A very moderate Larry Semon in which he plays a detective on the trail of a gang whom, disguised as a elderly Jew, he cleverly manages to capture. He and his wife however themselves get tricked by one clever con man and Larry also gets pickpocketed by another (a woman this time). Frank Alexander is the assistant in a pawnshop whose mildly crooked proprietor is again possibly intended to be Jewish (the antics are those typically imputed to Jewish shopkeepers). His wife, through the discovery of a misplaced photograph of Alexander's girlfriend, comes to believe that her husband is unfaithful and consults Larry and, iIn order to spy on the shop assistant and the girl, he pretends to be one of the shop's tailor's dummies. They discover he is spying on them, the proprietor discovers his wife has hired a detective and a typical Semon high-voltage tangle ensues where everyone is chasing everyone else and Semon has an opportunity for the dare-devil rooftop acrobatics several times employed in 1918-19 (see Dunces and Dangers and Humbugs and Husbands) and which would famously be copied and improved upon by Harold Lloyd in Look Out Below a little later in the year and by virtually every single comic in the years that followed.
There is a further final twist at the end.
Semon's humour is always recognisably "Jewish" in its style but very rarely explicitly so, in the sense that he plays Jewish characters (like the young Ernst Lubitsch or the US comedian Max Davidson) or makes constant Jewsih references (in the manner of Woody Allen) and this film is rather unusual in that respect. The caricatures are not very complimentary but it would obviously be absurd to describe them as in any way "anti-Semitic" or "anti-Jewish". The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, Jewish humour itself assumed such caricatures and made frequent use of them (the films of Davidson, himself, like Semon, of Central European Ashkenazi stock, contain many examples of such typical self-deprecatory humour).
The version of the film I saw is a much later sonorised and commented Spanish version and it is interesting that, despite being so evidently a Jewish comedian, Semon was hugely popular long after his death in both Fascist Italy and Fascist Spain.
There is a further final twist at the end.
Semon's humour is always recognisably "Jewish" in its style but very rarely explicitly so, in the sense that he plays Jewish characters (like the young Ernst Lubitsch or the US comedian Max Davidson) or makes constant Jewsih references (in the manner of Woody Allen) and this film is rather unusual in that respect. The caricatures are not very complimentary but it would obviously be absurd to describe them as in any way "anti-Semitic" or "anti-Jewish". The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, Jewish humour itself assumed such caricatures and made frequent use of them (the films of Davidson, himself, like Semon, of Central European Ashkenazi stock, contain many examples of such typical self-deprecatory humour).
The version of the film I saw is a much later sonorised and commented Spanish version and it is interesting that, despite being so evidently a Jewish comedian, Semon was hugely popular long after his death in both Fascist Italy and Fascist Spain.
