Short?
If the film is 59 minutes long, why is it considered a 'Short'? What is the minimum length of a feature film? I'd say 50 minutes, but others may disagree.
http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=5184666
The line seperating a short film and a feature film can be kind of arbitrary. For example, Keaton's "Sherlock Jr." is only about 45 minutes long, and many people count it as a feature film, while "The Pilgrim", at nearly an hour, is considered a short film. One argument is that it's a four-reel film, which at that time was still considered a short film, regardless of playing time. Another is that structurally speaking, it plays more like a short film, lacking the more involved plot you see in his later features.
shareActually, the line isn't arbitrary at all, as long as whatever body you're dealing with has chosen to specifically define it in some way.
I'm pretty sure the Academy, for instance, draws the line at 40 minutes, thereby admitting "Sherlock Jr." easily...as well as the ultra-short Disney feature "Saludos Amigos." (Given Disney's pull, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that that's WHY they so define features!)
Meanwhile, this site is slapped together principally by its users, and pretty much refuses to define ANYTHING as far as parameters go (which is why the ratings are meaningless, since there's no one thing that people are basing their ratings on) People can have labelled this a short, if they felt like it, and gotten away with it. (Hell, they could have labelled "Intolerence" a short if they wanted to...though I think perhaps a few more people would have taken them to task over it and gotten the label removed!)
After all, calling anything under an hour a "short" would slap half the b-movies into that category, especially several hundred b-westerns. NOT likely.
One possible reason that "The Pilgrim" is called a short, though, is that it no longer exists in an untruncated form. I'd have to go check my dvd's to know for certain (yeah...some other time. lol), but I'm pretty sure that modern prints only run 35 minutes or so.
Of course, even if that's true, it should still have no real bearing on whether the picture was a feature to begin with, and should be called such. So if you and I want to petition them to have that "short" label removed, we'd probably get a hearing...but, in order for them to make a decision, they'd have to finally decide where, exactly, they wish to draw the line. Lotsa luck.
(The really bad thing, of course, is, once something is labelled a short, will it still come up in a search if you're looking for a feature? Stuff like that can throw the research value of this site right out the window.)
Oh, okay, it was bothering me so I DID go check my dvd (from the mk2 / Warner box). The film runs about 38 and a half minutes, probably identical to that "German re-release" time of 39 that the site shows.
What I find a little confusing, though, is that tagline for it someone dug up about it being "Four hilarious reels" or something. A reel is about 10 minutes of film (or less, of course). I can't see squeezing an hour onto four reels.
But then again, that tagline could have come from the time it was reissued, so who knows?
(And don't you just love people that answer their own posts? lol)