The great Barney Oldfield roars across the silver screen in this silent comedy short from 1913, Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life. This is a genuine slice of Americana—please enjoy.
Film historians say this 1913 one-reel comedy is among the first moving pictures to feature a woman tied to the railroad tracks, a gimmick borrowed from Victorian stage dramas. Barney Oldfield plays himself, naturally. He drives the automobile (his 1909 Benz) that races the speeding locomotive to rescue the damsel in distress. At this moment Oldfield was easily America’s most well-known auto racer. The first to drive an automobile at a mile a minute back in 1903, for years he criss-crossed the country performing match races and exhibitions.
The rest of the actors in our potboiler are familiar players in Mack Senett’s Keystone Studios, the Los Angeles film company where Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Cops became famous. Sennett and and Mabel Normand are the romantic leads, while the wicked villain (sporting an enormous comic moustache) is played by Ford Sterling, with Al St. John and Hank Mann as his henchmen. There isn’t a whole lot more to this story, so just sit back and enjoy.
Good old pie-faced Mabel Normond.
Barney’s car is right hand drive. Was this the norm in 1913? If so when did the USA adopt LHD?
From the start, cars in the USA were built with both left and right hand drive, but when Ford went to left-hand drive on the influential Model T for 1909, that went a long way toward standardization. The last American car to offer RHD was Pierce-Arrow in 1920
I watched it through, curious if Barney made off with the bashful suitor’s girl in the end, as the photo at the top suggests. But that scene wasn’t in the short.