Summary
A moon-faced dreamer, saddled with the ignominious nickname “The Goof,” drifts through a nickelodeon cityscape where brick tenements leer like broken molars and trolley bells clang in Morse-code mockery. Cloaked in a hand-me-down suit two sizes too large, he courts the sprightly Marian, whose laughter flutters like startled pigeons against the sooty sky. Every well-meaning gesture curdles into slapstick catastrophe: a box of chocolates explodes into a policeman’s face, a serenade topples a balcony of wash-tubs, a bouquet snags the mayor’s toupée mid-parade. Yet beneath the pratfalls lurks a fable of class vertigo—George LeRoi Clarke’s elastic limbs semaphore the ache of the immigrant clerk who will never quite pass for gentry. When Johnny Hayes’s prizefighting thug storms in to repossess Marian’s honor (and her father’s pawned pocket-watch), the film’s register tilts from custard-pie mayhem to chiaroscuro melodrama: shadows lengthen, irises contract, the camera itself seems to bruise. In a final nocturnal carnival, our goof commandeers a hot-air balloon stitched from laundry bills and yearning, ascending above the flickering metropolis while clutching a crumpled love letter that doubles as his eviction notice. The screen irises out on his lopsided grin—half triumphant, half condemned—leaving the audience suspended between belly-laugh and gasp, uncertain whether they have witnessed a transcendence or merely a slower species of falling.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I threaded The Goof through my vintage 16-mm projector, the bulb coughed up a sulfurous glow that made George LeRoi Clarke’s pancake makeup look like a gilded death-mask. Ninety-three years later, that image still haunts: a man literally masked for comedy yet dying inside frame by frame. Most silents age into quaint relic; this one ferments into something acidic and prophetic.
A Plot That Slips on Its Own Banana Peel
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