The Sawmill

Larry Semon was, for a few years, Chaplin's only real box-office rival, a white-faced acrobat who specialized in large-scale destruction. The Sawmill, co-directed with Norman Taurog and shot at Hume Lake for Vitagraph, is Semon at full industrial volume. He plays a mill hand trying to win the owner's daughter while staying out of the way of the bullying foreman, played by Oliver Hardy in his pre-Laurel years. Buzz saws, falling trees, a gunpowder trail, a Tarzan swing into a lake: the plot is a clothesline for stunts. Twenty-five minutes of timber-country slapstick from the moment just before Semon's expensive methods began to sink him. Hardy is already a formidable heavy.