Going back to another of the box sets I've got, there are still two and a half discs worth of shorts on the Vitagraph Comedies collection. This time, it's the 1912 short The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton.
Once again, the short is only about 12 minutes, so there's not a bunch of plot. Charles Eldridge plays the venerable doctor in the town of Cuddleton, IN, with some sort of advisor who's constantly in his office. Apparently, they need a way to drum up business, and the idea is to bring in a younger doctor to his practice, that being Dr. Baldwin (Earle Williams).
Baldwin is, so we're supposed to figure, considered young and handsome by the standards of 1912, so suddenly, all the young unmarried women in town become hypochondriacs who want Dr. Baldwin to treat them. It's reminiscent, I guess, of the the relationship the Jean Harlow and Edumnd Lowe characters were having in Dinner at Eight. If it's funny how these young women all want to see Dr. Baldwin, it's even funnier when one of the women feigns illness, but it's th old doctor who comes to see her!
Unfortunately, the movie loses steam in the second half. Dr. Baldwin is married, and his wife has finally decided to follow him to town. Only she's supposed to pretend for some reason that she's his sister instead of his wife. Whatever the reason they give, it's not something that makes much sense, and not anything I can imagine the doctor's wife wanting to go along with.
The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton isn't bad by the standards of 1912, but it's also as technically limited as most of the shorts I've seen that were being churned out in the early 1910s when new theaters needed new content to show their patrons. I'd also say that there are better shorts from the era, too.
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