Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1921 · page 31 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #23 — page 31: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page reviews a 1920s silent film adaptation of "The Translation of a Shimmy Dancer." The plot centers on an English fortune-seeker in Hudson Bay who, learning his fiancée didn't marry as he'd hoped, spitefully marries an Indigenous woman named Lali (daughter of "Fry-on-the-moon") and ships her to England to shock his family. The satire targets class pretensions: the "good sports" of the English family transform the "savage" into a "raving beauty in two reels"—mocking both the family's snobbery and cinema's miraculous transformations. The protagonist's drunken revenge marriage and subsequent remorse suggest commentary on colonial attitudes and casual cruelty. The review's tone is gleefully irreverent about the melodrama, typical of *Whiz Bang*'s satirical approach to popular entertainment and social hypocrisy.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 29 Our Monthly Drammer “YOU HOLD MY WIFE” A Comedy On “Behold My Wife” BY JAMES STARR HERE is in “You Hold My Wife,” which George Selford has screened from Sir Fil- bert Barker’s “The Translation of a Shimmy Dancer,” the sort of romance that appeals to all the primitive story-loving in- stincts of the widely known human race. A bum of an Englishman seeking a fortune in the Judson Bay country hears from home that his fiancee has not married another man as he had hoped she would. He is led to believe his own family had deliberately planned to go against his plans. To be even with them he drinks a pint of likker, marries an Indian girl, Lali, the daughter of old Fry-on-the-moon, and ships her to England as his wife. The good sports of the English family, dismayed and shocked, take the savage in hand and, of course, turn her out a raving beauty in two reels. So that when the bum English chap, stricken final- ly by remorse and put on his feet by a two-gal-