The Sunday Intertitle: Use Force, Luke!
LUKE’S MOVIE MUDDLE (1916) AKA THE CINEMA DIRECTOR… gets by, like MENILMONTANT and THE LAST LAUGH, without intertitles, though this particular print, the sharpest on YouTube, has no main title either.
But text seems uncalled-for, as the action is so basic. If last week’s Luke short was just people hitting each other with clubs, and it was, this one is all people being shoved into an out of chairs. The site of suffering shifts downwards from cranium to coccyx.
All very limited, but short enough not to outstay its welcome. And there’s nostalgia for the day when your fellow customers’ hats were the biggest nuisance you faced in the audience. Actually, no — 1916 punters no doubt talked loudly, crunched their food, rustled their wrappers and laughed in the wrong places, we just don’t get that here because its a silent film.
shadowplay 
August 4, 2019 at 10:27 pm
Fast forward to 1944:
August 5, 2019 at 1:58 pm
Damn, I hate Pete Smith. Classic movie pest: he won’t shut up all through the picture.
August 5, 2019 at 10:07 pm
Warner Archive just put out a Best of Pete Smith set, with 75 one-reelers. It’s labeled Volume One.
They’re truly odd, running the gamut from comedy to documentary to tearjerker dog story to sports reel to pure stock footage, with Technicolor saved for cooking shorts — all with Smith’s nasal, sarcastic narration (although he dials the sarcasm down just a little when dealing with tragedy). They were all shot silent for speed and economy.
I can see them making sense in the old MGM package of one feature supported by shorts, cartoon and newsreel. A tonal palate cleanser between, say, Al Falfa and Greer Garson. Also, one has to try and imagine the pre-TV world, when the world was only viewed through static print images and the screen at the Bijou.
So far the sheer eclecticism is keeping Pete Smith interesting. For entertainment I again endorse the Charley Chase Hal Roach talkies, two volumes released thus far. There are also sets of Thelma Todd paired with Zasu Pitts and with Patsy Kelly — not the best Roach product, but the worst of them is buoyed by Todd appeal.
August 6, 2019 at 9:32 am
The Roach female duo shorts are charming enough. Jacques Tourneur did at least one Pete Smith “specialty”, Killer Dog, magnificently shot, with Smith all but ruining it with his non-stop wheedle. Probably some other decent directors are involved too.
August 6, 2019 at 8:26 pm
Fred Zinnemann and Felix Feist have already turned up as directors. Not sure if this is their very beginning or a between-features purgatory for contract directors.
August 6, 2019 at 8:52 pm
Well, Zinnemann had made Redes in 1936, so he had some previous experience. MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series probably has some good stuff in it too, certainly there are a lot of good filmmakers involved, crime specialists.
August 6, 2019 at 9:49 pm
The Crime Does Not Pay films are all well done and often expertly manipulative. Beyond the “MGM Crime Reporter” and the fake “local officials” who open each film, they don’t lend themselves to easy mocking the way most such preachings do.
The thing is, many of them dwell on innocent victims who suffer or die through no fault of there own, and the inevitable triumph of the law doesn’t help them. They’re downers, leaving one filled not with outrage or a determination to be a good citizen, but a fatalistic depression.
One wonders if they ever tried to match them to films that took a flippant or romantic attitude towards similar crimes, like comic murder mysteries or upper-class heists.
August 6, 2019 at 9:55 pm
They’d have little choice, since MGM made so many of those. But I also get the impression that programmes were often constructed quite haphazardly.