The folks at Undercrank Productions are back again, ready to remind us that they’re among the most dogged and tireless preservers and distributors of weird, under-acknowledged, and misunderstood films from the silent era. This time they have two new DVD releases of oddities and wonders from the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The first is Volume Two of their Found at “Mostly Lost” series, a collection of short, uncirculated films identified, either partially or fully, at the annual Mostly Lost film workshop held at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. Every year, attendees gather to watch unknown films from vaults and archives all over the world that have baffled archivists and historians, literally shouting out during the screenings to identify actors, locations, or even antique props. The ten films featured here were all identified during the 2015-2017 Mostly Lost conferences, a true grab-bag of genres and experiences. Many are boiler plate silent comedies such as Derby Day (1922), a vehicle for Italian slapstick comedian Monty Banks to do his best Charlie Chaplin impression as a well-dressed tramp who gets into a series of increasingly absurd misadventures, beginning with a manic chase scene where he pursues a dump truck containing a full lunchbox and climaxing with him running a madcap race as a horse jockey. The best, however, is the superb Noodle Nut (1921), where Billy Bletcher—the man who in the 1930s would begin a famous career as a member of Walt Disney’s stable of voice actors—plays a hapless noodle salesman who repeatedly tries and fails to transport a delivery of five-foot noodles across town to a client appropriately named Mack A. Roni. The slapstick, particularly his antics with a short-tempered, chubby rival, are ripped straight from a Laurel and Hardy short, especially the ones that saw them stuck with Sisyphean tasks like moving a player piano up an impossibly tall flight of stairs.
