Douglas Fairbanks and Constance Talmadge just want to get married but it’s easier said than done with her father and his favored suitor hot on their trail.
Home Media Availability: Released on DVD.
By hook or by crook
Douglas Fairbanks will always be remembered as the archetype and king of the movie swashbucklers and that’s fair, given his unparalleled success in the genre. However, before he was leaping about with swords, he was a stunt comedian in romantic comedies, Harold Lloyd before Harold Lloyd was Harold Lloyd.
I’ve covered quite a few of his available pre-swashbuckler films: the Ruritanian twist Reaching for the Moon, the western comedy Wild and Woolly, the Grand Canyon fantasy A Modern Musketeer, the surreal When the Clouds Roll By, the black comedy Flirting with Fate, and his modern era swan song The Nut. The Matrimaniac has the simplest plot by far, but that works in its favor.
Fairbanks plays Jimmie, a peppy lad who wants to marry Marna (Constance Talmadge). However, her father (Wilbur Higby) objects and wants her to marry Wally (Clyde Hopkins). The film opens with Jimmie letting the air out of automobile tires while Marna waits upstairs and her father and Wally stand guard on the lower floor. When a rope ladder doesn’t work, Jimmie and Marna opt to elope out the front door but Wally manages to follow them to the station and get on the same train.
Marna’s father will put an injunction on the marriage and has set things in motion, so Marna and Jimmie must avoid getting served and they must find a minister. Jimmie leaves the train to find Rev. Tubbs (Fred Warren), who, appropriately enough, is enjoying a bath. Jimmie drags him from the tub but misses the train. Wally thinks he has gotten clean away and begins to pester Marna to marry him instead but she will have none of it.
What follows is a manic race as Jimmie and poor Rev. Tubbs follow the train, attempting to recover Marna and proceed with the marriage. Of course, Jimmie has the Fairbanksian athleticism but the poor reverend simply cannot keep up and Jimmie can’t leave him behind. Meanwhile, Marna has her own schemes and is assisted by a sympathetic hotel maid (Winifred Westover).
In its review, trade magazine Motion Picture News described it as “another Douglas Fairbanks vehicle should prove welcome to his followers, although it can hardly be expected to win him new admirers… the story was spread over five reels only after careful stretching.”
That is accurate, the plot of The Matrimaniac never becomes more complex than “outrun father, get married” but I don’t think that is a bad thing. There’s always something refreshing about a quick and efficient “this is why this movie was made” kind of picture. We go to a Fairbanks film to see stunts and antics and The Matrimaniac doesn’t dawdle with anything else, it’s a chase from the word go and we quickly have Doug leaping and dashing about as he tries win the hand of Constance. Despite being modern and far less complicated than his swashbucklers, the 1910s Fairbanks films did tend to get bogged down in plot at times, particularly if they were written-directed by John Emerson and Anita Loos, which they frequently were.
My issue with some of the early Fairbanks pictures involving this duo (Wild and Woolly in particular) is that the writing doesn’t resemble normal human behavior but clearly the writers clearly think it does, so we end up with Doug merrily killing his way through the wild west. This is clearly meant to be a happy ending and maybe it was to them. (The duo were quite retrograde in their ideas, charmed by colonialism, women don’t need the vote, etc. Indeed, Fairbanks did his best work without them.) Loos was likely involved in The Matrimaniac, trade magazines were certain she wrote the title cards, but the story is so direct and so bonkers that there isn’t much room for anything else.
Director Paul Powell keeps things moving and move they do, to the point that the current version of the film doesn’t even break 50 minutes. A sub-one-hour feature was not an unusual thing in the 1910s but this feature feels like an extended short in many ways. There are no subplots, no further complications beyond the father’s increasingly desperate ploys to stop the marriage. Again, this isn’t a bad thing but it is quite simple for a feature of the time.
The supporting cast helps quite a bit. I particularly liked veteran performer Fred Warren’s work as Rev Tubbs. The reverend is absolutely not accustomed to racing after trains, getting arrested and trying to sneak a wedding in under the nose of the police and he can’t keep up with the enthusiastic Jimmie but he remains a trouper, ready and willing to do what it takes to get those kids married. (Constant and increasingly generous I.O.U. notes from the wealthy Jimmie help as well.) Warren’s “I’m too old for this but I will try anyhow” energy is a perfect counterweight to the Fairbanks pep.
Constance Talmadge doesn’t have as much to do here as she would in her own rom-coms but I prefer early Constance, before she developed such a habit of mugging for the camera. She doesn’t try to match Fairbanks in stunts but instead goes for cunning and manages to make a monkey out of both her father and Wally as she manages to get married under their noses.
Motography, another trade magazine, like the picture a lot and recommended it to its readers. “The exhibitor who shows Fairbanks pictures knows what they are good for at the box-office; all he needs to know is whether or not The Matrimaniac is up to the standard. It is, and a little bit higher.”
And that’s about right. If you were curious about the work of Douglas Fairbanks before he went all in for costume pictures, this is an excellent place to start. The charm and pluck is there. There aren’t any major showstopper stunts (the telephone wire walk is nice, though) but a consistent level of quality as he weaves his way across the screen. All in all, a fine and entertaining bit of light filmmaking.
Where can I see it?
Released as part of Flicker Alley’s Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer box set.
☙❦❧
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