Have a Heart (1928)
Article 5582 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-4-2018
Director unknown
Featuring Jimmy Aubrey, Bud Duncan, Fred Parker
Country: USA
What it is: Silent comedy short

A man resolves to solve the mystery of the haunted mansion in order to get a job as a reporter.

Here’s another silent short which follows the well-worn path of milking a spooky house for the laughs therein. The fact that the haunted mansion is considered a mystery to be solved should clue you in that the scares will be faked, though that alone wouldn’t disqualify this one on the grounds of lacking fantastic content. One nice thing, though, is that the motive for faking the haunting of the mansion has its own degree of fantastic content; instead of the usual band of counterfeiters, we have a mad scientist performing experiments with an artificial heart (hence the title). It’s a pretty standard silent short, but my favorite sequence occurs at the beginning when our hero has trouble just finding out the correct time.