The Serenaders

Like almost all films from the earliest days of movies, "A Wake in Hell's Kitchen" is very, very short—so short that it's really too short to give a numerical score. At only about half a minute, it is actually about average length for the time.

At the beginning, this film looks an awful lot like "Happy Hooligan" from 1903, as you see two men serenading a lady. However, in this case, the two are rivals and the man on the right is getting a great reaction from the woman in the floor above. However, the other man is now jealous—and the use a funny bit of trick cinematography to show what happens next. See it yourself—you'll see what I mean. Clever.

The Serenaders (1899)

Two men are on the street playing their instruments while they try to impress a woman in the window. Her attention and affections go to one of the men, which doesn't sit well with the other who decides to kick him. I won't ruin what happens from here but this film clocks in at just around 30 seconds and everything here is just a build up to the trick that happens. Again, I'm not going to ruin what the trick is but I must admit that I found it funny and it certainly makes the film worth watching if you're a fan of these early movies. This certainly isn't the work of George Melies but it's still fun.

The American Biograph & Mutoscope Company started out making peep show features: short films -- this one is little more than forty seconds -- which were shown in penny arcades. Eventually the models of distribution shifted and the image projected on the screen became standard. This meant that the length of the film could be varied and it grew to tell complete stories.

This one is a well-executed gag in which two clowns serenade a lady, one singing, the other playing the trombone. Eventually one loses his temper and kicks his rival so hard that he flies to up the lady's second-floor window; it's achieved by reversing the sequence. In execution it's a set-up and a gag, which would be the standard model of a silent comedy, interpolated into a story. That, however, would be after incidents like this ceased to be the point of cinema and became part of its vocabulary.