The Nut

The Nut was a mildly fun, meandering and overly long movie. It starts very strong with clever title cards, some unusual situations, and lots of the Fairbanks personality. Doug is a wealthy inventor whose sometimes clever and sometimes odd devices get plenty of attention. He loves Estrell (Marguerite De La Motte), a wealthy woman who wants to save all of the poor slum children from poverty by placing them with wealthy families.

When it starts to wander away from the main story, and I lost interest in this film. If you're a big fan of the Fairbanks personality, it might see you through but I found it to be tedious. When the story finds its way back to the fold, it is almost too late, but there are a few laughs in between and a sufficient ending.

Prior to releasing his Alexander Dumas-inspired movie, Fairbanks wasn't quite ready to give up his familiar trademark comedies yet. Just before he embarked on "The Three Musketeers," he took one last stab at pure comedy, releasing his March 1921's "The Nut." Fairbanks is a wacky inventor with a love interest two-floors above him who's interested in seeking for indigent kids to be housed in rich people's mansions. The entire plot is his attempt to get real and/or fake millionaires to support her vision.

One scene in "The Nut" caused the public confusion. Fairbanks pretends to dress in several historical characters behind a screen in the blink of the eye to amuse his beau's partygoers. A Charlie Chaplin lookalike emerges as one of the famous people. Remarkably, viewers were convinced he was the real Tramp, despite being taller than the shorter comedian.

Fairbanks most likely got a premonition that he should give up funny motion pictures when filming a stunt that appears towards the end of "The Nut." He's seen jumping out of a window onto a man walking on the sidewalk. But the actor landed on his arm, breaking his hand and injuring his back. Reports had Fairbanks recovering in the hospital for five weeks, but he was seen the next day at the studio posing for photographs with several people. Whatever the truth was, Fairbanks never returned to pure comedy after "The Nut," discovering his new niche in adventure costume movies was geared more to his more mature aspirations.

'The Nut' is entertaining enough, yet the elements never cohere. First, the good news: we get quite a bit of Douglas Fairbanks's trademark acrobatics. During the climactic sequence, he and Marguerite De La Motte (the latter partly stunt-doubled) clamber about inside a furnace boiler and its heating ducts -- good job this movie seems to take place in summer! -- and there's some clever double-exposure photography to give us a cutaway view of the two of them inside the ducts.

Unfortunately, 'The Nut' can't quite figure out what sort of film it wants to be. In the opening, Fairbanks is a crackpot inventor. We see him rousted out of bed by his own inventions: a series of Heath Robinson contraptions that end with Fairbanks bathed, showered and fully dressed. I was impressed by a strategic title card at the crucial moment when Fairbanks would have been seen naked. But what's all this cleverness in aid of? Parts of 'The Nut' are quite realistic; other parts are unrealistic but have some good screwball humour ... whilst other sections are neither realistic nor funny.

De La Motte plays a socialite who has some weird theory about letting slum children spend a few minutes each day in posh houses ... so that they'll be better citizens when they're whisked back to the slums afterwards, apparently. As the chief villain, William Lowery gives a good performance in a badly-written role. This is one of those movies in which the villain is willing to break a whole bunch of laws in order to seduce one particular woman (even though he has access to other women) for no discernible reason except to provide a conflict for the hero. There's also a supernatural running gag here, with villain Lowery phoning the heroine via a switchboard operated by the Devil in Hell, whilst Fairbanks phones the same lady via a switchboard staffed by Cupid. The heroine favours a white candlestick telephone which she keeps in its own weird little table kiosk: were ladies in 1921 unwilling to display their telephones?

The notorious Barbara La Marr is on screen briefly, but is given little to do. In a title card, she describes De La Motte as having 'yellow hair', but De La Motte photographs as brunette here. Mary Pickford turns up as a dress extra during the charity party sequence, yet her presence is so strong that I spotted her instantly. In the same sequence, aye, that's the real Charlie Chaplin briefly seen as a Chaplin impersonator.

In addition to his acrobatics, Fairbanks has a funny bit after he's stripped to his underwear in the street. Using a knife that he apparently keeps in his BVDs, Doug slices the two- dimensional pasteboard clothing off a conveniently life-sized male figure on a nearby billboard, then he 'wears' this back to his Greenwich Village home. (Not that this movie's exterior sets remotely resemble Greenwich Village of the 1920s, mind you.) I laughed heartily at a gag sequence in which Fairbanks pretends to be a corpse on a gurney. My rating: 7 out of 10.

Douglas Fairbanks so embodied the ideal young American male of his day: honest, gallant, athletic, charming, and perhaps anti-intellectual. Ideas didn't propel him in the movies (though he's a clever inventor in this one), action did. In this transitional silent feature, he still has the light-comedian identity that made him a star in the 1910s, but he's doing more stunts and working his way toward the action-hero persona that propelled him through the 1920s. The trouble here is, in the title role, he really is a nut--callous and deceptive toward his girlfriend, impractical in all things, and incapable of learning anything. The villain, William Lowery, is a good one, a handsome charmer whose perfidy is convincing, and there are also glimpses of United Artists allies Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford in a party sequence. But, as another poster notes, it's never certain whether it's an actioner or a comedy, and Fairbanks doesn't even look his best. And I know we have to suspend a lot of disbelief with these silent comedies, but I'm surprised to learn from this film that 1) wax dummies can persuasively impersonate real human beings for extended periods, 2) cops can arrest you with no evidence, and 3) all it takes to be married is a judge, never mind the license or blood test.

Douglas Fairbanks had already begun his transition to more prestigious, historical costume swashbucklers, for which he is best remembered, with his previous film, "The Mark of Zorro" (1920), but, apparently, unsure as to the success of that transition, he made one last modern comedy, this film, "The Nut". Reportedly, the success of "The Mark of Zorro" and the comparable failure of "The Nut" solidified the transition. Indeed, I agree that "The Nut" is one of the lesser Fairbanks comedies I've seen; certainly, it suffers in comparison to his earlier ones, including "The Matrimaniac" (1916), "Wild and Woolly" (1917), "His Majesty, the American", "When the Clouds Roll by" (both 1919) and "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" (1916), which are among my favorites and seem to be considered among his best by others, as well.

This is not a bad film, though; after all, Fairbanks, it seemed, was effortlessly charming and amusing, although he admitted this was one of his more lackluster performances. In this one, he plays a foolhardy inventor who is desperate to win the affections of the leading lady. There's an opening sequence where his inventions carry him out of bed, help him bathe and dress, which is similar to the use of absurd inventions for comedic effect in some of Buster Keaton's films and in some other slapstick comedies by others. This use of inventions isn't used throughout the picture, though. As with much of this film, it seems the gags and story lines are quickly dispensed with as soon as they've served their comedic purpose. Consequently, "The Nut" seems sketchy. The episodes with the stolen wax figures and the tiresome joke of having cupid and the devil as telephone operators are further demonstrations of this flaw. As Jeffrey Vance said (in the biography "Douglas Fairbanks", excerpts of which are included in the Flicker Alley booklet), "The picture is like a chaotic funhouse, filled with magical masquerades, illusions, and gimmicks of great momentary amusement. However, the material is in dire need of a cohesive plot—or at least a clear perspective—to make it truly enjoyable." Additionally, there are some funny intertitles, especially near the beginning, which directly address or talk directly to viewers; this sort of title writing had been one of the more clever aspects of Fairbanks's comedies since his teaming with Anita Loos on "His Picture in the Papers" (1916). And, there's some multiple-exposure trick photography for the "X-Ray", see-through-view of Doug climbing through a vent during the climax. Regardless, most of Fairbanks's films seem to have been better than this.

(Note: Charlie Chaplin doesn't play the Chaplin imitator here, which should be obvious to viewers familiar with Chaplin. According to Vance, Chaplin, however, did have an extra role as a passerby, minus the tramp attire, but, apparently, that scene was edited out. Mary Pickford also had an extra part as a party guest.)