Tragedy of the Dress Suit

Down on his luck Dell Henderson gets lucky with saucy young heiress Mabel Normand, but when he 'borrows' his unpaid landlord's dress suit to wear to her swanky party he sows the seeds for his own downfall. A fairly lame comedy (for which Normand is credited as writer) from Mack Sennett. Not sure why the plain and portly Henderson kept getting roles in which he won over Normand; not only is he not a good match, he's not a particularly good actor. The comic moment arrives in the final scene, and relies upon women feinting at the sight of a man without his trousers.

Down-at-the-heels Dell Henderson is sitting on a park bench when buddy William Beaudine tells him about a swell party. The problem is that Dell doesn't have a dress suit, but his boarding-house landlord, Ford Sterling does, so Dell "borrows" it. He's a big hit, too, with Mabel Normand and the others, at least until Sterling catches up with him.

This is one of the last short comedies that Mack Sennett directed for Biograph, the month before he became head of his own production company, Keystone, and he's already busting loose from the polite standards imposed on him by his bosses at Biograph and Griffith. Although people still act normally -- mostly -- there's a fairly shocking and funny ending. It's unfortunate the only easily available print is the old one drawn several decades ago from the Library of Congress paper print collection, before they established new transfer mechanisms. Perhaps they'll make a new transfer of this one soon.