The Nickel-Hopper (1926)

Some actresses, you have to warm up to; some you fall in love with at first sight. Mabel Normand is of the latter persuasion. With her trim figure, big, open smile and bedroom eyes, the 5’ 1” bundle of energy could light up a comic scene brighter than a pair of klieg lights. 

By 1926 Normand's career was winding down. After The Nickel-Hopper she would make only three more shorts, all in 1927. She died in 1930 due to recurring tuberculosis. She wasn’t Hollywood’s purist soul. When asked by a family magazine if she had any hobbies, she replied, “I don't know. Say anything you like, but don't say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.” (Note that she and Pickford were pals and her response was a gag, except for the getting drunk part.)

The Nickel-Hopper is not one of her best films. You have to go back to her co-starring bits with Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle, or starring features like Mickey and The Extra-Girl for Normand at her best, but Nickel-Hopper has some interesting qualities of its own.

The story is basic. Normand is Paddy, the Nickel Hopper. She works nights at the “Happy Hour Dancing Academy,” which would be a dime-a-dance hall except the dances cost five cents. Deposit your nickel and a dance comes out in the form of one of the girls who are, figuratively, nickel hoppers. Paddy “gets 2.5 cents a dance—and can do 105 dances a night—if her feet hold out.” It ain’t easy. As the band’s drummer calls out, “Choose your opponent for the next dance.”

The dance floor comedy comes from Paddy’s reactions to a multitude of partners—their sizes, shapes, terpsichorean ability, and degree of boisterousness. 

One of these dance hall wolves gets too fresh and she brushes him off. Outside after work, he causes her to miss the last bus home, but offers her a ride in his limousine. A passing woman threatens him: “You oughtta be ashamed! If I wasn’t a lady I’d belt y’ in the beezer, y’ big bo-hunk!” Paddy finally gets rid of him by asking him for a ten dollar bill. He leeringly hands it over and she drops it into the alms cup of a blind beggar. When the wolf furiously tries to retrieve it, Paddy calls a cop who only sees a big guy trying to steal from a blind man. Paddy is a clever girl.

At home, we find that Paddy’s family is made up of a hard working laundress mother, a sassy younger brother, and a lazy, egotistical and domineering father who runs off every fella who displays an interest in his daughter. When she blows up at him, Pop threatens to leave, an announcement to which brother says, “Aw hell, let him go!”

True love finally comes her way, and in his attempt to foil it Pop gets his come-uppance. There’s really a lot going on in thirty minutes.

The picture was directed by F. Richard Jones and was written by Frank Butler (who would later write three of the Hope/Crosby Road Pictures), Hal Roach, and Stan Laurel. The titles were written by the invaluable H.M. “Beanie” Walker.

Another great pleasure come from the presence of three uncredited actors. James Finlayson, that wonderful Scots character actor with bald pate, squinty eyes and delightfully fake walrus moustache (memorably seen in battle with Laurel and Hardy in numerous shorts and features) is a householder important to the last part of the film. The hot drummer, flailing away like a Jazz Age Keith Moon, is Oliver Hardy.

And most surprisingly of all, Boris Karloff is the dance hall masher who tries to reclaim his ten dollars from the blind man. After a lifetime of seeing Karloff play maniacs and monsters, it’s a hoot to see him not as a full-fledged villain, but just as a jerk.