The Rivals (1907) User Reviews

She Doesn't Seem To Care Who She Necks With

[boblipton · 5/10 · 23 April 2019]

Two young men court the same girl and try to wreck each other's efforts. One sabotages the other's car, while the other hands the first one a bunch of cigars, which promptly explode when the girl's father lights one up.

It's an amusing comedy from Edwin S. Porter, based on a contemporary comic strip. Although the print I looked at was too blurry to figure out who played which role, back in an era when the players were not identified, that was not too important a distinction. The audience was probably unaware that the director was Porter.

For me, the most amusing thing in the film is the young woman's indifference to which of the two young men she is necking with; they switch places, she returns to spooning.

For its Time, Makes Good Use of the Idea

[Snow Leopard · 13 June 2005]

For its time, this Edison comedy makes good use of the familiar idea of a romantic rivalry. The characters are a little plain, but the situation and the gag ideas are enough to carry the movie and to make it amusing most of the time.

Most of the story follows the various dirty tricks that two young men play on each other as they each try to court the same woman. Some of the sequences are pretty good, and it also helps that most of it was filmed outdoors. The movie was based on a comic strip of the era, and one or two of the gags would come off better in a comic, but the rest of it works.

The outcome is rather predictable, but it is funny enough anyway. The lively nature of the movie makes up for its little shortcomings, and it is at least average for a comedy of the era.

Apparently Thomas Edison had dyslexia . . .

[cricket30 · 7/10 · 4 May 2013]

. . . and got upset when the movies of his day were subtitled, so he ordered his own company--Edison Manufacturing (which claimed to have invented movies and which retained a legion of lawyers to put any RIVAL film company which thought up an improvement--such as SUBTITLES or SOUND or PLOTS--out of business in America A.S.A.P.)--NOT to include subtitles during the first five or ten years of its steadily declining output for the nickelodeon market (pretty much an Edison monopoly in the U.S., thanks to his lawyers and the absence of HBO, TCM, Cinemax, Showtime, Netflix, Hulu, TMC, Blockbuster, Tivo, Dish Network, Media Player, BluRay, etc.). So while people in Paris were enjoying pictures they could actually understand because subtitles explained what was going on, Mr. Magoo-Edison foisted somewhat unintelligible pretty moving pictures on the paying American public, who kept coming back to the only trough they had for entertainment. The quality of THE RIVALS print is worst than most surviving Edison pieces, and the New York American newspaper comic strip upon which it is based is so light-weight and trivial that neither the strip nor its author, T.E. Powers, merits a single sentence in Wikipedia (unlike, say, THE DREAMS OF A RAREBIT, which inspired another much better Edison flick and has pages devoted to it on Wikipedia).