A Suburbanite's Ingenious Alarm (1908) Online

This amusing slapstick feature gets much of its effectiveness from using a situation that many of us find easy to relate to. It gets good mileage out of the setup, and it has some good gags. Portions of it have been lost, especially at the beginning, but Kino's recent release of Edison features contains a restored version that includes more than enough for the story to be entertaining.

The plot concerns an office worker who just can't get up on time to avoid being late for work. No doubt many viewers both then and now could relate to the kinds of desperate ideas that we sometimes use to trick ourselves into getting up in the morning when we don't really want to do so. This man's seemingly ingenious plan is to tie a rope around his foot, hang the other end of the rope out of the window, and have a friend come by in the morning to pull on it. The movie then follows the series of misadventures that ensues.

The pace builds pretty well, keeping the zanier predicaments for the last part. Most of the visual details work well also. Although it has little that was new or innovative, it does a solid job of telling an amusing and entertaining story.

. . . 6 minute, 45.19-second short from the 1908 catalog of the notorious Edison Manufacturing Company is pretty hard to follow, given that this title is more chopped up than many included among the 150-piece+ 2005 4-disc Kino set (keep in mind that the U.S. taxpayer-supported Library of Congress has more than 400 Edison pieces available for instant download from its website alone, but the Kino folks had to rule out the majority of those as not suitable for the DVD-buying public on the basis of endemic racism, general lawless mayhem, violence, and sex, leaving them to scrape the bottom of the barrel with "tamer" stuff such as this mishmash, A SUBURBANITE'S INGENIOUS ALARM, or ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT, in which the famous beloved Coney Island pachyderm, Topsy, was fried alive with flames shooting from her feet as she bellowed because she was being tortured but NOT killed (her head is still moving AFTER Tommy's fun concludes), in one of the science project public demonstrations Edison was famous for ring-mastering himself with the cameras rolling, which DID make the cut for this 4-disc set, being the most notable thing Edison personally did in his life, as opposed to stealing the credit from his Black hired help and others for his thousand-odd patents, with hiring good lawyers being his best skill). Mr. Early is late here, so he ties one end of a rope around a leg of his bed and drapes the other out the window onto a public sidewalk, with predictable results.