Ain't Love Grand?

Ain’t Love Grand? is a 1921 slapstick fever-dream stitched from celluloid moth-wings, in which Al St. John—rubber-limbed, pop-eyed, a human exclamation mark—plays a lovesick vagabond who ricochets through a nameless city that looks like a cardboard fever. Every street corner belches steam-powered chaos: brass bands collide with anarchist picnics, a wedding cake explodes into snowdrifts of sugared shrapnel, and Cupid himself appears as a drunken projectionist who keeps splicing the wrong reels. Hilliard Karr, gaunt as a question mark, materializes first as rival suitor, then as monocled banker, finally as escaped gorilla, each identity folding into the next like origami made of nitrate. The plot, if one dares call it that, is a Möbius strip of courtship: boy meets girl on a roller-coaster trolley, loses her in a parade of flaming tubas, pursues her through department-store elevators that open onto Wild West saloons, then regains her inside a revolving lighthouse that projects their silhouettes onto the moon. Intertitles arrive like ransom notes written by a drunk Surrealist—“He pawned his heart for a hand grenade of affection”—before dissolving into animated doodles of kissing hippos. The film ends with a triple wedding, a quadruple funeral, and a Keystone cop bursting into tears because he has no more doors left to slam. It’s a love letter to love letters, soaked in benzine and set alight, yet somehow the ash still smells like lilacs.