User Reviews

When his fiancee hands back her ring, Arthur Johnson swears off women. When her fiance dumps her, Mary Pickford cries and gives up men. When they sit next to each other on a train, though, everything mistakes their shy attitudes for that of newlyweds.

I think that the reason that so few of D.W. Griffith's comedies for Biograph have been available until now (this and several other rare films have just been posted to the Library of Congress' National Screening Room site), is in part that he used his more elaborate techniques in his dramas, while the comedies depended more on his players' acting; in part because of the snobbish attitude that drama is serious and comedy is ... well, silly, and not art; in part because he handed the comedy over to Frank Powell and Mack Sennett; and in large part because his comedies were rarely the laugh-out-loud farces and burlesques that overwhelmed movie comedy when Sennett struck out on his own. Given his Victorian standards of story-telling, he seemed to be uneasy with making people, particularly young women, the butt of jokes; his comedies were structural, rather than risible.

Occasionally, though, he could turn out a good one, particularly if he had the right actors. He has them here in his two young leads.

Here is one of those funny pictures which are based upon the perversity of fate and the propensity of human nature to do unintended things. To bring a man-hater and a woman-hater together and set Cupid to work in devious and wholly unexpected ways, is worthy the genius of the highest type. In this instance it has been admirably done; and when the friends of the couple begin sending congratulations and presents they seek the wisest way out of the difficulty and determine to let it go at that. The fun lies chiefly in the absurdity of the situations and the fidelity with which they are worked out. The incidental features, like the Anti-Marriage Club, add to the whimsical character of the picture and increase its picturesque and dramatic qualities. It is altogether an unusually pleasing picture. - The Moving Picture World, March 12, 1910

The plot of this laboured comedy from D. W. Griffith would struggle to fill a five-minute running time, but Griffith stretches it out to more than three times that length so that each scene drags on interminably. Arthur V. Johnson is very good as the avowed bachelor mistaken for a new husband, and Mary Pickford is fetching as the young woman mistaken for his bride, but the material is so paper-thin that they can do little to salvage the picture

This was the first Griffith film that was undertaken in the west (California) after being started in New York. Huge tents were erected for the facilitation of this 17 minute piece, and is about a woman-hater (Arthur V. Johnson) who is mistaken for the new bridegroom at a wedding party.