One of Fairbanks' first comedies for United Artists (the company he founded along with Chaplin, Pickford and Griffith), When the Clouds Roll By combined Fairbanks, the “popular philosopher” of his early Artcraft films, with Fairbanks, the spectacle-maker (notably in the surrealistic dream sequence and in the disastrous flood scene, through which he swims and dives). Writing in 1949, Alistair Cooke noted, “These comedies parodied with no discernible time-lag the pattern of a new social scene we now take for granted. In twenty-odd films, the Fairbanks screen character flattered Joe Nobody's ability to meet and throw every affectation of the day and to have sensible ideas on a lot of topics a layman should know nothing about. This picture is a skit on the dubious profession of ‘psychoanalyst,' a new word in 1919 and one that covered in the public mind more naive and lurid cures than Freud or Adler had ever dreamed. Technically, it is one of the most inventive of all Fairbanks films. The slow-motion chase is about the best gymnastic section of all the early comedies....”