À tort et à travers

Bryant Washburn and Mildred Davis are getting married. Washburn has a theory about marriage that he persuades Mildred to put into effect: the Eternal Courtship. He'll show up for two hours each Wednesday with a bunch of flowers and stay for a couple of hours. Thus, their relationship will never become stale. Everyone who knows about this thinks it as stupid an idea as I do. Mildred tells her friend, Margaret Livingston, that Washburn, who is a salesman, is out of town a lot.

Theories about marriage and relationships keep shifting all the time. Certainly, in the last two decades they've changed. In the era of this movie, people talked about "companionate marriage", which meant no children. This is a sort of anti-companionate marriage; one of the plots has Washburn finding his wife has been knitting baby clothes.

This is a comedy with a normative viewpoint, set up to fail from its very beginning, with a title that proclaims that end. As a result, despite some talented performers and some moderately amusing sequences, it is the cinematic embodiment of its own title.

It is part of the nature of things that a great many films from the silent era are now only available in abbreviated home-view versions. Made normally in 9.5mm for the Pathé-Baby (known in the US and Britaain as Pathescope or Pathex), although there were other systems, these films were not necessarily abbreviated but the reels were small (3 mins each) so you needed an awful lot of reels to make up a whole full-length full-length film. What is more the chances of that great pile of reels surviving intact until today are...well, judge for yourself. So such bonzer Pathé-Babys are rare to come across but they exist. I have watched, for instance Henri Pouctal's Le Vert Galant 1924 (retitled - Pathé-Baby also had an irritating passion for retitling which sometimes complicates identification - Henri IV) in a succession of innumerable little files that neverthless add up to about 85mins worth. The films that were made so for the Baby are I think likely always to be popular French films. Foreign films seem to have been standardly cut down usually to about 30 minutes.

Sometimes, as in the case of Heimkehr (1928) for instance (which does thankfully also exist in more than one full version) or Trenker's arctic disaster film Der Ruf des Nordens 1929, one wants to tear one's hair out at the inadequacy of the abbreviated version. On other occasions - and this film is I fear very much a case in point - one wonders at the end of the half-hour how on earth they ever managed to drag the film out for another half hour longer. Perhaps this was only ever a medium-length (35-40mins) film but that was already unusual by 1919.

The story is exactly as stated and quite frankly there is not any more to it than that. Supposedly it was a big success for Mildred David but one wonders since she seems to do nothing except look vaguely goofy throughout the film.

The MPPC claimed as late in the day as 1912 that nobody would want to watch a film longer than half an hour - a notion that signed a death warrant for most of the companies involved - but it is true that for some films thirty minutes is quite sufficient.