Officer, Call a Cop

A Keystone-tinged fever dream of municipal mayhem, Officer, Call a Cop detonates the sleepy street corner into cubist slapstick: patrolman Fred Gamble—badge askew, helmet slipping like melting Dali clocks—pursues a pickpocket through a labyrinth of barber poles, trolley tracks, and suffragette parades while Elsie Jane Wilson’s flapper magistrate keeps rewriting the city ordinances faster than the ink dries. Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran, twin fuses of nervous nitroglycerine, impersonate both jewel thief and constable, spawning a hall-of-mirrors identity crisis that ends with an entire police orchestra—batons turned clarinets—marching into the courthouse fountain. The film’s final shot, a slow iris-in on a handcuffed handshake between anarchist and officer, feels less like closure than a Möbius strip giggling at the very notion of civic order.