User Reviews

Unfortunately, the currently extant print of "The Cradle Snatchers" cuts out part-way through reel 3, just as we are being introduced to two-thirds of the titular characters, and doesn't resume until the fifth reel, as the three boys whose escapades form most of the surviving part of the beginning arrive for what, it becomes apparent, is the denouement of the film involving three married ladies, two of whom we have hardly met. The result is that what initially looks like a fraternity-house comedy turns out to be a tale of marital revenge, minus most of the marriage -- once you have extrapolated backwards from the obvious jump, it makes sense, but in consequence the opening horse-play section does end up occupying a rather higher proportion of the running time than was ever intended.

The connection between the two sets of characters is that Susan Martin is the aunt of young Henry Winton's girl -- and when she discovers the damning note that proves her husband, supposedly on a business trip, is actually inviting his friends along on a rendezvous with some sugar-daddy-seeking flappers, her indignant niece comes up with the idea of punishing the errant husband by having her handsome young beau pretend to be Susan's own trophy 'toy-boy'. At some point during the missing reels, this arrangement is apparently extended into a formal contract involving the recruitment of Henry's two room-mates to perform the same function for the other deserted wives, in return for a thousand-dollar fee... even though one of them is scared stiff of women and the other is required (for some rationale now lost in nitrate decay) to pretend to be a Spanish osteopath.

Inevitably, the reluctant seducer is paired off with the most upright of the wives, the 'Spaniard' proceeds to base his role (with great success) upon a stage melodrama, and young Henry and Aunt Susan scarcely have time to practise their own canoodling between trying to sort out all the rest. And equally inevitably, the husbands and their floozies turn up at the same spot for some intended canoodling of their own; they get what they deserve, reconciliations are made, and lessons are learned. Franklin Pangborn as a weak-kneed husband gets one of the best lines: when advised by his young 'rival' that to win back the wives their husbands will have to court and flatter them, he complains aghast that the women will then expect that sort of thing all the time...

Apparently this was an adaptation of a dialogue-rich Broadway comedy; if so, it makes a very effective stage-to-silent transformation, without heavy reliance on title cards to convey either its plot or its humour. Even the surviving print shows clear nitrate damage in a number of places -- fortunately rarely obscuring the image -- and it is a pity that almost all the material dealing with the errant husbands seems to have been lost, with only Uncle George really making any kind of showing in the existing footage. However, even in its incomplete state the film is still good fun, with the sequences in which the three boys attempt to satisfy their contract with their variously-assigned ladies verging upon the hilarious -- especially the scene in which the shy young 'Swede', pumped full of Dutch courage by his room-mates, tries to do his duty by his stiff-backed date, likewise bullied into a far too revealing dress by her two female friends and just as ill at ease as he is.

(Incidentally, so far as I observed, there is no reference to 'cake-eaters' in this film.)