Fishing

A sun-bleached pastoral fever-dream, Bud Fisher’s one-reel vignette unspools like a hand-tinted postcard that’s been left in the rain: Mutt, gaunt as a Modigliani scarecrow, trudges toward a mirror-still pond, cane pole twitching like a divining rod, while Jeff—half imp, half cupid—skips behind him, pockets rattling with bent hooks and bubble gum. The meadow itself seems to breathe; every blade of grass is a green syringe injecting chlorophyll straight into the celluloid. The first act is a study in negative space—long shots of line slicing sky, bait droplets arcing like miniature comets—until the cosmos answers with a battalion of skunks whose monochrome stripes ripple like piano keys struck by an invisible virtuoso. Mutt’s nose inflates, eyes balloon into saucers, and the universe tilts into slapstick delirium: a tangle of tails, a bouquet of musk, a chiaroscuro ballet scored only by wind and outraged yelps. Just as the air begins to reek of existential fur, the film pivots on a single beam of sunshine: a lithe bather emerges from the reeds, skin pearlescent, hair a spilled corona of flax. Time dilutes; ripples become stigmata of desire. Mutt, still dripping eau de skunk, metamorphoses into a lovesick satyr, heart thrumming like a snare drum. Enter the rival—shoulders borrowed from a Michelangelo ignudo, moustache waxed to rapier points—who splashes into frame, turning the pastoral into an arena. The final tableau is a triptych of gazes: hers liquid, Mutt’s volcanic, the interloper’s glacial. Fisher cuts to black on the instant the fishing rod bows, leaving the tug-of-war unfinished, the heart unlanded, the cosmos chuckling at the cruel geometry of triangles.