Mabel's Wilful Way casts Mabel Normand as a young girl just out on the town with her parents at what looks like a fine eatery. But the orchestra is not playing music to her liking so she sneaks off to a nearby amusement park.
Where she meets up with a couple of young man looking to pick up some women which was a bit more constrained in those more puritanical times. The young men are Roscoe Arbuckle and Edgar Kennedy. Kennedy would go on to develop that famous slow burn of his in so many films as a character player.
Here he's just a sidekick of Fatty's and the two with Mabel enjoy the rides, the carousel, the chute the chutes, etc. One time Kennedy throws baseballs at a man clearly in blackface. In those more racist times and this was the year of Birth Of A Nation the man in blackface is none other than Billy Gilbert of the famous sneeze. He like Kennedy also enlivened many a film as a fine character player.
Such was not the case for the leads Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. A pair of the earliest of Hollywood's scandalous tragedies.
