When Mabel catches her husband flirting with their maid, it leads to a sharp dispute. As part of making up, the couple decide to take a walk to the park. Nearby, another married couple have just had a similar domestic squabble, and they too go to the park together. But at the park, all parties involved find it difficult to avoid getting themselves into further trouble.
02 Nov Fatty’s Spooning Days (1915)
Wife-swapping
As a comedy, this one is poor in the things that seemed to matter, the physical bits, the comic takes when the situation turns sour.
But its amazing in what it chooses as its story. Remember, film was young, younger in those days that the web is now. It was still experimenting and the comedy for this silent period was what worked best. There were few known things that worked so many different experiments were tried.
In this case, it is wife-swapping. Sure, the story shows benign things: park benches, fluttering eyes. But we know these images denote some nimble rutting. Unlike the Shakespearean pattern where the comedy is in the disguise and discovery, here it is mostly in the act, which lands the main couple in jail.
It is a disconcerting thing, because this thread died off early in the family tree of movies. Seems disconcerting as a result.
Posted in 2006
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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