Traps and Tangles

A frenetic carnival of collapsing scaffolds and exploding paint pots, Traps and Tangles choreographs its slapstick symphony inside a half-built skyscraper where rivets behave like meteors and tar buckets possess gravitational malice. Madge Kirby—part Pierrot, part parkour sprite—scampers across beams that vanish into cartoon nothingness while Vera Steadman’s society belle, draped in parachute-silk skirts, pirouettes above a yawning city grid, her parasol doubling as a semaphore for impending doom. William Hauber’s ironworker stomps through the frame like a rusted colossus, each footfall triggering Rube-Goldberg cataclysms; Pete Gordon’s sniveling rent-a-cop pursues the chaos with the single-minded zeal of a pilgrim chasing a relic that keeps transubstantiating into banana peels. Larry Semon—author, director, and human Catherine wheel—inserts himself as a beanpole escape-artist whose pomaded hair becomes a fuse for disaster: a single spark from a rogue blow-torch sends it flaming skyward, a comet heralding the collapse of girders, dignity, and the laws of physics. Frank Alexander’s corpulent tycoon oscillates between operatic apoplexy and helium levitation when an errant air-hose inflates his tailcoat into a pachydermal balloon; James Donnelly’s one-armed riveter provides a counter-rhythm of pathos, his missing limb a ghost-presence that keeps steering the mayhem toward miraculous redemption. The plot, a Möbius strip of pursuit and pratfall, folds time: the same plank that brains a villain at reel two re-appears, boomerang-like, to rescue the heroine at climax, now lacquered with fresh custard. Every gag is a palimpsest—screws morph into butterflies, a blueprint unrolls into an origami cobra, and the final kiss is delayed by a runaway elevator that shoots into the stratosphere, its cables snapping like over-tuned violin strings against the dusk.