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5.5/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.5/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Love and Doughnuts remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Picture, if your retinas dare, a universe where every piston-thump of a dough mixer syncs with the human pulse. Love and Doughnuts is not merely a ninety-year-old custard fossil; it is a deranged symphony of flour ghosts, a film that believes slapstick is the highest form of pastry metaphysics.
Ben Turpin’s squint becomes a cosmic event: those walleyed pupils function like twin periscopes scanning alternate dimensions where crullers have souls. When he sculpts a tower of éclairs destined to levitate via bicycle-pump inflation, you realize this is Edison-era science-fiction disguised as kitchen hygiene violation.
Frank Bond’s pinstripe heavy struts in like he wandered from a lost Lang thriller, smuggling raspberry contraband inside hollowed-out old-fashioneds. The screenplay—credited to no one, as if the scenarios congealed out of bakery steam—treats sugar glaze the way noir treats gunmetal: every shine is a threat, every sweetness a shakedown.
As the manic heiress who believes marriage is a carnival ticket, Haver pirouettes between In Pursuit of Polly spontaneity and The Tigress feral elegance. One rooftop wooing sequence—lit only by billboard neon—matches any rooftop clinch in late silent melodrama for erotic voltage minus the moral hand-wringing.
Director—probably committee-of-madmen—stages the finale inside a five-story coin-operated cafeteria. Pneumatic tubes hurl crullers like artillery shells; Al Cooke’s flatfoot skids across jam slicks, firing icing from a popgun. The revolving door becomes a zoetrope of white uniforms splattered ruby, evoking both Frolics at the Circus centrifugal frenzy and The Reckoning Day moral vertigo.
Censors of 1927 missed the subtext: every cream-puff explosion is a money-shot, every jelly-squirting a defloration. Yet the film ends not in debauch but in communal communion—townsfolk link arms around the oven, chanting until the pastry levitates, a Eucharist of carbohydrates. Call it Capra before Capra, or call it carb-loaded evangelism; either way, you exit believing dough can rise again.
Stack this against Poor Karin Scandinavian austerity or Just a Song at Twilight melancholy; its sugar-high anarchy makes both resemble stale zwieback. Only Milestones of Life dares equal tonal whiplash, yet that film mourns entropy while Love and Doughnuts belly-laughs in entropy’s face.
The 4K restoration by Eye Filmmuseum reveals every grain of sugar suspended mid-air, every flicker of stove fire licking Turpin’s boots. A new score—clarinets imitating kettle whistles, ukuleles aping cash-register pings—turns the screening into a bakery you can hear with your teeth.
If you nurse the heretical notion that silent comedy peaked with Lloyd or Keaton, allow this cyclone of crullers to humble you. Ninety brisk minutes later, you’ll exit convinced that every real kiss should be accompanied by the faint scent of cinnamon, and every political scandal could be solved if adversaries simply shared a hot, fresh, perfectly glazed ring of forgiveness.
IMDb 5.8
1919
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