Summary
In a sun-scorched county where the wind rattles drying sheets like brittle parchment, laundress Betty—her face a map of worry—abandons her toddler at the Orphan Asylum’s iron gate, promising to return before the church bell tolls noon. The child, a miniature escape artist in drop-waist pinafore, wriggles free, plummets down a laundry chute, and lands—soft as contraband—inside Betty’s wicker basket now bumping along rutted roads toward the hilltop villa of an unnamed bachelor whose life smells only of pipe smoke and starched linen. There the household’s sole beating heart is Brownie, a scruffy terrier with the soul of a Parisian flâneur; he bathes the stowaway in a tin tub ringed by a folding screen, turning hygiene into seaside vaudeville. Minutes later the infant slips past gate, hedge, and destiny, toddles into traffic, and is scooped up by a paternal policeman bound for the Children’s Society’s joyless wagon. Brownie, sensing cosmic injustice, kidnaps a doppelgänger cherub from a pram, performs a swift switcheroo beneath the constable’s nose, and trots off with the original child balanced across his back like a living trophy. The finale: Betty and the bachelor arrive panting; the tot flings pudgy arms around the man’s knees, christening him ‘Daddy’ while Brownie mouths the cuff of his trousers. The man—outflanked by cuteness—capitulates; the camera irises out on a newly minted family stitched together by laundry, larceny, and love.
Synopsis
Betty leaves the child at the County Orphan Asylum while she delivers the weekly laundry to the bachelor's home. But the kid escapes and slides down a chute from the second story landing in the basket which Betty is dragging along behind her. At the bachelor's the baby is turned over to Brownie, the valet, who gives the baby a bath, filling the small tub with water and placing a screen around the outdoor bathroom. Later the baby roams out into the street where she is picked up by an officer. Brownie saves his little playmate as the baby is about to be placed in the wagon and taken to the Children's Society Home, by substituting another baby who looks like his pal. Betty and the bachelor find Brownie coming down the street with the baby. The child says that she wants the man for a a daddy, and with Brownie tugging at his trousers' leg and the baby 'pulling "at his coat lapel, he could hardly resist, and the baby's wish is granted.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I watched Playmates I was folding my own laundry at 2 a.m., half-asleep, when Baby Peggy’s saucer eyes peered through 102-year-old nitrate and jolted me awake like cold rinse water. Silent shorts rarely survive with their gags intact; here, every pratfall feels freshly inked. Fred Hibbard—veteran of hundreds of one-reel Mack Sennett rampages—trades custard pies for something tender yet anarchic, a hybrid of Dickensian foundling plot and Keystone mayhem, all condensed into a breat..."
