I found this a bit tedious; partly, I think, the problem was that it's pretty title-heavy, and we were watching a print with the intertitles in Dutch with a translation read out over the cinema intercom. I've witnessed this done very successfully, for example with a French/German print of Buster Keaton's "The Haunted House", but in this case the titles were so long-winded and frequent that the voice-over interfered with the piano accompaniment and tended to kill the intended laughs.
The little girl 'Bubbles', Mary Anne Jackson, is funny; not a prepossessing child, but a credible mischief-maker. Polly Moran, as the eponymous cook and nominal heroine(?), doesn't get a lot to do, other than look frustrated at the men in her life and quaff down a bottle of Nerve Tonic (a.k.a. furniture polish, according to the label). I was a little confused as to whether she was supposed to be pregnant on the way to her wedding ("blushing on one side and bulging on the other") or merely suffering the after-effects of her own cooking, in the manner of Bubbles in the previous scene. I'd assumed the former, but if so it comes on very quickly and doesn't seem to be of much concern to either of her suitors..!
The first half of the film is full of allusions to Prohibition, plus the running gag that Polly's cooking is so good that neither her employer nor her two suitors is willing to do without it. The second half consists chiefly of a slapstick car trip, in which the participants spend hours in their attempt to cross town, and is generally funnier as such things go: the car loses its spare wheel, Mr Smith loses his trousers, Bubbles is bounced out of her seat, there's a run-in with a traffic cop who harbours a grudge, and Polly sits on the wedding-cake, causes a puncture and falls down a hole. It's not exactly a lost treasure either way.
The little girl 'Bubbles', Mary Anne Jackson, is funny; not a prepossessing child, but a credible mischief-maker. Polly Moran, as the eponymous cook and nominal heroine(?), doesn't get a lot to do, other than look frustrated at the men in her life and quaff down a bottle of Nerve Tonic (a.k.a. furniture polish, according to the label). I was a little confused as to whether she was supposed to be pregnant on the way to her wedding ("blushing on one side and bulging on the other") or merely suffering the after-effects of her own cooking, in the manner of Bubbles in the previous scene. I'd assumed the former, but if so it comes on very quickly and doesn't seem to be of much concern to either of her suitors..!
The first half of the film is full of allusions to Prohibition, plus the running gag that Polly's cooking is so good that neither her employer nor her two suitors is willing to do without it. The second half consists chiefly of a slapstick car trip, in which the participants spend hours in their attempt to cross town, and is generally funnier as such things go: the car loses its spare wheel, Mr Smith loses his trousers, Bubbles is bounced out of her seat, there's a run-in with a traffic cop who harbours a grudge, and Polly sits on the wedding-cake, causes a puncture and falls down a hole. It's not exactly a lost treasure either way.
