The New Stenographer

Since I had a post on a new Star of the Month today, I decided I ought to do a brief post on a short. This time, I put one of my Blu-ray discs from the Vitograph Collection in my Blu-ray player and watched The New Stenographer.

At 12 minutes, there obviously isn't that much of a plot. A firm puts a want and in the paper for a new stenographer, and gets Lucille (Flora Finch, who according to her bio would have only been 43 at the time the movie was made). She's good at what she does, but the first thing her bosses notice about her is her looks. Unfortunately, she's decidedly homely, to the point that I was wondering whether the studio as a joke had a man dress up as a woman to play the character.

However, Lucille is good at her job so she gets retained, until one day she doesn't show up, having left a note on her desk. The doctor has told her that she's suffering from overwork and needs to take a two-week break. Since this is 1910, it's not like she gets a ton of vacation or, God forbid, sick leave. Instead, she's got a cousin (Florence Turner, about 25 at the time and in the liner notes of the box set as Florence Lawrence who is a different actress) who is going to take over the job for the two weeks. And, wouldn't you know it, but the temp is reasonably good-looking by the standards of 1910.

Since all three men who work at the place notice the change in looks, they're all interested in pursuing this new stenographer, as though none of them have wives of their own back home. But then two two weeks are up, and the punchline is that the temp is already married, and to a rather homely man. The office is "stuck" with the old stenographer again.

The New Stenographer is an adequate enough movie, although I don't find anything particularly special or noteworthy about it. As a short released in early 1911, however, it's always worth watching just to see what set design and fashions were like back in the day. The new stenographer, for example, has a fairly ridiculously large hat of the sort that's way out of style.

Unfortunately, I've got it on Blu-ray which means that I can't really do screencaps since my computer only has a DVD player. It also seems quite surprising that this short doesn't seem to be on YouTube, since it's clearly in the public domain. I did find a similar short called Stenographer Troubles from 1913 on YouTube that was also produced at Vitagraph and stars Florence Turner as well. For the record, I checked under both Florence Turner and Florence Lawrence and the short didn't seem to show up.