Wall Street Blues (1925)

Name: Wall Street Blues
Director: Del Lord
Genre: Comedy
Released: 1924-08-09
Duration: 18 min
Cast: Sidney Smith, Billy Bevan, Andy Clyde, Natalie Kingston, Barbara Pierce

1925 · Silent film · 18 min · dir. Del Lord

Comedy

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Synopsis

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…

Synopsis from OMDb