Between the Acts

Larry Semon comedy.

A slapstick comedy directed by Larry Semon and starring Hughie Mack & Patsy De Forest.

Mrs. Jinks dreams that her milquetoast husband was more of a manly brute—at least until a life-saving blood transfusion changes him into her worst nightmare.

While Larry Semon does not star in Rips and Rushes, its confident gags and frenetic pace suggest his touch. In the knockabout one-reeler set in a dance studio, three suitors compete for the girl. James Aubrey, the actor playing the father’s preferred suitor, may look like a Chaplin imitator, but he came by those skills honorably, born like Chaplin in Britain and likewise coming to the U.S. with Fred Karno’s troupe. Nevertheless it’s Alice Mann, with her wacky headdress and knowing glance, who steals the show. Suffice it to say that many vases are broken and pants ripped before she escapes out the window with the handsomest of the beaus.

A clerk is given $10,000 to deposit at the bank, but the bank is closed for the night so he tries to get to the bank president's house with the money.

Larry's absurdly plush life of ease as a convict comes to an end when his sentence is up. Tossed out, he tries several ways, including a stickup to get back in the comfortable jail. Exchanging clothes with a lookalike escaped prisoner, he goes back, only to find he's to be hung. Now desperate to leave again, he joins other cons in a jailbreak.

A harried propman backstage at a theater must put up with malfunctioning wind machines, roosters that spit nitroglycerine, and a gang planning to rob the theater's payroll.

Boisterous gangster kingpin Bull Weed rehabilitates his former lawyer from his alcoholic haze, but complications arise when he falls for Weed's girlfriend.

The headwaiter does tricks with spaghetti that the greatest spaghetti handlers in the world never heard of. The sight makes your mouth water. Besides food, the scenes are garnished with a couple of trayfuls of beautiful girls.

The Sportsman is an American film comedy first released in 1921, directed by Larry Semon and Norman Taurog. The film stars Larry Semon, Lucille Carlisle, Al Thompson, Frank Alexander and William Hauber.

Unlucky Larry finds himself pursued by the police after he inadvertently steals a man's car and kidnaps his girlfriend.

The storm, which takes up most of the second reel, is a trial run for the storm sequence in The Wizard Of Oz which Semon would make in 1925. Fox released a comedy that was an exact copy of Lightning Love just before the Semon film was due to come out. Albert E. Smith noticed the similarities and on September 5, 1923 attempted to have the Fox film pulled from the exhibitors.

Comedy on the golf links.

Lay Zee works on a farm and has won the heart of the farmer's daughter. There is oil on the farmland, and some swindlers are determined to get their hands on the property, by force if necessary. Lay Zee, who knows that oil has been found on nearby farms, convinces the farmer not to sell, and the swindlers enlist the help of another farmhand, who is jealous of Lay Zee's relationship with the girl.

Larry might be a hick causing a lot of trouble at the farm, but he shows he can outsmart those crooked city folks!

This film represents one of Larry Semon's pro-war films. He is a clumsy guy working in a restaurant and oddly, everyone who works in the place as well as many of the customers are Kaiser-loving spies. Why they would be headquartered in a restaurant in California, I have no idea! Regardless, their aim is to steal some plans from some old guy and his daughter. When Semon finds out, he comes to the rescue.