“The featured comedian, Charles Murray, is never so much at ease as when seated at a card table, engrossed in the business of winning stage money and producing comic effects. This two-reel All Star Comedy affords Murray the opportunity, and the situations in which his cheating opponents cheat themselves by swapping their deuces, one from each hand, for the face cards dealt Murray makes a mirthful situation. Murray appears as a druggist, a pill pounder, whose home life affords him two luxuries, a butler and a domineering and tyrannical wife. The backroom of the drug store is the ‘card parlor.’ Some mixed labels on drug bottles serve to create a situation in which the druggist believes himself guilty of administering poison and results in some good knock-about comedy. In the cast with Mr. Murray are Clara Bow, who is perhaps the most promising of the young actresses, and James Turfler.” (19 May 1923 Exhibitors Trade Review)
In one of those serendipitous man-makes-astonishing-disovery-by-accident stories, filmmaker Gary Huggins came across a cartoon he was looking for among a stack of film cans in an Omaha parking lot. But to get the cartoon, he had to buy the whole stack. Going through the footage later, he realized one of the titles, The Pill Pounder, featured a 17-year-old Clara Bow! Author David Stenn who wrote the definitive Bow biography Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild had given up hope of finding this obscure, independent, Queens-made short. And it was not even a sure bet that Bow was in the film until Huggins unspooled the title in his living room!
The Pill Pounder was produced by All-Star Comedies and distributed in the United States by W.W. Hodkinson. The short two-reel comedy was released on 22 April 1923 at a length of approximately 2,000 ft. (600 m.). The only known surviving copy is an abridged 35mm print with a length of 1,161 ft. (354 m.) from which the original titles and an unquantified number of pictorial shots were removed. This restoration was completed in April 2024 by San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
