[…] An extraordinary film which mixes adventure serial, burlesque, science-fiction (very unusual in the Italian cinema). The print from La Cineteca di Bologna is quite incomplete, although the film had already undertook such violations to become unintelligible (as it can be read in Cinema muto italiano di Martinelli).
André Deed plays the part of Modestino, called Saltarello. Valentina Frascaroli is Mado the adventurous woman, with an elegant profile and the insolent look cut by a black hat – echo of Pearl White and of Musidora.
[…] The mechanical man in Deed’s film is an “authentic” gigantic robot, remote-controlled by television. It doesn’t seem that there are precedents: it comes out of the tradition of the automatons. But the reference to R.U.R.- Rossum’s Universal Robots is unprobable. Karel Capek wrote it in 1920 and it had two famous representations by Feurstein in 1921 in the national theater of Praha. The Frederick Kiesler’s one is of 1922. On the contrary, on the 2nd of June 1922, Vinicio Paladini and Ivo Pannaggi have presented Ballo meccanico futurista in La Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in Rome.The costume created by Pannaggi is surprisingly similar to Deed’s Uomo meccanico. We want to precise that we don’t intend to count Deed’s film among the precursor of the “mechanical esthetic”. On the contrary we believe that one of the major episode of our avantgarde finds a thematic-figurative motive (mechanigraphical) precisely in the “low” Italian cinema. If it’s a direct source, we just have to demonstrate it (L’uomo meccanico is approved by censorship on the 1st of November 1921 but it is released in Rome only one year later, the 25th of October 1922). […]
(Michele Canosa, Cinegrafie, n.4)