"The past is a foreign country. They do
things differently there."
Special tnanks to Cartoon Research for introducing us to this short.
Film, like life, is an ephemeral thing. It's there,
and then it isn't. Everything is but dust
in the wind. But unlike life, sometimes, if rarely, a film
comes back — as happened, aptly enough, with Frankenstein
(1910), our Short Film of the Month
last month. Sometimes, however, when films come back, they're different,
something is missing…
And that is the case of this extremely obscure stop-animation
short, now known as Dolly Daisy in
Hearts and Flowers, which resurfaced somewhere along the way but without
its original soundtrack. Nowadays, the short can be found online underscored
with different aural treatments, none of which are the original. (Personally,
we find the version found
here has the more-appropriate "borrowed"
soundtrack, but the version we embed below has much clearer visuals.) This oddly
uncomfortable short here was released by Warner Bros. in 1930 as part of its
Vitaphone series ("Vitaphone production reel #1136"), and as with
many of its Vitaphone ilk, the accompanying disk is lost. ("Vitaphone was a sound film system used
for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its
sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. […] The soundtrack was not
printed on the film itself, but issued separately on phonograph records. The
discs […] would be played on a turntable physically coupled to the projector
motor while the film was being projected. [Wikipedia]")
It is entirely possible that once upon a time the
short even had spoken dialogue, but the lack of that in no way hampers the
overall effect of the short. Dolly Daisy in
Hearts and Flowers is simply an oddly unnerving, vexatious, and
disturbing short that sits smack dab in the middle of a dreamscape one step
away from being a nightmare. "Love never looked so creepy. […] Just a fun,
weird little short to make you ponder just why all children's entertainment
pre-Willy Wonka seemed to be designed to scare the ever-loving shit out its intended
audience. [Content Party & Review]"
Dolly Daisy in
Hearts and Flowers:
It is arguable that Dolly Daisy in Hearts and Flowers was made for kiddies, as it is a
bit sexually suggestive for a pre-peachfuzz audience. The plot involves a love
triangle: two guys, both with voyeuristic tendencies — But then, what man
doesn't have voyeuristic tendencies? — vying for the attentions of a fickle
female. Along the way, they both carelessly cause physical harm to hapless
third persons (the mother [?] and a somewhat stereotypical Black fisherman) and
the gal floats to the moon… All the characters are dolls, and even in ancient B&W
they exude a close kinship to Chucky and other evil dolls of his kind.Whether the film was truly made in 1930, the year
commonly attributed, is possibly open to question — as the blogspot The Boundaries of Fantasy
indicated way back in 2009: the puppet used for the sailor is the same
"Mugsy" (a.k.a. "Mugzee") puppet used in a short entitled Cracked Ice, which, depending on the
source you read, was made in either 1917
or 1922.
So, while it is entirely possible that the film was rereleased with a new date
added, it could also be that the Mugzee puppet was simply reused for the film. It
is doubtful that the short's producer/director Howard S. Moss (9 June 1881 – July
[possibly 30 June] 1964) treated his dolls with anything less than TLC, going
by what AFI mentions in
their entry on Moss's lost, 50-minute
human & doll film, The Dream Doll
(1917): "Moss was credited with designing and building some of the
fourteen-inch dolls used in the film, while many others were made to order by
European craftspeople; his collection was valued at several thousand dollars."
According to the World Catalog,
there seems to be a 1917 Howard S. Moss short entitled Dolly Doings, which seems to have had nothing to do with the
little girls' book of almost the same title by E. Patterson from 1880. We doubt that it
is the same film as Hearts and Flowers,
if only because there is a Vitaphone release from 1930, #1065, also from Moss,
entitled Dolly Daisy in Dizzy Doings –
a film not yet added to his filmography. But assuming that the 1917 & 1930 Dizzy Doings are the same short,
credence is given to the hypothesis that H&F
is likewise older.
Moss's accepted known filmography is spotty, at best,
with many films lost or forgotten. Going by Loyd Bruce Holman's Puppet Animation in the Cinema: History and
Technique (pub. 1975), some of Moss's titles lost to time include: Dunkling of the Circus (1917), Goldilocks and the Three Bears (1917), In the Jungle (1917), Jimmy Gets the Pennant (1917), A Kitchen Romance (1917), The Magic Pig (1917), Midnight Frolic (1917), and Out in the Rain (1917). The First Century of Cinema,
a website only open to educational institutions (as of July 2021) — and that
gave us all the dates to the films listed above — would add the following shorts: The Beauty Contest (1921), The Dollies of 1917 (1917), The Dream Doll (1917), School Days (1917), A Trip to the Moon (1917) and possibly The Moss Doll (1930).
Most, if not all, Motoy (a.k.a. Mo-Toy) Films seem to have been distributed by the Peter Pan Film Corporation.
An online search reveals other Mo-Toy titles as well, at
varied locations, but no single list that includes them all, and often Moss's
animator gets the credit. Take a look at this one, for example, Buzz Saws and Dynamite, starring Mugzee [aka Mugsy],
one of Dolly's suitors, and credited to Charles Bennes, the animator of Dolly Daisy in Hearts and Flowers (and Dizzy Doings, for that matter). (For
more info on Buzz Saws, go here.)
Or how about Mugzee in this surreal short with sound, Mr Mugzee in Television
a.k.a.
Television Romance, likewise credited to the unknown Charles Bennes.
Considering how early the duo practised the art of stop motion animation, and the extent of their (mostly lost) incredibly strange output, it would seem to us that they and their work are unjustly forgotten.
Absolutely nothing can be found online about Charles Bennes, but
only a little bit more can be uncovered about Howard S. Moss a.k.a. Howard Moss
a.k.a. Stanley Moss a.k.a. Howard Stanley Moss. He was born in Chicago, where
he ran Motoy Films and, in 1902, married Florence Adele Seavey, with whom he
may have had two
(twins) or three
children, and died in NYC in 1964. "Animated puppets, not drawings, were
the staple of Chicago-based Howard Moss's films. These juvenile shorts
frequently featured caricatures of screen stars like Mary Pickford and Charlie
Chaplin. [SilentFilmOrg]"
BTW: The Mugzee puppet is believed by some to be a caricatured of silent film star
Ben Turpin [19 Sept 1869 – 1 July 1940]. (Q only knows who Dolly should be. Colleen Brennan, maybe?) Whoever Mugzee is based on, it definitely seems to us that Mugzee himself inspired another famous face familair to us all:
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