Hot Stuff (1912) watch online HD

Biograph comedies at this time usually were built around simple practical jokes. In this jilted lover, Mack Sennett, puts some kind of hot sauce (tobasco?) into the Taffy that ex-lover Mabel and Salesman Dell Henderson are making. Everyone gets upset at Dell when they taste the Taffy. He is driven from town and Mack is brought back to Mabel. The bottle of sauce is discovered on Mack, but he confesses and all is forgiven.

This is pre-pie days, but Baking Taffy is a harbinger to the baked pies to come.

Sennett, Henderson and Mable all give good performances. As with most of the Biographs of 1912, the acting is fairly straight. There is little playing to the camera. The wild elements of the Keystone comedies would not start until about six months later in September of 1912.

One of the several dozen short comedies that Sennett directed for Biograph, before he went off to Keystone to work on his own, wilder farces. Here he not only directs, but stars as the jilted lover.

Although not as wild as some of his own comedies, this stands up better than much of the work he did at Keystone. People are recognizable, their motives are clearer and the jokes, in that context, a lot sharper.