Review by Marty Mapes

American Slapstick Volume 2 is three discs of fun and film history, broken into easily digested small bites. But serious film buffs looking for lost masterpieces may be in for a disappointment.

Cinephiles can usually name a handful of the giants of silent film comedy: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, maybe Harold Lloyd or Fatty Arbuckle. But given that the silent era lasted 30 years, four names is not very many. This collection can fill in a some of those gaps. David Kalat produced this DVD, and he correctly points out that "No serious student of pop music would claim to know rock 'n' roll just because they'd heard an Elvis tune or two -- and the same holds true for silent comedy."

Among the three DVDs, you'll find 30 films ranging from a breezy five minutes long to the feature-length (71-minute) film Charley's Aunt starring Charlie's brother, Syd Chaplin. The earliest film is from 1915, and the latest is a clip from 1937 (illustrating what "silent comedy" morphed into when talkies took over).

The collection seems to be assembled from whatever's available. Nevertheless, from among those, Kalat groups them coherently. The rare Harold Lloyd shorts all go together; the one-hit wonders are presented as a group; the Chaplin knockoffs are back to back; and so on.

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