Wall Street Blues (1924)

movie

(25)

Country: USA
Genres: Comedy, Short
Release: 1924-08-10
Director: Del Lord
Writers: John A. Waldron
Language: None | English
Stars: Sidney Smith , Billy Bevan (1887–1957) , Andy Clyde , Natalie Kingston , Barbara Pierce , John J. Richardson , Vernon Dent , Edgar Kennedy , Sunshine Hart , Leo Sulky , Leo Sulky
Runtime: 20 min
Awards: N/A
AKA: Wall Street Blues (United States of America) , Wall Street Blues
Plot: This is a very passable Sennett comedy set in a broker's office when speculation on the stock exchange was at its height in what you might call the long run up to the 1929 crash. Billy Bevan plays a janitor who acts as an "honest broker" in warding off the various sharks and robbers and in helping the cashier marry the boss's daughter.One point of interest is the revival at this time of trick effects in comedies. After the huge fashion for trick films 1901-1905, inspired by the example of Méliès, such things had rather gone out of fashion in the two decades that followed. In the early twenties virtually the only comedian making systematic use of trick effects (usually involving eggs and animals) but by the end of the twenties more and more comics were incorporating such effects.There seems to have been two major contributing factors - the fashion for daredevil effects (of which Semon had also been a pioneer) and the improvement in overhead and aerial photography (film after film includes a person, a child, an animal or a car hanging perilously, superimposed over an image of streets and traffic or of seascapes below). There are two examples in this film. The second factor was the enormous advance in animation techniques and the popularity of animated films (animation being itself a direct descendant of the trick films). So, in this film, for instance, we see the cashier doing a drawing that comes to life very much in the style of the Fleischer Out of the Inkwell cartoons.There has recently been a rather exaggerated fashion for the films of Charley Bowers, which made the most extensive use of trick-filming, but Bowers was very much representative of a general fashion of the time which is observable in many other films. The greatest comic of them all, Buster Keaton. was also an adept of film trickery (as in The Play House or Sherlock Jr.) although this is not personally my favourite side of that multi-talented performer.
IMDB:tt0015466