Oil's Well

This comedy starring Monty Banks is one I wanted to like. After all, I love silent comedies. However, the film has a plot that seems poorly constructed but worse than that, it really isn't very funny. Watchable...but not funny.

The film begins with a jerk discovering oil for his boss' company. However, instead of telling the man, he caps the well and pretends that it was dry. he also has decided he wants to marry the boss' daughter, so he uses his boss' financial straights to get the man to agree to the marriage. Unfortunately for Monty--this means he cannot have the girl but he's also so dim he doesn't realize it.

By an odd (and hardly believable) quirk, they all end up in the fictional land where the oil well is capped. There, lots of seemingly random events occur--such as Monty finding a clever way to climb up a ladder to see a pretty lady, his nearly getting shot by a firing squad and many other disparate things--none of which really work together and very few of which elicited any laughs. Mildly interesting but nothing more.

Monty Banks was a good screen comedian with a checkered career. His three or four feature comedies did not set the world afire. Indeed, PLAY SAFE flopped for no clear reason. With the coming of sound, his Italian accent forced him behind the camera and he became a very assured director in England.

His short comedy was good, but this one is not among his best. The plot is a typical comedy set-up: Monty is in love with the daughter of his boss, who is trying to get a well in production in a Latin American country, "somewhere south of the Eighteenth Amendment". However, the villain of the piece, Robert Gray, has cut a deal with the locals to not report it is a gusher. He comes to the man's office and offers to raise money to get it producing if he marries the girl. Everyone agrees and it's off to "Chilitina".

At this point we go through a long, irrelevant subplot in which Monty is wandering around looking for the girl. The gags in it are inventive and well executed -- I particularly like the one with the rope ladder -- but it pads what should have been a snappy two-reeler. By the time the story returns to the issues that started the film going, it seems like an afterthought.

Still, the gags are good. If you wish to take a look, it's on the National Film Preservation website, one of the films repatriated from New Zealand in 2010.