Review of Hands Up!

Hands Up! (1926)
Griffith long and short
30 May 2017
There appear to be two versions of this film, a full 70-minute version and a half-hour short entitled Injun Trouble. The latter does also seem to have been released as I have seen contemporary reviews which appear to be discussing the short version. It also appears to be the version by the sole unfavourable reviewer here.

An unidentified Raymond Griffith short, A King for a Day (Eén dag koning) appears in the Dutch EYE collection. It is a story of a king and his lookalike in an imaginary kingdom and, although EYE dates it as 1920, it seems to be more likely that it appeared in 1922, when there was a whole spate of pseudo-parodies following the success of Metro's Prisoner of Zenda (others are the Christie comedy Choose Your Weapons and Semon's A Pair of Kings). There were later parodies, Laurel's Rupert of Heehaw (following Selznick's release of the sequel to Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau, in 1923) and Langdon's Soldier Man 1926 (which also contains a neat clin d'oeil towards the 1926 Barrymore film The Sea Beast) but none that I know of before 1922. The film is very similar in plot to Semon's A Pair of Kings and is a rather mediocre slapstick comedy, although there is evidently missing footage. The production company is unknown.
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