimmy Aubrey finds himself in China, where he proceeds to cause all kinds of nearly-funny mayhem. Aubrey's character seems to have been inspired by every silent comic you've ever seen, which leaves him looking kind of bland. Some neat moments, but strictly second-rate.
2 Reviews
how bowdlerised versions can render films more surreal
kekseksa18 April 2018
This is apparently the original of a Spanish "commentated" film that I have seen called Sandalio en oriente (Aubrey was known as Sandalio in Spain where he appears to have been particularly popular). It is, I suspect, largely a remake of an earlier Aubrey film for Vitagraph - Chinks and Chases (1917).
It opens with the hero canoodling on the doorstep with his inamorata while her father observes scowling from a window. He then hurls the unfortunate Jimmy onto a building site where a heavy weight is about to fall because the rope that holds it is frayed. It lands seemingly not on Jimmy but on the other end of the plank he is sitting on and the resultant see-saw effect mysteriously catapults the hero into China (or possibly Chinatown) where he has some very strange adventures including, at one point, massacring a whole lot of Chinese whose corpses then magically reform themselves.
This sort of surrealism in US practice normally required an excuse even in farcical comedy and in fact, since one recognizes the inamorata and her papa in the Chinese characters, the whole sequence is presumably intended to be a dream and I assume that this would have been made clear in the original ending. But in this version that ending would appear to be missing thus rendering the film rather more surreal than it originally was.
This sort of abbreviation was common with home-viewing versions. The only version I have seen, for instance, of Lortac's animated film Le Cauchemar d'un piéton (a pedestrian's nightmare), and possibly the only version that survives, is a 9.5mm Pathé-Baby version retitled Déboires d'un piéton. It involves man being chased out of his house and through the streets by a gang of cars with fierce teeth so that he eventually has to climb a lamppost to get away from them. It is a very surreal little film but, as the catalogue-description makes clear, the original film concerned a pedestrian who has a nightmare after nearly being run over by a car. By leaving out the frame of the dream, the Pathé-Baby version has in effect rendered the dream "reality" and made the film more surreal than was originally intended.
It opens with the hero canoodling on the doorstep with his inamorata while her father observes scowling from a window. He then hurls the unfortunate Jimmy onto a building site where a heavy weight is about to fall because the rope that holds it is frayed. It lands seemingly not on Jimmy but on the other end of the plank he is sitting on and the resultant see-saw effect mysteriously catapults the hero into China (or possibly Chinatown) where he has some very strange adventures including, at one point, massacring a whole lot of Chinese whose corpses then magically reform themselves.
This sort of surrealism in US practice normally required an excuse even in farcical comedy and in fact, since one recognizes the inamorata and her papa in the Chinese characters, the whole sequence is presumably intended to be a dream and I assume that this would have been made clear in the original ending. But in this version that ending would appear to be missing thus rendering the film rather more surreal than it originally was.
This sort of abbreviation was common with home-viewing versions. The only version I have seen, for instance, of Lortac's animated film Le Cauchemar d'un piéton (a pedestrian's nightmare), and possibly the only version that survives, is a 9.5mm Pathé-Baby version retitled Déboires d'un piéton. It involves man being chased out of his house and through the streets by a gang of cars with fierce teeth so that he eventually has to climb a lamppost to get away from them. It is a very surreal little film but, as the catalogue-description makes clear, the original film concerned a pedestrian who has a nightmare after nearly being run over by a car. By leaving out the frame of the dream, the Pathé-Baby version has in effect rendered the dream "reality" and made the film more surreal than was originally intended.
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