Silent movies - Mum's the Word

After last week's post took me some time for research, I decided to take it easy today and bring you a another comedy short. It's "Mum's the Word" from 1926.

The plot explains the title (spoilers ahead).
According to Wikipedia, "mum" is a Middle English word meaning "silent". In this case, it's about a widowed mum having kept silent to her new husband about her son.

Unfortunately, he's on the way for a surprise visit.
On the sleeper train, a thief tries to steal a young lady's purse while she's sleeping. She chases him off, pulls out a small gun, shoots, and hits the son, who's in the bunk across the aisle, in the butt. When he sees her, he's smitten by her beauty.

On arriving at his mother's house, she tells her jealous husband that he's his new valet. He meets the maid in the kitchen and surprise, she's the girl from the train.
Of course he's trying to meet with his mother in her room, but the husband is suspicious. But wait, why is the maid trying to sneak into the husband's room? (That's what you get for having separate bedrooms.) Not hard to guess, I know. He too has a secret, the "maid" is his daughter.


I liked the story, for example how the husband tells "his new valet" to shine his shoes and then shave him.
The shoes go from one person to the other, even through the shave.

No wonder that the shave goes wrong if someone keeps tugging on your foot to pull a shoe off and put another on, and the husband ends up with half a mustache which doesn't really make him like his "valet" more.

"Nightfall - - Everybody has a growing suspicion that everybody else suspects something suspicious -"

There's a lot going out of and going back into rooms when the children try to get to their parents (the mother's flowing negligée is gorgeous and the daughter's outfit very interesting, by the way) and everyone is trying to look inconspicuous which is kind of difficult when finally all of them meet in the hallway, but of course everything gets cleared up in the end.

24 minutes can't give you much plot, but I really had fun and thought especially the son and daughter had really good comedic timing in their scenes together.

I hadn't heard of Charley Chase before who made very many shorts and was well respected in the silent film industry, but never managed to climb the top like Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd.
After seeing this short, however, which isn't said to even be one of his best by some, I think I'll have to check out more of his work.


Source:

Fritzi Kramer: Mum's the Word (1926) - A silent film review. On: Movies Silently, April 29, 2018