Something happened to Mack Sennett's staff during the sound era: they lost that sure sense of pacing of gags, thrills and story that they had during the silent era, from the earliest, plot-free Keystones onward. For some people sound added a dimension. For Sennett, who plunged headlong into the new medium -- he even set up his own color lab at the studio and did shorts in Sennett Color, a variation of two-strip Technicolor -- integrating sound into the equation was a problem and his sound shorts were hit-or-miss, working best with performers who could interpolate their voices and personalities into the spaces -- W.C. Fields' asides, Bing Crosby's songs, Andy Clyde's chuckles -- which didn't stop him from making others and the disastrous feature HYPNOTIZED.
In addition this is one of Sennett's plots from the days he was at Biograph: two young men are courting Andy Clyde's daughter. She wants to marry one, her father insists on the other. And while Andy Clyde can read dialogue, when he's holding a conversation with someone who can't, it sounds awful.
Since most of the short takes place in a rowboat on the ocean, even the color doesn't work here, since it's hard to show the blue of sky and sea when your color palette is red and green. But that's really the only reason to see this movie, to see what two-strip Sennett Color looked like.
Or you could skip the whole thing.
