When Love Took Wings (USA,1915)

This film is ahead of its time with regard to showing airplane scenes. Nevertheless, it was not new in Keystone studios, which had been making films with airplanes since its very first year, being “A Dash Through the Clouds” (USA, 1912) a fine example of a early Keystone film with very this same sort of plot. 

This is a typical Keystone film of 1910s, with a plenty of broad gestures and physical humor, including the traditional kick on the butt gag. 

In a unspecified rural area, a girl (played by actress Ollie Carlyle, who was somehow physically similar to Mabel Normand, then a star of Keystone studios), had a very jealous father and three suitors. Those characters lived in a rural area and all suitors tried to get the girl’s love. The suitors are in conflict among themselves and with the girl’s father, but nothing prevented the suitors from keep on coming. Not even the risk of being beaten by her father keep those men away from the girl. 

The girl is taken out of home, against her will, by one of her suitors. Her father calls the police. Another suitor finds them and a fight starts. 

Then, ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and the girl see an airplane and they fly away. Yes, they were minding their own business and suddenly found a empty airplane. A chase happens, with cars and even a bicycle trying to reach the airplane. Despite all mess, both Fatty and the girl landed without a scratch. And they both tried to get married, but something unexpected prevents the marriage from happening. 

At the end, the suitors end up giving up the girl, although one of them unwillingly remain. Actually, he was forced by her father to marry her, as the other two suitors had already run away. 

This film, no matter how exaggerated it is, gets to show the influence of some recently invented technological items in daily lives of people, like the telephone, car, airplane, etc. The chases involving different means of transportation were relatively common in comedies of this studio and were often very funny, also giving a modern touch to those films in the eyes of audiences of the era.