User Reviews

Her father wants Blanche Cornwall to marry the penniless French count. She prefers the big American suitor. To put one over on daddy, the American makes himself up with a silly mustache, and now no one can tell them apart.

All right, it's not a new story. It's one of perhaps a thousand or so short comedies with the same plot, and there are bits of it that happen because it will enable a particular gag. However, one of the gags has the suitors doing the mirror routine, best remembered from the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP. It's an old routine, and seems to have arisen in the 1840s in French stage comedy. Many comics have done it, including Max Linder, and Lucille Ball. It's handled neatly here.

Rightly, the mirror scene in "Duck Soup" is one of the most famous bits of comedic genius caught on film, and even Wikipedia notes that the routine had its antecedents in Max Linder's "Seven Years Bad Luck" (1921), Harold Lloyd's "The Marathon" (1919) and Charlie Chaplin's "The Floorwalker" (1916). I wouldn't be surprised if it had older roots than that, perhaps to the stage, because here it is again in an even earlier variation in Alice Guy's "His Double."

Although not technically sophisticated, with its tendency for poor camera placement and tableau style of title cards, "His Double" does contain a thorough mirror motif within its one reel. Not only for the cracked mirror being removed allowing for the gag of a man disguised as another man figuratively and literally mirroring him, but also for two scenes where characters prepare to pretend other characters. Actors playing actors, with a mistaken-identity farce ensuing. In other productions, such as "Cousins of Sherlocko" and "Officer Henderson" (both 1913), Guy's actors cross-dressed to similar effect, with the former also including a double. In this one, though, the boy, Jack, pretends to be the Count, so as to fool the father into allowing his marriage to his daughter. The daughter, Grace, dresses up as a ghost with a gun to scare the real Count into falling out a window. The action and cutting gets appreciably quick during all the hijinks, to the point that even I was a bit confused as to who was authentic and who was the imposter. And that's the point, because the ultimate illusion--the mirror--is cinema. This is one of cleverest and most reflexive films I've seen from Guy.

There is a rather unaccountable belief that this is a lost film but it certainly exists. Many years ago it (or at least most of it) was on youtube as part of an (at least) five-part compilation of Guy's Solax films. Part 5 was the first seven minutes of His Double. When I came back to search for Part 6, the whole lot had vanished. But I can say for absolute certain that the first seven minutes of the film exist and probably so does the rest of the film.

It is a not very good film. - the usual story of a father who is determined his daughter should marry a count leading the boyfriend to dress up as the count in order to thwart his plans. He also gets the girl to pretend to be a ghost. That is as far as the first seven minutes takes you.

Sadly the most important part of the film comes later with the two counts wadering around and throughly confusing the father but meeting at one point either side of a mirror whose glass has been removed for repair (the removal comes in the first seven minutes - this is exactly the same preparation for what follows later used by Max Linder in Seven Year's Bad Luck). The two look-alikes either side of a non-existent mirror was a vaudeville act with a long history but this film is the first known film use of the gag. Later Chaplin uses it in a referential way (there is no mirror) in The Floorwalker 1916, Charley Chase uses it very elaboratly in Sittin' Pretty 1924 and Max uses it in Seven Year's Bad Luck (rather differently from all other versions, including the later Marx Brothers' Duck Soup version, because the people either side of the mirror do not really resemble each other - a joke in other words, like the Chaplin one, at yet another remove). If anyone has Parts 5 and 6 of that compilation, do us all (and Alice Guy) a big favour and make them available.