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Terrible Ted
Directed by	Joseph A. Golden
Cinematography	G. W. Bitzer F. A. Dobson
Production company	American Mutoscope and Biograph Company
Distributed by	American Mutoscope and Biograph Company
Release date	September 25, 1907
Country	United States
Language	Silent

Terrible Ted is a 1907 short silent comedy film directed by Joseph A. Golden. Produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, it was filmed on location in Union Park, Manhattan, and in Biograph's New York studios. It was released by Biograph on September 25, 1907.

Plot

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Analysis

Discussions surrounding Terrible Ted tend to focus on issues of generic attribution, narrative construction and formal structures, situating the film within the wider historical framework of American transitional-era cinema.

Relation to the Bad-Boy Film Genre

Charles Musser, among others, inscribes the film within the tradition of the bad boy comedy subgenre, alongside shorts such as Blackton and Smith's Maude's Naughty Little Brother (1900), Pathé's Les Petits Vagabonds (1905), Porter's The Little Train Robbery (1905) and The Terrible Kids (1906), and Biograph's The Truants (1907). The narrative subgenre of the bad boy film constituted an intermedial extension of previously developed yet concomitant generic formulae and forms of expression: sensationalist popular literature and comic strips. Although the myth of the bad boy was to give rise to some of American early narrative cinema preferred protagonists from 1897 onwards, with films such as Biograph's The Schoolmaster's Surprise (1897) and Edison's A Wringing Good Joke (1898), the genre was to falter as early as 1905 to be replaced by 1906-1907 by the Western genre and the figure of the cowboy, as they "provided models of transgressive manly action outside the framework of the contemporary urban world" and a "more mythic conception of the recent but still-fading past." The comedic subgenre was ultimately brought to an abrupt halt in 1908. As nickelodeons, from 1905 onwards, were progressively and rapidly becoming the privileged mode of film exhibition, allowing greater audience outreach and visibility, the bad-boy films were attacked by middle-class reform movements and discourses which castigated, alongside with those attributed to dime novels and comic strips, its supposed lack of morality and pedagogical didacticism, as well as their alleged propensity to be turned, within the novel context of the nickelodeon, into schools of crime. Within the early and transitional-era wave of bad-boy films, Terrible Ted is thus widely considered to be one of the last expressions of the genre.

Satirical and Parody Aspects

Other scholars, similarly commenting on the interconnection of film with dime novels and comic strips, emphasize a related yet doubly differentiated generic filiation. Nanna Verhoeff proposes to understand the fact that the boy's fantasy of being a bandit proceeds from his reading of a dime novel Western as designating Terrible Ted as a parody spoofing not simply the Western genre popular both in dime novels and films at the time, but the very middle-class discourse of moralization endeavoring to undercut both of those still predominantly working-class consumed art forms as well as their growing stylistic and narrative interpenetration. While Miriam Hansen and Kristen Whissel, both engaged in a similar gesture, re-situate the film in the political context of its reception to envision it as a satire of "Roosevelt adventurism" implicitly criticizing not solely "American masculinity" but the founding myths and illusory pillars of the nation. W.D. Philips furthers the argument by showing how the journey from the urban streets of New York to the mythical West which structures the boy's dream borrows the generic tropes that the film ultimately mocks from the genre of frontier adventure. The relations linking the narrative cinema of the transitional-era period to sensationalist fiction are thus shown to be operative not solely at the level of shared class structure and disparaging middle-class uplift discourse but also at that of narrative and generic constructions. Terrible Ted proves, for W.D. Philips and others, to be a site from where to investigate how the evolution and progressive delineation of narrative cinema before its relative stabilization as 'classical mode' were bound up, discursively and structurally, with other forms of popular entertainment—the dime novel, comic strips—from which to appropriate generic formulae and with which to play games of parody and satire both undermining their literary origin and the moralizing discourses attached to both art forms.

Relation to the Print Industry and Middle-Class Audiences

Drawing structural similarities between the levels of industrial development of both transitional-era cinema and the cheap print industry, W.D. Philips advances the hypothesis that Terrible Ted constitutes, for both the cinema and print industries of the period, a film which anticipates the later restructuring and widening of their audiences from chiefly working-class to primarily middle-class ones, by constructing, within the narrative of the film, the readership of dime novels and, by association, the theatrical audience of films, as belonging to an idealized middle-class:

Forty-five seconds into Terrible Ted a close-up of the cover of Wild West Weekly replaces the long shot that had heretofore described the scene (Figs. 1 and 2). Although a number of early cinema scholars have addressed the relationship between films of this period, cheap sensational literature, and narrative genres, such a connection is rarely as foregrounded within the films themselves as it is here. ... Thus, both the audience and the industrial personnel for at least this film, and arguably for a larger portion of early cinema, are implicitly identified with the readership of this kind of popular literature. Yet, by contrast, within the diegetic space of the film itself the juvenile reader is strongly identified by middle-class markers of house and home: both the parlor space in which he sits "studying" and his mother's attire work to signify this class status (see Fig. 2). Even as the protagonist indulges in a notably working-class form of entertainment, the film goes to some length to make his middle-class position clear. If, as has been argued, the target audience of these forms of cheap literature was not always as neatly divided along class lines as has sometimes been assumed, still the film seems intent on describing an idealized middle-class audience. It follows that, in the same way the film constructs a middle-class audience for the generic formulas of story papers, it also projects a middle class audience for itself or, more broadly, envisions a middle-class audience within the very space of the theater.

For W.D. Philips, Terrible Ted is exemplary of those transitional-era films which participated in the legitimization for middle-class audiences of sensationalist subjects borrowed from working-class entertainment upon which the literary industry would later capitalize in the form of the post-World War I pulp fiction boom.

The Dream Sequence

The dream sequence is the narrative and formal feature that has retained the attention of most commentators of Terrible Ted.

Charlie Keil, against the idea advanced by Kristin Thompson that early films only rarely had recourse to dreams and visions, argues that the use of such devices was, in all actual fact, relatively developed during the transitional-era, and sees Terrible Ted as typical of the dream films populating the period: a comedy which does not refer to the dream in its title in order to conceal its central narrative mechanisms from the audience and which uses the dream as a way of "playing a joke on the dreamer (and providing one for the audience)."

Various scholars have however emphasized the fact that the film's dream structure does not simply reproduce the generic expectations of transitional-era comedies. The fact that the dream, narratively, is only revealed to be such to the audience by the very end of the short prevents it from solely assuming a moralizing function, even though the film does not eschew the early narrative cinema trope tending to transform dream sequences into ethical and social bouts of didacticism. Russell Merritt, for instance, considers Terrible Ted less didactic than contemporary counterparts and that the film "owes part of its charm and startling freshness to its refusal to deliver a homily." According to the scholar, the dream sequence structuring the film dialectically oscillates between the release of fantasy and its ultimate repression:

What Maxim Gorky wrote of the American amusement park is true of the dream in the American dream film. The fantastical spectacle, he observed, has a divided purpose: to reveal the pleasures of the unfettered imagination and to repeat an all-powerful commandment—"Don't!"

Feminist and Gender Approaches

For feminist film scholar Judith Mayne, the enunciative system determining the discursive organization of the film as a whole and, particularly, of the dream sequence "confirm[s] what has become common knowledge in film theory: that the subject of enunciation in the cinema is male, infantile perhaps, but male nonetheless, emphasized in particular by the parade of 'others'—women, Native Americans—as well as the mother's punishing gesture as reality principle." By embodying both the roles of the dreamer and the conjuror, Ted is able not simply to take control of the process of enunciation for most of the film but to both "embod[y] and ac[t] out a narrative desire. In Terrible Ted, the child has incorporated the narrative authority of the adult into his own fantasy, in a series of displacements that lead from mother to book to gun to police to various villains." As Miriam Hansen remarks, furthering the argument through a comparison of Terrible Ted to Porter's The "Teddy" Bears (1907), in the latter film, Goldilocks is never granted control over the story:

Unlike Terrible Ted, Goldilocks is not allowed to maintain her power of enunciation, to complete the scenario for herself—and for the viewer.

Reception

Anxieties over the violent content of the film

having been attacked by middle-class reform movements and discourses which castigated, alongside with those attributed to pulp fiction and comic strips, its supposed lack of morality and pedagogical didacticism as well as

Terrible Ted

Within the filmic wave of bad-boy films,Terrible Ted is considered

narrative genres and formal features, and on their intersection with issues of class and gender structures, uplift discourse and transmediality (the influence of cheap sensationalist literature) within the wider historical framework of American transitional era cinema—

External links

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