Volume 2 — Our Monthly Drammer
Reading edition
“YOU HOLD MY WIFE”
A Comedy On “Behold My Wife”
BY JAMES STARR
There is in “You Hold My Wife,” which George Selford has screened from Sir Filbert Barker’s “The Translation of a Shimmy Dancer,” the sort of romance that appeals to all the primitive story-loving instincts of the widely known human race. A bum of an Englishman seeking a fortune in the Judson Bay country hears from home that his fiancee has not married another man as he had hoped she would. He is led to believe his own family had deliberately planned to go against his plans. To be even with them he drinks a pint of likker, marries an Indian girl, Lali, the daughter of old Fry-on-the-moon, and ships her to England as his wife. The good sports of the English family, dismayed and shocked, take the savage in hand and, of course, turn her out a raving beauty in two reels. So that when the bum English chap, stricken finally by remorse and put on his feet by a two-gallon can of likker, returns to England to recover his squaw, he finds her a social sensation of the season and the mother of a fine little son. He tells her that it is not his son, she faints, he cries to the servant, who is handy, “You Hold My Wife,” the servant does. The English chap leaves the house and joins a circus.
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“MIDSUMMER BADNESS”
A Comedy On “Midsummer Madness”
There are a few directors of pictures you can not depend upon for the sane, sensible and spirited productions. Billie The Mille is one, no longer just Sesil’s brother, but one who calls himself a director, no one knows why, but he does. Billy’s latest is a photographic essay, a world beater, a sensation, but it is unbelievable. The Mille has woven a real bum story, telling it by captions and not by pictures, such as all good directors do some time in their life, we all make mistakes, and Billy has just started at the beginning of his long list. No one knows just why this picture was made, but it doesn’t make any difference to the restless public, they will stand for anything and Billy knows it. He is a wise guy. In the story there is the new idea of the neglectful husband and a guy that likes this guy’s wife, the neglectful husband likes the other guy’s wife. They should swap each other’s wife and let it go at that, but Billy wouldn’t have it that way, so he made them love each other for awhile and then he tore them apart. The master of this picture put in a subtitle reading “The End” and let the public go home for the evening to start a drama of their own.
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The Sydney Bulletin tells a fairly good story about family foibles. Here it is:
The thud-thud of swiftly moving feet gave me warning as I was about to turn the corner, and I drew back to avoid a collision. An agitated figure, his breath coming in sobs, whirled past me and leaped on to a car that was leaving the car-stop; and almost at the same moment another shape shot around the corner and fell upon me. He released me at once and apologized profusely. Gazing furiously at the car, now fading in the distance, he explained the situation. “That man’s wife,” he said bitterly, “ran away from him and came to be my housekeeper, and just now, when I got home, I found him trying to make love to her. The dirty cur.”
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The clock struck nine, I looked at her, Her lips were rosy red; “At quarter after nine, I mean To steal a kiss,” I said. She cast a roguish glance at me, And then she whispered low With quite her sweetest little smile, “The clock’s like you—it’s slow.”