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.
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.
