A Regular Pal

A Regular Pal” is a 1919 one-reel prism that fractures vaudeville into cubist slapstick: Beatrice La Plante’s switchboard operator, stranded between two suitors—Noah Young’s swaggering traffic cop and William Gillespie’s moth-eaten bookkeeper—unleashes a chain-reaction of mistaken identities inside a single autumn afternoon. The film begins inside a dim boarding-house hallway where the wallpaper perspires with nicotine and unfulfilled rent; a ringing telephone becomes the metronome of chaos, each buzz propelling the heroine deeper into a labyrinth of swapped overcoats, forged love-letters, and a runaway Model-T that behaves like a drunk mechanical bull. Hal Roach’s scenario treats space like an accordion: he squeezes a city block into a cramped foyer, then stretches the same block until it loops back on itself, so the same cop who writes a ticket at minute four is seen munching the same hot-dog at minute nine, now inexplicably wearing the bookkeeper’s pince-nez. Gags detonate not through brute velocity but through delayed fuse: a seemingly throwaway close-up of a cat licking spilled milk pays off reels later when the feline reappears inside a patrol wagon, calmly licking the cop’s abandoned nightstick as if it were a popsicle. Intertitles, scrawled in Roach’s jagged hand, read like ransom notes from the subconscious—“He kissed her shadow by mistake and the shadow slapped him twice.” The climax erupts inside a moonlit park bandstand where every character converges wearing someone else’s clothes; identities dissolve into semaphore, and the final iris-in closes on La Plante’s wink—half promise, half threat—at the audience, as if to say the joke is on our craving for order. What survives is not merely a quaint comic relic but a pre-Freudian anxiety dream about urban anonymity, delivered at 18 frames per second and soaked in the metallic taste of nickelodeon piano wire.