Nonsense (1920) Silent Comedy Review | Surreal Kidnapping Farce Explained

Imagine, if you dare, a pastoral poem hurled into a threshing machine: that is Nonsense. Reels unwind like a drunken square dance—barn doors yawn into expressionist gateways, and the horizon keeps sliding sideways as though some prankster loosened the pegs of the world. Our ingénue, Little Nell, crowned with flaxen braids that catch the sun like wheat aflame, becomes the absent center around which two beaus orbit in ever-more-ludicrous ellipses. One is Lige Conley’s gangly tinker, a human exclamation mark; the other, Frank J. Coleman’s portly gallant, whose silhouette suggests a walking bread loaf. Their rivalry is less about affection than about who can invent the more baroque catastrophe.

The abduction itself occurs inside a single, breathless shot: a hay wagon, previously camouflaged as a still-life, sprouts arms, a burlap hood, and a getaway mule that moves with piston-like precision. The camera refuses to cut, letting the horror of uprooting settle like dust on fruit. Marvel Rea’s Nell does not scream; she simply widens her eyes until the frame can’t contain them, a tactic that weaponizes silence. From that moment, the narrative surrenders to physics gone feral—gravity loosens, perspective warps, intertitles shrink to onomatopoeic yelps.

Every haystack becomes a Trojan horse, every windmill a guillotine in waiting.

Director Sidney Smith, a name too often eclipsed by the Sennetts and Chaplins, choreographs chaos with the patience of a watchmaker dismantling time. Notice how he withholds close-ups until minute thirty-two, when Conley’s face—smeared with axle grease and bewilderment—fills the screen like a telegram from the front. That jolt of intimacy, after acres of long shots, feels almost indecent, as though we’ve been invited to sniff the fear behind the clown paint. Compare this strategy with Terror Island, where proximity is currency spent early and often; Smith hoards it, then splurges.

The pursuit ricochets through three set-pieces, each escalating the premise until plot becomes origami. First, a locomotive that thinks it’s a rodeo bull: Conley clambers across car roofs while hobos below wager apples on his survival. Second, a county fair where the Ferris wheel rotates counter-clockwise to the film’s own projection, a meta-wink that predates It Pays to Advertise’s consumerist satire by months. Third, a moonlit river whose surface is littered with stolen horseshoes; every step clangs like a blacksmith’s lullaby, turning suspense into comic opera.

Gender performance, usually the domain of Victorian melodrama, here becomes elastic vaudeville. At one point Jimmie Adams’ henchman dons Nell’s gingham skirt to evade detection; the disguise works not because it’s convincing but because the universe of Nonsense accepts silhouette over substance. In that instant the film anticipates the masquerade ball in The Painted World, yet trumps it by making the swap purely pragmatic, not symbolic.

Cinematographer Hap Ward—yes, the same Hap Ward better known onstage as a rubber-limbed comic—bathes nocturnal chases in aquatint blues rarely seen in 1920 stock. He achieves this by under-cranking the camera while tinting the positive print with a weak solution of copper sulfate, a trick so inexpensive it borders on alchemy. The result: foliage shimmers like fish scales, and faces hover like sickle moons. Cinephiles who swoon over the cyanotype nightmares of Life Without Soul will recognize a kindred chromatic daring.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Nonsense (1920) through its definitive frames.

Yet for all its visual bravura, the film’s heartbeat is sonic—imagined, not recorded. The score, long lost, survives only in a 1921 Motion Picture News snippet: “a hurdy-gurdy medley punctuated by slide-whistles whenever Coleman’s trousers explode.” Modern audiences must supply their own soundtrack; I recommend a metronome set to 6/8 time, overlaid with typewriter bells at every pratfall. The silence is not emptiness but invitation, a sandbox for synesthetic play.

Compare the rescue climax with Princess of the Dark, another tale of stolen femininity. Where that film resolves via deus-ex-machina aristocracy, Nonsense opts for collective barnyard insurrection: cows stampede, ladders revolt, even the weather throws its hat into the ring with a cyclone that arrives, paradoxically, from a cloudless sky. The abductors are buried not under righteousness but under sheer accumulated stuff—a satire on capital that predates Stripped for a Million’s gilded excess.

Restoration status? A 2019 4K scan from a surviving Portuguese print (retitled Sem Sentido) reveals textures previously smothered in mildew: the herringbone weave of Coleman’s waistcoat, the downy nap on Nell’s cheeks, the cracked leather of Conley’s shoes that flap like thirsty mouths. The Nitrate Picture Show screened it to a sold-out cathedral of cine-nerds who gasped when a spider—an unscripted stowaway—crawled across the lens during the abduction scene, its legs etching spectral calligraphy. That arachnid cameo, unplanned yet perfect, embodies the film’s ethos: accident as co-author.

Interpretations bloom like wildfire. Feminist scholars read Nell’s passivity as strategic camouflage; she waits, Sphinx-like, until the masculine frenzy spends itself, then steps over the rubble with the serene authority of a deity bored by worship. Marxist critics spotlight the currency of hay—literal fodder turned ransom token—arguing that agrarian surplus births its own Gothic. Queer theorists celebrate the film’s rejection of reproductive futurism: no marriage, no patrimony, just endless elopement from fixed identity.

My own take? Nonsense is a Rorschach blot wearing overalls. It satirizes the rescue narrative so savagely that rescue itself becomes nonsense. Yet the emotional aftertaste is not cynicism but vertiginous empathy: we recognize our own world where meaning frays like overall denim, where headlines read like lost intertitles, where every solution invents a shinier problem. The film ends on a dolly shot that recedes faster than the characters can advance; they run in place, horizon slipping like a treadmill belt. Fade to white—not black—because even closure has been democratized.

So seek it out, ye archivists, ye torrent spelunkers, ye 16mm fetishists with vinegar-scented basements. Project it against a bedsheet strung between apple trees; let the flicker mingle with fireflies until celluloid and insect swap luminosities. Or stream the imperfect rip on some back-alley site where Portuguese subtitles smother half the frame—truth insists on cracks. However you ingest it, remember: the opposite of sense is not chaos but possibility, and Nonsense harvests that crop with gleeful, anarchic abandon.