Silent Film of the Month: Shot in the Excitement (1914)

Run Time: 15 Minutes. Studio: Keystone. Director: Rube Miller (most likely). Producer: Mack Sennett. Cast: Al St. John, Alice Howell, Rube Miller, Josef Sickward, Edwin Frazee, Grover Ligon. Release Date: October 26, 1914.

With the sheer amount of short films put out by Keystone studios in the 1910's, it is no surprise that some of these films are completely overlooked today, even one as funny as Shot in the Excitement. It is even less surprising that this forgotten film is from the same year Charlie Chaplin was working at Keystone, since not surprisingly the Chaplin films get more attention than one with much less remembered stars (this film had the same release date as Charlie Chaplin's fantastic Dough and Dynamite).

As the film starts Alice (Alice Howell) is painting a fence when her two suiters (Al St. John, Rube Miller) see her. The two suiters get into a slapstick fight over her involving paint, cannon balls and a fake spider. There is not much more to the story but when a comedy is funny what else does it need?

I would imagine a person who has read or heard about Keystone films but haven't seen many will find this to be exactly what they expect. This film is full of over the top acting, fast paced slapstick and impossible gags. Though this is what you mostly hear about Keystone comedies it is not always the case. Some of them are slower moving than you'd except from that description and deal more with farce than slapstick. In fact many of the Keystone shorts of this era would be lost on a modern audience as they parody melodramatic conventions that are no longer in vouge. Not so with this film. Shot in the Excitement is a live action cartoon in every respect. In fact I would dare a cartoon fan to look at a scene involving a bobby-trapped bench and not think of so many classic cartoons of the 1940's and 50's. It is for one to look at a film like this today and think that the acting is simply over the top because the movie is over 100 years old and very primitive. However that is not the case here. Watch most silent dramas and you will not see any acting as over the top as this. Similarly watch some of the lighter less slapstick orientated light comedies of this era and you will also see more subtle acting. The over the top acting is part of the humor of this film. Think of how in a Tex Avery cartoon, who will see over the top exaggerated takes but if you watch a superhero cartoon the reactions will be much more subdued. The reason for this is simply a matter of style. No one criticizes a Tex Avery cartoon for being over the top, but rather enjoy it for being so over the top and unsubtle. So why not just look at this film as a live action Tex Avery cartoon? If you choose to look at it that way this is a delightful short. In fact this is one of my favorite non-Chaplin, non-Mabel shorts from Keystone during the 1910's.


Though they may not know him by name, fans of silent comedy shorts, will probably recognize Al St. John. Al St. John was the nephew of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and appeared in many of Arbuckle's best shorts. He would often play a similar role in those shorts as he played here, often being a romantic rival for Arbuckle. St. John was in many ways the king of over the top cartoony acting. While there were quite a few comedians who made a living mugging to a camera, few did it as well as St. John, and his work never fails to make me smile. In Billy Wilder's brilliant Sunset Boulevard (1950), Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) would say "We didn't need dialogue we had faces." This is certainly true of Al St. John, he had a very memorable and recognizable face and could make one laugh simply by using it. Fans of talkie B westerns may recognize him as well. He played a character named Fuzzy Q. Jones in a large number of the Billy the Kid B-Westerns starring Buster Crabbe as the outlaw. For many of those westerns he was credited as Al 'Fuzzy' St. John.


It is often thought that during the silent era, women did not engage in the rough and tumble stuff. Those who don't watch much silent films may think of women during that era only playing the kind of image of purity that Lillian Gish played in Broken Blossoms (1919) or Edna Purviance played in so many Chaplin films. This was not so though. Female comedians played just as much over the top slapstick as the men. Alice Howell is a great example of this. This film was made during the actress' time at Keystone. During this period she was mostly playing supporting roles to the more famous comics (most famously she was the dentist's wife in the Chaplin Keystone, Laughing Gas (1914)). Still even in these years she tended to steal the show. One may notice something looking at the picture at the top of this article. Alice looks anything but glamorous. Truth be told she was definitely a beautiful woman, but she had no trouble making herself look less attractive for comic reasons. This can also be said of the over the top acting she does in this short, which involves quite a bit of mugging. She is just as much a rough and tumble comedian as any of the men at this time, and at the top of her game (which she is here), she can hold her own with the majority of them. In later years Alice would get bigger roles than most of her Keystone films, but unfortunately the majority of those are lost. Still what we have in these Keystone films is a talented woman who can steal the scene from the scene-stealers themselves.  


The following is a review of the short from Moving Picture World (dated October 31, 1914).


"Eccentric rube characters appear in diverting number. The humor is all of the slapstick sort, varied by amusing tricks and antics. The photography is good and the close is especially amusing for this type of film."


Watch the short below.




-Michael J. Ruhland