The Star Boarder

A cacophonous boarding-house, half doll-house, half pressure-cooker, detonates into slapstick delirium when a suave interloper masquerading as a veteran traveler commandeers the best room, the last pork chop, and every secret heartstring of the landlady’s nubile daughter. Around him orbit a gallery of human exclamation points: a walrus-mustachioed cuckold whose eyebrows ping-pong like semaphore, a rubber-spined bellhop who ricochets off banisters, a moon-eyed errand boy forever clutching a live lobster as if it were a pocket watch, and—stealing every third frame—a shaggy dog whose tail writes better comic timing than most directors. The plot, if one insists on excavating it beneath the avalanche of door-slams, mistaken beds, flying custard, and collapsing staircases, concerns a missing rent cheque, a forged telegram, and a midnight elopement that ends with the entire cast—plus the lobster—catapulted into the city reservoir. Yet Griffith’s scenario is less interested in destination than in detour: each gag pirouettes into the next with the reckless grace of a drunk tightrope walker, so that narrative becomes a mere clothesline on which to hang pratfalls, undercranked chases, and the flicker of pathos when the little boy realizes the hero’s suitcase is empty. Printed on brittle nitrate, tinted rose and cobalt by some forgotten colorist, the film survives as a fever dream of 1920, equal parts nursery rhyme and urban panic, its tempo syncopated to the borborygmus of a nation learning to laugh at its own jitters.