User Reviews

Here we have a riddle ... and a perfect example of the difficulties awaiting anyone who would explore the history of silent film. This short comedy -- clearly American, and clearly made before American women got the vote in 1920 -- was screened in October 2006 at the Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy, where I saw it (and laughed heartily). The original opening credits are missing from this print ... an all-too-common occurrence in films from that period; it implies that a dishonest exhibitor intended to screen this print under a false title (with new opening credits spliced in), so as to avoid paying royalties. However, the dialogue intertitles all contain the film's original title in their ornamental border: this too was a common trait of silent films, as an attempt to defeat precisely that sort of piracy.

So, where's the riddle? According to the border of this movie's intertitles, the film's name is 'A Lively Affair'. U.S. copyright records show only one silent film with that title: a 1912 Vitagraph domestic comedy starring Clara Kimball Young and Leo Delaney (both of whom I would recognise on sight; neither of them is on offer in THIS film). The movie screened at Sacile is also titled 'A Lively Affair', and does indeed seem to date to 1912 or nearabouts, yet it's clearly not the Clara Kimball Young movie. Nor are any of this film's actors -- some of them in heavy make-up -- identifiable, at least not to me. And this film doesn't resemble any Vitagraph production I've seen. It doesn't help that the title 'A Lively Affair' is so generic, it could refer to ruddy well anything. Many American films of the 1910s were never copyrighted, which explains why the Library of Congress would have no record of THIS film.

Some alleged authority has classified the Young/Delaney film 'A Lively Affair' as 'lost'. I don't know who makes those decisions, nor what they base them on; I do know that so-called 'lost forever' films have frequently resurfaced. I refuse to consider any movie irretrievably 'lost' unless it's been deliberately destroyed: otherwise, it has merely been mislaid. When I looked up 'A Lively Affair' on IMDb, I discovered that only the Young/Delaney (Vitagraph) film of that name is listed ... yet (as of March 2007) six votes have been cast for it, meaning that at least six IMDb users claim to have seen this movie. (A supposedly 'lost' film, remember.) But were any or all of those IMDb users actually referring to the OTHER 'Lively Affair', the one screened at Sacile? I've no idea.

Right, then: the rest of this IMDb review refers strictly to the film screened at Sacile in 2006. It's a sex-reversal comedy, of the type that was quite common during the suffragist movement of the 1910s in America and Britain. Like most of the others in that dismal subgenre, this movie assumes that if women ever get the vote, they will commence behaving precisely like men, eventually taking over men's roles in society ... and forcing men into women's roles.

SPOILERS COMING. And here's the hilarious (not much) plot: a woman in bloomer trousers (signifying her suffragist status) leaves the baby with her husband while she goes to what the intertitles identify as a 'suffragette meeting'. (The actual suffragists found the word 'suffragette' demeaning and condescending.) The suffragette meeting turns out to be an all-women poker party ... but their hen night swiftly degenerates into an argument, which turns into a fight. Since this comedy depends on sexual clichés, an all-female brawl naturally consists of the women pulling each other's hair. The police raid the joint. Down at the cop-shop, the husband we saw earlier and some other husbands arrive. They taunt the women by marching in lockstep, implying that the women are going to prison. One of the husbands has a grotesque forelock that makes him look like cult author Harry Stephen Keeler.

I did say that I laughed heartily at this movie, but in this case that's a dubious tribute. I laughed at how utterly unrealistic this movie is in its depiction of sexual relationships, either in 1912 or any other year. I laughed at the grotesque behaviour of both the male and female characters in this movie, which is quite implausible yet still extremely funny. (In the same way that Keystone comedies from this same period are implausible yet funny.) Intentionally or not, this film reveals a great deal about the sexual prejudices of Americans in the early twentieth century. I'll rate this 'Lively Affair' 8 out of 10, and I hope that the mystery of this film's production history will eventually be cleared up.