Stealthily game-changing light comedy uses a handsome leading man in a role typically cast with a physical comedian or even a slapstick grotesque. But since that leading man was Douglas Fairbanks, in his breakout film*, it paved the way for dozens of Cary & Hugh Grant types to play these roles in the future. (Come 1920 - ‘21, Fairbanks moved on to the large-scale period adventures he’s best known for.) John Emerson, an actor who really wanted to direct (yep, even in 1916), found a cache of story treatments submitted to Triangle Studios by a young Anita Loos (they soon married) and a young actor (Fairbanks) no one thought could act running out his option. The knockabout farce they made follows Doug, the scion of a health food mogul, who prefers steak & cocktails to plant-based goop, but tries to make good and get his picture in the paper to placate Dad. No less than D.W. Griffith though it unfit for release (Could they cut it down to a short?) and only the delayed delivery of a new feature for its big NYC premiere got this on the screen as temp substitute.* An immediate commercial & critical hit, the Fairbanks, Loos, Emerson team made half-a-dozen like it in 1916 alone. The ones that survive all fun, if in various states of repair. FLIRTING WITH FATE from a few months later, in much better physical shape, and much better directed by Christy Cabanne. But its storyline (despondent Doug hires a hit man on himself . . . than changes his mind) less original.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *As yet, Doug is ‘stash-less’ which gives his face an ‘unfinished’ look.
READ ALL ABOUT IT : *Anita Loos tells the whole unlikely story herself in A GIRL LIKE I. Loos now best known for GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, but as a writer in the early ‘30s, she was Hollywood’s IT girl.
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