Yankee Doodle in Berlin. 1919. Directed by F. Richard Jones.

(3/30/00)

It may have been that I was in a depressed mood, and my eyes were really hurting, but I was disappointed in this one. It's about an American officer who infiltrates German headquarters as a female impersonator and has the Kaiser and two of his sons falling all over him.

It was interesting to see Ben Turpin, though there really wasn't too much of him, but I was disappointed in Ford Sterling as the Kaiser. Knowing about Sterling as the chief of the Keystone Kops, I was very interested in seeing him, but he just wasn't funny.

The film did have its moments, though. There is a cute scene towards the beginning with an Irish POW who doesn't have a bit offear of his German captives. When he blows his nose he thinks nothing of wiping it on the German flag and he cuts the Kaiser's face out of a portrait. He drapes the picture with the flag and when the flag is removed there is a monkey peering through the empty space. "Who made a monkey outof the Kaiser?" ask the astonished officers. "The Allies," quips the prisoner as he exits.

My favorite thing in the whole movie was the Empress who did not take kindly to her husband's interest in the "woman." She is huge and powerful. She threatens to "knock his [the Kaiser's] block off." When we first see her I think she has a great stein of beer, but I'm not sure. The rivalry of the two princes over the female impersonator is fun, but I've seen better.

I liked itwhen Mrs. Kaiser pushes her husband into the bathtub just as a bomb drops into that same bathtub. And I liked it when the Kaiser runs from the Allied bombing with a missle or bomb following him, aimed right at his posterior. But overall the picture was a letdown.

I do wish that the film had built. I think it would have worked so much better if the tempo had accelerated to a mad, grand finale of action. I thought that that was what happened in Mack Sennett comedies, but it seems that my expectations were too high.