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In this delightfully funny short film, a little tramp and his mongrel find their attempts to fill their stomachs hampered by several policemen, a couple of muggers, a publican, and a lunch wagon proprietor. Chaplin, Edna Purviance, and Scraps the dog prove good value, whilst Charlie’s brother Syd also appears, in this the comedian’s premiere short for First National Films.
When a beautiful young actress drops the letter that she was carrying, a young man worms his way ingeniously into her film studio in order to return it to her. However, before he can find her, and in the attempt to not to be detected, he causes untold chaos across the lot. Action-packed scripting, irreverent gaggery, and a fantastic central performance from Harold Lloyd combine to decidedly hilarious effect.
A young man follows a pretty girl to a beachside diner, but is turned away for lack of funds. Luckily, there is a young boy outside—rich pickings for a bit of daylight robbery. Once inside, he manages to sample, steal, and grift his way towards a ten cent meal, but doesn’t count on the equally shameless girl playing the old cheque switcheroo. Delightfully irreverent, with a brilliant central performance from the young Stan Laurel, Just Rambling Along proves wonderfully entertaining.
McCay’s polished, strangely beautiful piece of animation details the sinking of the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, which went down just off the south coast of Ireland on the 7th of May 1915 after being struck by a torpedo from the German submarine U-20, killing 1,195 of its 1,959 Liverpool-bound passengers. Potent imagery and a reverence to detail combine to good effect.
