Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip from the film The Kid Stakes shows aviator Horatio (Jimmy Taylor) and Madeline (Eileen Alexander) offering to fly Fatty Finn’s goat Hector to a goat race. En route to the airfield Fatty (Pop Ordell) and his gang meet their friend Seasy and a Chinese hawker. The film then cuts to a goat parade at the racetrack. After the gang excitedly waves off the biplane, Horatio attempts an aerial stunt and the children watch as Hector falls out of the plane. He lands in a pond and is rescued. The clip has intertitles.

Educational value points

• The highly entertaining clip demonstrates how silent comedy film used visual gags and intertitles to produce humour. In the clip humour is created by the slapstick of the goat ‘looping the loop’ and the wry intertitle that tells us ‘so did Hector’, as well as by the shift in the children’s expressions from excitement to horror as they watch Hector fall. The appearance of Seasy out of the hawker’s basket also illustrates the absurd, even fanciful, nature of the humour.

• The opening scenes in the clip showing Fatty’s gang on the streets of Woolloomooloo represent a period before the saturation of mass media when children spent a significant portion of their time outside. The Kid Stakes was based on a popular newspaper comic strip called Fatty Finn, which was created by Syd Nicholls in 1923. Like the comic strip, the film focuses on the exploits of Fatty and his gang in and around inner-city Sydney, then a working-class area.

• This feature film is unique to the silent-era period in that it is aimed at a young audience and this focus is evident in the clip. Much of the clip is shot with the camera placed at the children’s level, which takes the viewer into their world, such as when the young Seasy pops out of the Chinese hawker’s basket. The sense of a children’s world is reinforced by the natural and spontaneous performances of the children, who appear unaware of the camera.

• By 1927, as the clip reveals, filmmakers were no longer using only wide shots, having realised that long and medium shots and close-ups could be used to help tell the story. For example, the clip cuts between long shots of Hector falling, filmed from the perspective of the children, and medium and medium-long shots that show the children’s reactions – they firstly stop in their tracks and then, after Hector lands in the pond, race across to rescue him.

• The biplane may have been included in this scene not simply for comic effect, but because in the 1920s aviation was still in its infancy and the public was fascinated by flight. Even though flying exhibitions and joyrides were popular, most people had not seen an aeroplane up close. In the clip the aviator Horatio is depicted as a humble love-struck suitor, but in the 20s aviators often took daring risks to break speed and distance records and were treated as celebrities.

• As depicted in the clip, goat racing, in which goats were harnessed to two-wheeled carts, became a popular pastime among Australian children in the early 20th century. Goats were common domestic animals particularly among working-class families as they cost little to feed, provided a source of butter, milk, cheese and meat and were used to cart firewood, water and other goods. The billycart or go-cart was adapted from and takes its name from the goat cart.

This clip starts approximately 56 minutes into the feature.

A title card reads ‘I’ll fly Hector over in my aeroplane’.
A gang of kids bust Hector, a goat, out of captivity in the Twirt mansion, with the help of Madeline Twirt and Horatio John Wart. The gang comes across a man carrying baskets across his shoulders. He sets the baskets down, speaks to the kids and, suddenly, a gang member jumps up from inside one of the baskets. The gang, now complete, moves on.

A title card reads ‘The Big Parade’.
The parade prior to the big goat race has started.
The gang, along with Madeline and Horatio, race towards Horatio’s biplane. They load Hector into the back of the plane. Madeline and Horatio put on their flight gear and climb into the plane. The plane takes off. The gang wave goodbye to Madeline, Horatio and Hector.

A title card reads ‘Horatio in his wild enthusiasm looped the loop’.
While the plane is upside down, something falls out.

A title card reads ‘So did Hector’.
Hector falls into a pond. The gang race towards him and pull him out of the water.