A Busy Night

Jimmy Aubrey causes chaos in China.

King Ferdinand of Sodonje (King Ferdinand Saronoff) is threatened with an attack. When a tourist who resembles him shows up at the palace, the king suggests that they switch clothes with each other. The fake king signs a document, and thereby signs his own death sentence. He manages to avoid the firing squad just in time, and asks for his own clothes back, but the real king refuses.

Robinet, the lead in this Italian slapstick comedy, wants to be an aviator in the worst way, and this being an Italian slapstick, that's how he does it. Italian slapstick in this period was absolutely bone-breaking, so much so that it makes Keystone slapstick look like drawing-room comedy by contrast.

The new maid and her mistress devise a plan to foil the men in the house. ...[The mistress of the house finds her chambermaid using her toiletries.]... She is dismissed and the lady advertises for a new maid. The new maid arrives at the front gate and the bemused gate keeper lets her in. The page boy sees her walking up to the house and admires her beauty. She is shown in to meet her new master, who also admires her, and mistress.

Robinet gets punched by a boxer in the ring and decides to challenge him for a match. To win, he needs to train as much as he can.

Saturnino Farandola: Raised by monkeys, taken in by sailors, captain of a frigate. He sets off to chart unknown worlds with his loyal crew. Beneath the sea he encounters love in the person of Mysora the beautiful. On land he comes up against a mad wise man, a Machiavellian mandarin and bloodthirsty Apaches, but nothing will be able to stop his desire to explore.

The story of the meeting and falling in love of a man and a woman. The story is told by showing the characters from below the knees only. A man in smart shoes prepares to go out. His maid gives him his coat, he dusts off his shoes and leaves. As he leaves the building an elegant woman drops her purse. He returns it to her and follows her home.

In this play on the symmetry of black and white, Robinet leaves home in his bright new suit for a stroll through a blackening industrial landscape. (MoMA)

Perez plays a henpecked husband who is chained at the neck by his wife in the kitchen and when he tries to stand up for himself, she throws him out of the window where he is dangling for dear life.Once she sends him to the store, Tweedy becomes smitten by a stage actress and tries to woo her with great success until his wife shows up on the scene and all hell breaks loose with cartoon gags.

Robinet is jealous, with comedic results.

While Robinette's old admirer isn't at home, she secretly meets Robinet. Suddenly the man returns and Robinet is forced to disguise himself as a woman.

Helen offers herself in marriage to the winner of a poker game in order to obtain money to replace what her brother has stolen. Antonio, a half-breed, is the winner, but Helen is saved from fulfilling her bet by Bruce Devereux when he doubles the stakes and wins the girl. She marries Bruce but leaves for New York when she finds the marriage to be a fake one. There she marries her previous music teacher, but he proves to be faithless, leaving her with a small son. Bruce returns and assures her he had not arranged for a fake marriage. Her present husband, not able to cope with the pressures of his many affairs, kills himself, leaving Helen free to remarry Bruce.

Robinet brings down the house when he unleashes himself on Mimi Kratzfuss , an attractive opera singer, during a music hall performance.

A hapless nitwit sets up his living space in the middle of a street, then moves to a police station, then gets a job in a movie studio, with calamitous results.

A 1916 short comedy starring Marcel Perez

Robinet disguises himself as a woman to get away from his girlfriend’s husband, and discovers the unexpected pleasures of public drag amidst mobs of flirtatious men. (MoMA)