Life, 1929-06-14 · page 19 of 44
Life — June 14, 1929 — page 19: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains a movie review and satirical cartoon. The review criticizes "The Little Minnicks at Play," a home movie featuring the Minnick children, condemning it as having "rotten acting, rotten directing and worse than rotten photography" with no plot or subtitles. The cartoon below depicts two figures: a heavyset woman (likely representing a stereotype of poor or working-class femininity) confronting a well-dressed man in a coat. The caption reads: "Cop: *Me an officer? Heh! Heh! I'm just coming home from a masquerade.*" The joke relies on the woman's apparent inability to distinguish the man's actual profession from costume, satirizing either female perception or the unreliability of appearances—a common trope in early 20th-century American humor.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Add Movie Reviews The Minnicks at Home You can well afford to pass up the Minnick residence, New Rochelle, this week, where the feature is “The Little Minnicks at Play,” a Home Movie picture. Never before, in years of moving picture yoing, have I seen such a horrible example of rotten acting, rotten directing and worse than rotten photography. The picture, which has no plot—and no sub-titles, either, for that matter—seems to be a series of disconnected studies of the Minnick children at play. If you can imagine a weaker subject than that, I owe you a hat. The setting is that portion of God's great out-of-doors which is known locally as the Minnick front yard, an expanse of: grass surrounded by a hedge. The cast of characters consists of Willie Minnick, aged four, and Amy Minnick, aged three weeks past diapers. In the opening shots, rather more than slightly out of focus, Willie appears to be pushing Amy over on her head, a bit of business which might better have been cut—although the same criticism would apply equally well to every inch of the whole film. Mr. Minnick, the operator of the projecting machine, obliges here by reversing the reel so that Amy appears to be, first standing on her head, then leaping backward to her feet. Somebody in the audience laughed at this; the room was full of people. The next episode pictured was a mugging contest between Willie and his small sister, in which they vied with each other in trying to get their faces—homely litle maps—as close as possible to the camera. The effect of this was wholly regrettable, particularly since both children carried coals to Neweastle by “making faces” into the camera. A sad fiim indeed. —John C. Emery. chestnut tree. First Postman: Do you have nice people on your route? Seconp Ditto: Oh, yes. They get their Saturday Evening Posts at the corner newsstand. Tue Bacon Sonc: “Liver Come Back To Me.” How to get an automobile cheap— + buy it on the installment plan and run over the collector. Tue Jones Law Has Come tq Notuinc But Licht Fines ano Jeers. A joke is never really old until it has been in two shows and a Broadway column. \ beautiful woman can get almost Cop: Me an officer? Heh! Heh! I'm anything except your point of view. just coming home from «a masquerade. comicbooks.com