The king is threatened with a revolution and death, and he abdicates in favor of the dock laborer who has hidden in a box and been smuggled into the palace. The new ruler is too lively for the plotters and after smashing numerous vases over their heads and dumping them into a cistern beneath the palace, he is knighted by the newly crowned queen.


Revolutions seldom arrive gift-wrapped, but in A Pair of Kings they slide in on splintered pine. The film, a 1922 two-reeler that clocks in just under twenty minutes, is a Molotov cocktail of monarchical panic and dockside slapstick. It opens on a kingdom whose currency appears to be anxiety: torch-bearing malconten...

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Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.

Larry Semon

Larry Semon
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" Revolutions seldom arrive gift-wrapped, but in A Pair of Kings they slide in on splintered pine. The film, a 1922 two-reeler that clocks in just under twenty minutes, is a Molotov cocktail of monarchical panic and dockside slapstick. It opens on a kingdom whose currency appears to be anxiety: torch-bearing malcontents swarm the plaza, their shadows writhing across baroque façades like Expressionist woodcuts. Inside, the king—played by Vernon Dent with the porcine terror of a man who’s just re..."
Joe Rock
Larry Semon, Norman Taurog
United States


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