What is the best way to clean out a bank vault? Use a vacuum cleaner! That is how two skilled thieves, played by Edgar Kennedy and Louise Fazenda, go about their business in this comedy, which is the twelfth film from the Keystone Film Company distributed by Triangle. The other two actors in the short are Slim Summerville and Charlie Murray, playing a pair of not-so-skilled detectives. The film is part of a corpus of forty nitrate titles – shorts and features, fiction and non-fiction, comedies and dramas, Italian and foreign productions – donated by Livio Fantina to the Cineteca del Friuli in 2015, all sharing one characteristic: being the Italian version of a work. The Great Vacuum Robbery was digitised in 2022 as part of the national Digitisation Programme of the Ministry of Culture, and since the 35mm nitrate print of the short formerly owned by Fantina appears to be the sole surviving element across FIAF archives, a preservation copy has also been struck.

Elena Beltrami