I've come to the conclusion that I've never seen anyone in my life quite like Mack Swain. His face was just a weird one- permanently contorted into a kind of teenager's gormless disgusted sneer, like he's just been told by his parents that he's got to be in by one o'clock- no later. But it's that sneer on the body of a big lumbering oaf of a man that is so odd. He's a bully and a slob and I can't think of another comic so firmly rooted in the mid 1910s as Swain. And for that reason he's interesting. And, as I've said before, in small occasional doses I can find him quite watchable.
Ambrose and wife have a falling out after he shoots up her beer stein. He takes his child-woman daughter out with him to get a replacement- they run into trouble with another couple in the park intent on acquiring a beer stein of their own. I think you can tell that I don't really know what a beer stein is.
So, help me out, I'm struggling: the sexy dark-haired girl in the park- is that Mae Busch? Or is that Minta Durfee? I'm sure I'm going to look back at myself in a few months time and shake my head in despair at my ignorance- I liked her, I thought she was attractive and very modern looking, but I only know Mae Busch from her Laurel and Hardy stuff a decade and a half later, and all I know about Minta Durfee is that she was Mrs Arbuckle. IMDB tells me the girl in the park is one of them, but such is my horrendous ignorance, I don't know which one. Can you imagine the difficulty of this situation for me? Especially when some of my comments about Mae Busch before have been less than flattering.
No-one will find 'Willful Ambrose' particularly funny of course, but I think a pleasant feeling of bafflement and bemusement is not unwelcome on occasions, and you certainly get that with the Swain Keystones. And damn it I enjoyed this. I found some of the stuff with the backwards daughter just... weird, but hey, weird's good too.
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