Dollars and Sense

While today the Keystone studio is associated with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, "Dollars and Sense" shows that the studio had other acts as well....and in this case Ora Carew starts in this odd film....and odd in that it uses Carew for dual roles.

When the story begins, you see Hetty has a twin brother. This is odd since Hetty is a girl and Ora Carew plays both roles. In other words, they were identical except for gender...a genetic impossibility. Soon Hetty learns that she and a some Englishman are both joint heirs to an estate and they must marry...or the other will receive everything. Soon she and her twin scheme to cheat the Englishman out of his fortune.

The plot simply makes no sense at all...as well as Ora playing both twins. But is it funny? Additionally, while I could piece together the plot after reading the IMDB summary, the story was weird and confusing...made worse by some very poor editing and a vague story. Surprisingly unfunny and featuring some guy in a bear suit as well as the Keystone Kops.

Ora Carew was a blonde actress in silent films who was pretty but not especially talented; she later had slightly more success as a screenwriter. 'Dollars and Sense' is possibly her best film, as it gives her a chance to play two different roles ... one of them male.

The Keystone Film Company is remembered for slapstick comedies filled with pratfalls and pie fights, but some of their comedy films were subtler than this, with a gentler form of humour. Ora Carew and Joseph Belmont starred in a series of Keystone films; she usually playing an innocent country girl, with Belmont as her shy hayseed lover. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Carew-Belmont films were far more popular in rural cinemas than Keystone's more typical slapstick output ... which catered for a more cynical, urban audience.

In 'Dollars and Sense', Ora Carew plays her usual innocent farmgirl, but this time she has a twin brother ... also played by Ora Carew. Ms Carew's attempt to play a teenage boy is not especially successful. She wears bib overalls and clodhopper boots, and tucks her long hair down the back of a work shirt. Not for one moment is she plausible as a biological male in this movie, although she does make some effort to use different body language for her two different roles. But the 'male' twin in this movie comes off more like a tomboy than an actual boy.

For wildly implausible reasons, the plot of this movie decrees that the male twin is forced to impersonate his sister, in a borrowed frock and a horsehair wig. So, for most of the movie, actress Ora Carew plays a teenaged boy who is disguised as a girl. This sort of double-decker transvestism is very difficult to pull off, even for a first-rate actress, and Ms Carew simply isn't that good an actress. Her 'boy in disguise' is clearly a young woman, not a boy attempting to impersonate a girl. Consequently, this movie is more complicated than it needs to be, and less funny. I give Ms Carew due credit for trying to stretch her acting skills in this movie, but 'Dollars and Sense' proves that Ms Carew's talents were not especially notable in the first place.