When Julius discovers his wife in the arms of another man, his neighbors tell him to go jump in the river. Instead, he hatches a madcap plan to win her back.
Home Media Availability: Stream courtesy of Sprocket Vault
Whistling Through the Graveyard
I suppose I should open this by mentioning that The Merry Widower is not actually a spoof of The Merry Widow, just a goofy play on the hit film title for an unrelated comedy. All the Hollywood silent comedy houses did this to a certain extent but Hal Roach’s place sure seemed to do it a lot. I am particularly partial to Are Parents Pickles?, which was a play on Are Parents People?
The Merry Widower was actually a sendup of then-popular marital dramedies (Cecil B. DeMille had made them his stock in trade with hits like Don’t Change Your Husband and Why Change Your Wife?). It was a vehicle for Scottish comedian James Finlayson (while he was still billed as “Jimmie”) and was directed by Roach staffer Richard Wallace, with Stan Laurel. Laurel was Finlayson’s personal friend and would, of course, later feature him in the films he made with comedy partner Oliver Hardy. (Laurel was also quite the expert spoofer, genuinely sending up Hollywood hits with Mud and Sand and Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde.)
The film also features the 1920s Hal Roach signature of a large role for a faded star. Roach was out to class up the joint with big names, even if they were a bit shopworn, and had successfully signed Theda Bara, Lionel Barrymore and Gladys Hulette, all of whom had careers that had seen better days in the 1910s. (Though Barrymore would make a full comeback.) This time around, the star is Ethel Clayton, who had scored a hit with Lubin in 1915 with The Great Divide but whose career was on the downturn.
Tyler Brooke plays an apartment building Romeo who has fallen for the woman in the window across the way (Clayton). He impresses her with a soulful violin performance (via Victrola) but she won’t ask him over because she is married to Julian (Finlayson).
Julian has been off shooting at a duck but returns home only to receive an arrow in the pants with a note from Tyler to Ethel. He begs her to be his. Infuriated, Julian hides in the grandfather clock (I did giggle at this foreshadowing of Laura). Tyler threatens to shoot himself if Ethel will not be his but then the gun in his pocket gets tangled and begins shooting from his trousers. The neighbors are roused, Julian declares that Ethel is unfaithful and crowdsources whether he should take her back. All the neighbors declare that she should go to Jack and Julian should go drown himself. (1926 was very much like 2026, it seems. Never ask a crowd for an binding answer to anything!)
Julian can’t quite manage to drown himself and instead drowns his sorrows in the bottle… of Worcestershire sauce. (I love the visual humor of using the classic paper Lea & Perrins wrapper to mimic the old-school alcohol-in-paper-bag. The gag made me cackle.) Charley Chase, in a cameo role, plays a fellow drunk who gets rid of Julian by making him think he swallowed a mouse.
Meanwhile, Ethel thinks Julian is dead but can’t move forward without a body. She calls a spirit medium (his business card reads: “Mahatama, Master of the Spirit World, Not a Bootlegger”) to locate his corpse. Julian, now a hansom cab driver, happens to pick up Mahatama and hatches a plan. He knocks the spiritualist out, puts on his clothes and decides that he will win his wife back through supernatural trickery.
I try to make a point of not reading any modern reviews of a silent film before I tackle it myself but I did notice that a fair number of reviews found this film to be slow and lacking in plot. I have to say, I enjoyed the pacing and the plot makes absolutely no sense… which is also a Hal Roach staple! Most of the best Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang shorts basically just trailed off at the end and were all the better for it. And it’s a lot of fun to see gags that would later be reused by Laurel and Hardy, like the missing husband falling into whitewash and making people believe they have seen a ghost (The Live Ghost).
I also think that the viewer will get a lot more pleasure out of this short if they have already seen a few of those marital dramedies. This film pokes at several of the more popular tropes (oily seducer entering into the marriage, madcap plots to win back the wandering spouse) and skates on the edge of spoof and slapstick, all supported by Beanie Walker title cards.
I don’t know, this short just tickled my fancy and I would even say it has become one of my favorite Roach shorts of the period. It has just the right combination of the madcap and the macabre. In fact, the final act heads right into horror-comedy territory with the action taking place in a graveyard and the characters dashing around through the tombstones and interacting with a character who may or may not be a guardian of the entrance to the underworld.
Quite often, the stars signed by Roach would kind of just go with the flow and not interact heavily with the more eccentric characters but Clayton rolls up her sleeves and gets down to business, gamely running around tombstones and dodging bullets fired by her male costars. It’s a shame she didn’t stick around with Roach because she and the rest of the cast seemed to be enjoying themselves.
James Finlayson is, of course, most famous for playing fiery antagonist in Laurel and Hardy pictures and what makes this short work so well is that he is such a thorough louse that nobody is really rooting for him to win– but we don’t like his rival either! A Team Nobody comedy is always a bit of a risk but nobody could pull that sort of thing off quite like Stan Laurel in his prime and I see his fingerprints all over the film. Finlayson brings his signature peppery manner to tie it all up with a ribbon.
This isn’t the most famous comedy short of the silent era but it suited me perfectly and delivered some genuine belly laughs that I sorely needed.
Where can I see it?
Stream courtesy of the Sprocket Vault.
☙❦❧
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Movies Silently 