Week 22 - Jack's Delight

Questionable Humor  - ridicule actually - is the subject of this week's block. We saw many examples of jokes and cartoons making fun of the suffragists in the U.S. and England, including a link to a 6 minute Charlie Chaplin movie from 1914. It is never listed among the better films Chaplin made, and in fact, modern critics pretty much pan it as a bad take off on the better gags in Kid Auto Races. You can watch it at this link:

http://free-classic-movies.com/movies-01/01-1914-05-07-A-Busy-Day/index.php#.

I found myself interested in the clothing worn in the movie and looked at one listed for 1913 on the same website. It was a Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand movie called Mabel's New Hero. In both the bad Chaplin movie and the New Hero movie, the comedic character wore bold stripes - everyone else wore solids. Since these were silent films, I am pretty sure that fabric choice was quite deliberate.  So I figured I'd have to use stripes in my block this week.

 

The choice of the bright lemons for the center was deliberate on my part.  After looking at the two movies referenced, I became interested in Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle and other films from the era and got lost clicking around in the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia and Google Images. One of the chefs I occasionally watch on the Food Network likes to use lemons and lists them as essential to California cuisine. So, since I had spent a good part of my morning virtually in Hollywood, the lemons jumped out of the group of fabrics at me.

And now I'll just click my way back to Hollywood and look at more of the films and the ladies' dresses from a hundred years ago.