He Did and He Didn’t

He Did and He Didn’t (1916)

A doctor, very much in love with his beautiful wife, comes to suspect that her visiting childhood friend Jack is more than just a friend. Jack's intentions are honorable, but everything he does tends to show his actions in a suspicious light, especially when burglars invade the house and Jack and the wife are caught together in their nightclothes.

Date of release
1916-01-29
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (10)
Runtime
26m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Roscoe Arbuckle

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Fort Lee

He Did and He Didn't is a 1916 American silent short comedy film starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Mabel Normand.

Production

The dark plot, extremely sophisticated for its time, involves a corpulent husband who finds himself consumed by jealousy when his wife's dashingly handsome old schoolmate unexpectedly turns up for dinner. The film was also written and directed by Arbuckle.

Because it was billed as a comedy, the ending attributes the assumptions of the husband, including the murder, to eating bad lobster. After several lighthearted comedies featuring Mabel Normand and Roscoe Arbuckle, this seemed to be an added dimension to film genre in general, in that it attributed serious jealousy fantasies to human nature, but still managed to maintain a cheerful demeanor overall in its approximate 20 minutes.

The film was shot when many early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at the beginning of the 20th century.

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