Mabel and Fatty's Married Life

While a lot of the material in this Mabel Normand/Roscoe Arbuckle feature is somewhat routine by their standards, it eventually builds up the situation rather well into a funny final sequence. Both of the two stars are engaging, as usual, throughout the movie, so that it is still watchable even in the less impressive stretches.

The story has 'Fatty', as Mabel's husband, leaving Mabel by herself at home, where she becomes increasingly worried over a series of minor but odd events. Much of the earlier part of it features gags that are not all that creative, but this part of the story is pretty much necessary to set up the better parts towards the end, when things get more manic and entertaining.

Normand and Arbuckle do their usual solid job in performing all of the material. Mabel plays up her character's agitation a little more broadly than she usually handles such scenes, but the effect works.

A rapid-fire comedy number, full of amusing action. Fatty and Mabel offend an organ grinder traveling about with a monkey. The organ man gets his pal and plans revenge upon Mabel, who is alone at home. This is a good number and well photographed. - The Moving Picture World, February 20, 1915

Mabel and Fatty's Married Life (1915)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

When Fatty Arbuckle leaves town, his wife (Mabel Normand) stays home alone and then gets scared thinking that gangsters are after her. These early Fatty shorts have been really hit and miss with me and this one here is a miss. There's really nothing too funny here, although there are a couple nice stunts where Fatty is standing in the road and nearly escapes getting hit by some passing cars.

Film can be found on The Forgotten Films of Fatty Arbuckle, which contains four discs worth of material including items directed by Arbuckle after he was blacklisted from Hollywood.

When Roscoe has to go out of town on business, he leaves Mabel alone at home. She is terrorized by what she iamgines to be roving gangs of murderous foreigners, like organ grinder Glen Cavender. Like many a Keystone of this era, this is a burlesque of other movie themes. Also like many of them, it burlesqued the works of D. W. Griffith, who had followed Biograph's policy of making films about the evil foreigners who threaten good American women -- almost invariably played, it seems, by Joseph Graybill. The rest of it -- the woman at peril cowering behind a door, while family and police race to the scene -- was also a staple at Biograph, and the core of the editing techniques that Griffith -- had been a staple of Keystone farces at least since THE BANGVILLE POLICE had introduced the Keystone Kops. They show up here too. Although there's a certain realism about this -- Mabel drives herself to distraction through neurotic imagination -- that wasn't often at play in Keystones, there's a clear line of succession here; this seems to be based most securely on WON IN A CLOSET, which in turn seems to derive from the Giish sisters' 1912 movie debut AN UNSEEN ENEMY. I'm sure, if you look, you can find other movies in its structure.

I'm sure FATTY ARBUCKLE and MABEL NORMAND deserved their popularity back in 1915 when silents were attracting audiences to this new thing called "the movies", but frankly it's easy to dismiss it today as little more than a nostalgic look at Hollywood's primitive beginnings.

Both are likable enough and the set-up is good for laughs, as they visit a park and interact with an organ grinder and his monkey. This leads to the scenes were Mabel is alone at home letting her imagination run away her and suspecting that the gangster described in the newspaper is trying to get into her home.

The mysterious quiver of the drapes frightens her for awhile, until the moment arrives when the organ grinder himself dares to part the curtains and reveal the culprit to be his monkey.

What strikes me most about the early silent films is the tackiness of the sets, not to mention the unbelievable bad taste in set decoration and furnishings. This is especially true here, as Mabel's house is a house of horrors as far as "set decoration" is concerned.

Summing up: Watchable but certainly not the best of the duo's collaborations.