'When Extremes Meet' is an early example of comedy springing from class consciousness: we are clearly expected to sympathise with the lower-class characters against the middle-class ones, even though the lower-class couple are depicted in too broadly comic a manner to be plausible as real people.
A middle-class couple are sitting on a park bench, but their privacy is invaded by the sudden arrival of a garishly-dressed lower-class couple, who crowd onto the bench even though it is too narrow to support four people. The lower-class couple are drunk, and they start to grope each other in a manner surprisingly explicit for a movie made in 1905. The middle-class couple are offended by this display, and they promptly move to another bench... but the lower-class couple follow them. Then the lower-class man tries to kiss the middle-class woman. A fight starts between the two men, which escalates into a fight between the two women. A clergyman tries to intercede. A constable arrives, and of course he mistakes the clergyman as the cause of the trouble. The cop hauls the priest off to prison. The film ends with the lower-class couple cheerfully snogging away, delighted at all the trouble they've caused.
I found this film mildly funny, but I suspect that it aroused very hearty laughs indeed in 1905.
A middle-class couple are sitting on a park bench, but their privacy is invaded by the sudden arrival of a garishly-dressed lower-class couple, who crowd onto the bench even though it is too narrow to support four people. The lower-class couple are drunk, and they start to grope each other in a manner surprisingly explicit for a movie made in 1905. The middle-class couple are offended by this display, and they promptly move to another bench... but the lower-class couple follow them. Then the lower-class man tries to kiss the middle-class woman. A fight starts between the two men, which escalates into a fight between the two women. A clergyman tries to intercede. A constable arrives, and of course he mistakes the clergyman as the cause of the trouble. The cop hauls the priest off to prison. The film ends with the lower-class couple cheerfully snogging away, delighted at all the trouble they've caused.
I found this film mildly funny, but I suspect that it aroused very hearty laughs indeed in 1905.
