His Wife's Mistakes

"His Wife's Mistakes" is a film that is directed by Fatty Arbuckle. He also stars in it, as does his wife (Minta Durfee) and his nephew (Al St. John)....making it truly a family affair. I must admit, however, that Al isn't given much to do here except collect a paycheck.

When the story begins, Fatty is hired as a janitor though he is a complete incompetent and makes a mess of most everything. Amazingly, the boss' wife is waiting to see Mr. R. U. Stout and when Fatty arrives, she asks him if he is R. U. Stout and he thinks she's making a remark about his poundage. Soon, she invites him to lunch and they go to a very strange restaurant...and soon the boss arrives...along with his gun!

In some ways, this film is definitely a product of its times...filled with pratfalls and slapstick. By the early 1920s, silent comedies became a bit more sophisticated...with little of the mindless shooting, punching and kicking you associate with slapstick. But here, it's a film by Keystone and was when slapstick was king...so of course it will have all that. I generally don't like slapstick BUT was amazed at Fatty's ability to take a fall or tumble. However, despite being light on plot and being filled with slapstick, it also manages to have some nice moments...and Fatty is quite nice in them.

For a slapstick Keystone film, this one is really good. While I prefer some of Fatty's more plot-driven and less slapsticky films (such as his great "Mabel and Fatty Adrift"), this one is very good and is well worth seeing....even if some of the humor is really yucky! See what I mean...you'll see what I mean by yucky!

Roscoe Arbuckle wrote, directed and starred in 'His Wife's Mistake' at a crucial point in his career, when he was weaning himself off crude slapstick and gradually developing a subtle sense of characterisation. I enjoyed this entire two-reeler, except for one genuinely disgusting sequence after Roscoe's boob character gets shaving cream mixed up with vanilla ice cream. Unbilled actor Frank Hayes plays a barber's customer who gets lathered with the ice cream: when Hayes discovers the mistake, there's a truly sick-making scene when he and Arbuckle both start licking Hayes's face. (Hayes, a stage-trained Victorian actor, uses his lanky frame to good effect here.) Meanwhile, we see pretty Betty Gray sipping a shaving-cream soda ... then spitting it out again.

The plot is standard farce confusion. Roscoe is the porter and all-purpose dogsbody in an office building. Big-shot executive William Jefferson is expecting a client named Stout, and orders his wife (Minta Durfee) to detain Stout until a crucial moment. When blimp-bodied Roscoe blunders into the reception room, Minta asks him 'Are you Stout?'. From here, the movie writes itself.

I was slightly surprised by the arrival of a 'nance' character named Percy Dovewing, played by Arthur Earle. Actually, 'nance' characters (effeminate males) were stock comedy characters long before 1916, but this character still astonished me. For one thing, his name is nearly identical to that of Percy Dovetonsils, the effeminate poet played so memorably on television by Ernie Kovacs four decades on. Arbuckle and Kovacs were both comedy geniuses, yet Kovacs's humour shows no obvious influence from Arbuckle. 'His Wife's Mistake' makes me wonder if Kovacs perhaps studied Arbuckle's films.

Earle's performance as Dovewing is a fairly standard 'nance' act, except for one startling moment immediately after his entrance, when he crosses paths with a Negro. At this point I groaned, expecting to see two stereotypes at the same go: stereotypical gay man meets stereotypical black man. I was surprised by what happened instead. The black man (unbilled, and apparently not a professional actor) stares at Dovewing, then laughs and does a brief 'camp' imitation of him! It's refreshing to see a 1916 movie in which a black man acts like a normal human being instead of a goggle-eyed lawn ornament.

I viewed a print of 'His Wife's Mistake' which appears to have a truncated ending. Several of the Triangle-Keystones were conceived as three-reelers but released more economically as two-reelers; I suspect that footage was excised from this film before its release, in which case the missing footage likely no longer exists. Basically, Roscoe has screwed up the business deal but can just barely put it right in the last few seconds before a stock option expires ... except that the characters here are so unsympathetic, there's no reason for us to want Roscoe to save them. I guess we'll never know how this movie was meant to end. But it's mostly funny on the way there. Despite that really disgusting ice-cream scene, I'll rate this comedy 7 out of 10.

I've just had to revise my opinion of this movie. Previously I had thought it chaotically performed and edited. However, I have just come from the Museum of Modern Art where they have shown a print of this as part of a twelve-program series of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle movies. It was the most complete print I've seen of this movie and it takes its place along with the other classic late-Keystone Arbuckles like THE WAITER'S BALL and HE DID AND HE DIDN'T. The ending is still abrupt. There's a shot of Washington Square Arch that makes me believe it was shot as a three-reeler, but that's all that survives of the third reel. Perhaps, though the missing footage will turn up.

Structurally it's an episodic series of one-reelers, something that Chaplin was still using twenty years later in MODERN TIMES: in the first, Roscoe gets a job as a janitor in a skyscraper and performs a series of gags on that theme. In the second, he is mistaken by the wife of the building's manager for a Missouri businessman she has been asked to entertain. "Are you Stout?" she asks, since that is the man's name. Roscoe, of course, misunderstands her....

On the way out of the museum, however, I was annoyed to hear one of the people who had been to the show announce "But it's still the same old pratfalls." True enough. And FINNEGANS WAKE is still the same old alphabet. There hasn't been a new letter added since the 17th century. You will pardon me, I hope, for thinking that someone who can't differentiate between a capital C and a small o is not likely to utter intelligent criticism of English literature. I submit that someone who cannot tell the difference between a neck roll and a 108 probably can't make an informed statement about silent comedy.

Well, I can tell the difference, and I think Arbuckle made some damned fine comedies and this is one of them. If you manage to see a good print, I think you might agree.