All Wrong Ambrose

A portly everyman, Ambrose, waddles through a kaleidoscopic gauntlet of civic absurdities—his bowler hat a magnet for calamity, his waistcoat a canvas for custard pies of fate. In a nameless city where trams shriek like banshees and policemen multiply like deranged amoebas, he is first mistaken for a pickpocket, then for a prince, finally for a ghost. Each misidentification catapults him into chiaroscuro alleyways, baroque drawing rooms, and a seaside carnival that folds itself inside-out like a Möbius strip. Mack Swain’s elastic face registers every mortification with the mute poignancy of a clown crucified by his own greasepaint; the camera, drunk on Dutch tilts, lingers on his trembling jowls as if they were pages of a missal. Elsa Bradford’s intertitles read like serrated haiku, slicing the slapstick with whispers of existential dread: “He ran toward himself—yet kept escaping.” By the time Ambrose is catapulted from a faulty Ferris wheel into a funeral cortège, the film has become a tremulous hymn to the human talent for perpetual self-exile.