"Cupid in Quarantine" is an interesting relic from a past pandemic to be viewing during the current one of 2020. While nominally the supposed disease outbreak in the film is from smallpox, the nation and the world was actually in the midst of the Influenza pandemic, which was already resulting in intermittent closures of movie houses around the country. It's a comedic short film from producer Al Christie, whom I'm not very familiar with but who was reportedly prolific and ranked a notch somewhere below the more well-known likes of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach.
How odd, then, that when there was already such a film employing humorous relief from a deadly virus, albeit indirectly by substitution with smallpox, that there appear to be so few films in general from the era that mention the pandemic in any form. A gag from Mary Pickford's feature "Daddy-Long-Legs" (1919) is along similar lines, as her character's sneeze scatters a crowd (some of the people of which are wearing masks). Reportedly, theatres also injected slides making fun of the flu. And one may see a similar indirect treatment, by way of the plague, in such dramatic German films as "The Plague in Florence" (1919) and "Nosferatu" (1922). Having recently also viewed some of the annual Red Cross charity films fighting against tuberculosis and the British public-information film "Dr. Wise on Influenza" (1919), I wonder if the dearth of Influenza as a topic in cinema isn't just a matter of most silent films being lost more than other offered hypotheses of the disease being ignored and forgotten for whatever reasons. Plus, as in 2020, film production was shut down for a while. David Pierce ("The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929") has calculated that about 70% of American feature-length films are entirely lost, and I would imagine those numbers might be worse for short films and newsreels and films from other countries. Even many of the films that do survive may be missing footage, as this one seems to be around the end.
Maybe there's a lesson in there regarding the perils of disregarding our cultural heritage, but this is a review of a comedy, so let's keep it light. In "Cupid in Quarantine," a father attempts to prevent his daughter from associating with her boyfriend. The young couple learn of a neighbor in quarantine from a diagnosis of smallpox and so decide to paint their faces with pox so as to shelter in place together. Dad peeping through a window see this, however, and employs a policeman to pretend he's infected, too, and join the lovers indoors. As Fritzi Kramer, of her Movies Silently website, in her review points out, the characters do rather well in their respect of social distancing--at least in so far as contagion is involved. They only invite their infected neighbor, who turns out to be a minister, over to marry them after they believe they've been contaminated for real by the cop. Talk about papa's plan backfiring. In the oldest tradition in the history of cinematic comedy (dating as far back as Lumière's "The Sprayer Sprayed" (1895)), no prank here goes unpunished.
Supposedly, Christie's films were more situational and story-based than some of the slapstick of the day, but the comedy in "Cupid in Quarantine" is still quite broad at times. And speaking of slapstick, the father literally hides in the bushes with a stick in which to hit his future son-in-law. Nevertheless, this is worth a look for anyone interested in some historical comic relief more than one hundred years later from a pandemic.
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