Martha Sleeper is a shop girl who dreams of marrying the boss (Mike, her motorcycle delivery man suitor just doesn’t measure up) in this Hal Roach one-reeler.
Home Media Availability: Stream via YouTube.
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There were two types of film magazines during the silent era: fan magazines aimed at ordinary filmgoers and industry magazines aimed at distributors, theater managers and other people who needed the inside baseball news. These industry publications would often include tips for theaters to best market individual films and bring in paying customers. For the 1925 film Sure-Mike!, the Exhibitors Trade Review had this advice:
“In exploiting this comedy mention the cast and that it is a Hal Roach Comedy.”
And that remains true because, when I received a request to review Sure-Mike! and I saw that it was a starring vehicle for Martha Sleeper in her Hal Roach days, I was immediately sold on the picture. Martha Sleeper was just a teen when she was holding her own alongside experienced Roach funnymen like Charley Chase, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Max Davidson and, as we see here, James Finlayson.
This picture plays on the wildly popular genre that every leading lady had to try at least once: the shop girl romance. The working class women who filled movie theaters delighted in seeing their own day-to-day lives being given the Hollywood glitz. Sometimes the shop girl married the boss (like Clara Bow in IT and Mary Pickford in My Best Girl), sometimes she discovered that her boss wasn’t all that great and returned to her true working class love (like Gloria Swanson in Manhandled), sometimes the boss was never really in the picture and her true love was the window dresser all along (Evelyn Brent in Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em).
Sleeper plays Vermuda (and I love the play on trendy 1920s names), a department store clerk who is late for work by more than twenty-four hours. Officious floorwalker James Finlayson is after her hide and we first see her rollerskating hell for leather down the streets of Los Angeles in an effort to keep her job. Sleeper’s work with Charley Chase (where I primarily know her) costumed her as a standard leading lady but here, she is coded as a more eccentric character in the classic Mabel Normand or Louise Fazenda line.
Sleeper maintains a deadpan face and a firm grip on the wad of chewing gum in her mouth as she causes chaos and clearly performs many of her own stunts. She ends up tumbling into the motorcycle delivery compartment belonging to Mike (Martin Wolfkeil), who nurses a crush on Vermuda.
She gets a ride to work with Mike but Vermuda has other plans and those plans include the new manager (William Gillespie). He’s so fancy that he wears a monocle on the job and, the titles informs us, puts perfume on his eyebrows. What a dream! Vermuda manages to get inside the store undetected by the floorwalker and, after causing a bit of chaos, she is summoned up to the manager’s office. He has something he wants to ask her. Will she… deliver some parcels?
The rest of the staff know of Vermuda’s crush and tease her but she is determined. She will succeed! All her plans come crashing down, though, when she walks into her boss’s office and finds him sitting in his wife’s lap surrounded by his four children. The nerve! Vermuda storms out of the story via an upper floor window and lands on Mike’s motorcycle once again. Maybe true love was right in front of her all along– if she and Mike can drive home in one piece, that is. (The patented Hal Roach runaway vehicle scene is, of course, in the cards.)
The response to Sure-Mike! was enthusiastic. Moving Picture World declared “Besides tickling the risibilities of every audience this subject will serve to more firmly establish Miss Sleeper as a very clever comedy actress.” And Indiana theater manager declared it “A good one with lots of laughs.” A Wisconsin theater reported “A dandy little comedy and Martha is a clever little actress. They do not have to waste any more time looking around for someone to fill Mabel Normand’s shoes. Martha can do it.”
(Some sources put Sleeper’s date of birth a few years before the official 1910. Shaving a few years off their birthdate was standard operating procedure among Hollywood stars. I have my doubts that Sleeper was just 15 when this film was made but extra young leading ladies were not unheard of, with Loretta Young celebrating her fifteenth birthday while she played the lead in the Lon Chaney vehicle Laugh, Clown, Laugh. The point is that, fifteen or eighteen, Sleeper was knocking it out of the park.)
Hal Roach studio comedies tended to meander by design, deftly leaping from one situation to the next with the smallest of bridges between. The Roach team makes it look easy but they were one of the few outfits that could pull it off. With just one reel to get the story across, director Fred Guiol kicks things into hyperdrive with frenetic stunts, snappy title cards and the whole thing held together by Sleeper’s charm. Using the shop girl comedy, so familiar to contemporary audiences that it could basically be a story shorthand, allows everyone to focus on the next mad situation. I particularly enjoyed the sequence with Sleeper barely climbing onto a streetcar and having to deal with a horse (wearing a hat!) nipping her backside.
This is a fun little comedy and an ideal showcase for Sleeper, I find myself absolutely agreeing with the critics and theater managers who heaped praise on her and the picture. It’s a shame that Sleeper’s career wasn’t bigger and that she is such a forgotten name today because her fresh and lively personality comes across a century later. If you have a spare ten minutes, don’t miss this one.
Where can I see it?
You can stream it with score and intro as part of Ben Model and Steve Massa’s Silent Comedy Watch Party.
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Movies Silently 
Martha was such a comedic talent that had great comic timing, an adorable expressive face and handled pratfalls like a pro, yet for some reason, she didn’t become the big star she should have been. Whatever the puzzling reason, we can enjoy her in films such as this one and several of the silent Charley Chase films (especially Mum’s the Word). On a side note, she was married for a time to a distant relative of mine (my grandfather’s cousin) during the 1930s!
She really was wonderful!