I watched "That Ice Ticket" along with another Angela Murray Gibson comedy short, "Arrested for Life" (1923), via the State Historical Society of North Dakota on YouTube for Silent Movie Day, but this one is also available on the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers home-video set, as well. Although I have the set, I hadn't got around to seeing this one, but I'm glad I finally have, as it checks a few boxes for me. Besides my obsession with seeing a lot of silent films and my desire to especially see more of them made by female filmmakers, I can also add this one to my list of pandemic-related titles, a subject of interest of late for obvious reasons.
There's not actually any contagious disease depicted in this comedy, but the humor does revolve around everyone outside of a woman and a boy's house believing that their home is infected with smallpox. That's because the mischievous boy found a "small pox" sign and posted it on the front of the house. All but one who approach the house run away upon the discovery or from the threat of the boy or his dog approaching them. The editing is quite brisk, too, by the way, there's a bit of a flashback, and the picture opens with still photographs subjectively seen as motion pictures. The entire scenario, as well, besides being part of subgenre going back to early cinema of prankster boys, is reminiscent of D. W. Griffith's "The Sunbeam" (1912).
There were also other comedies, in addition to the dramas, making light of contagion around this time that I've since seen, including a sneeze gag in a film of Gibson's old friend, Mary Pickford (Gibson worked on Pickford's "The Pride of the Clan" (1917)), "Daddy-Long-Legs" (1919), which has basically the same premise as repeated several times in this short of character running away from the threat of contracting a potentially fatal illness. Doubtless, any such popularity of these scenarios in the late 1910s and early 1920s was due to the so-called Spanish Influenza. Even though it's smallpox here, as well as in the prior "Cupid in Quarantine" (1918), scarlet fever in Griffith's film, or the plague in some European dramas of the era, including "The Plague in Florence" (1919), "The Betrothed" and "Nosferatu" (both 1922). And, that's just what I've found, as it's important to remember on Silent Movie Day that most silents are now gone and many, if not most, of those that do survive aren't necessarily easily accessible.
Anyways, smallpox in this case becomes a test for Gibson's character's various suitors. That's right, contracting a disease with reportedly a some 30% risk of death is treated here as the measure of a man's commitment to love. This after the pandemic-era film already featured a boy terrorizing people with disease. Boy, how times haven't changed all that much.
