Dunces & Dangers

Two vaudevillians so down on their luck the trained goldfish are alley-ooped into the frying pan, but the wife nixes the notion.

They flee bill collectors over the rooftops of downtown Los Angeles perilously and wind up where they started, with a million-dollar inheritance.

Wizard of Oz

Oz has its vicissitudes, Prime Minister Kruel has supplanted Queen Dorothea. Prince Kynd and the people object, “I give you until the new moon—otherwise, the dungeon.”

A tornado’s distance from Oz is Kansas. Ambassador Wikked takes a two-seater aeroplane there, and lands in a field.

“On a farm in Kansas once bloomed a rose.” The foundling Dorothy was deposited there by Kruel, “a hostile faction meant you harm and I whisked you away to save you from them.”

This is the great comedy observed by Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times in a rollicking house of children and adults. We can observe how much of a resemblance there is between Larry Semon and Martin Short in medium long shots, and between Oliver N. Hardy and Dan Blocker (the role is a clean-shaven farmhand, a rival suitor).

Picture Play expressed an opinion that Semon was distracting its reviewer from the book. Writers have wondered in our time what it’s all about.

The Dome Doctor

Larry Semon started as a newspaper cartoonist, and here you see him in a two-reeler at or near the origin of Warner Brothers animation. An amazingly frantic and funny comedy, with an especially beautiful gag involving a battering ram, star-cross’d lovers and a stalled automobile.