The Playhouse, one of Buster Keaton's most fondly remembered short comedies, offers an unforgettable prologue set in a vaudeville theater, where Buster portrays every performer on stage—including an entire minstrel troupe—as well as every member of the audience. It's a virtuoso display. In 1929, eight years after The Playhouse was produced, Lupino Lane crafted a comedy called Only Me, in which he took the same basic idea and expanded it to two reels: his film, also set in a vaudeville theater, offers multiple Lupino Lanes (some of which were doubled by his brother, Wallace Lupino) on stage and in the audience. But surprisingly, another and lesser known silent film comedian, Marcel Perez, actually got there first, and explored this idea years ahead of either Keaton or Lane, in a long-forgotten short from 1916 called A Busy Night.
Born in Madrid, Perez was appearing in films in Europe as early as 1907, then came to the US after the outbreak of the Great War. He appeared in dozens of American-made short comedies for a variety of companies, but never achieved the stardom enjoyed by the era's top comedy stars, perhaps in part because he changed his screen name repeatedly: he was variously known as Robinet, Bungles, Tweedledum, Tweedie, etc. In recent years Perez has finally gained appreciation among silent comedy buffs, thanks largely to the efforts of film historian Steve Massa, who has written a biography of the man and endeavored to make his surviving films available through public screenings and DVD releases.
A Busy Night should serve as an ideal introduction to this under-appreciated performer. In the very first shot, we are shown a life size cutout of Perez, dressed in a tux like a stage magician, displaying a number of miniature images of himself in various guises. And then the star himself, looking very dapper, steps out in front of the cutout and grins at the camera. What follows initially appears to be a conventional comedy: Perez, or "Tweedledum" as he is called here, is a drunken swell who creates a disturbance at a posh club for men. Ejected from the premises, he stumbles home. Alone in his apartment he waxes eloquent, condemns all humankind for incivility, and exclaims: "Ah, if everyone was like me in this world! Some Paradise!" Whereupon he passes out, falls into a deep dream state, and gets his wish.
It all begins with a Big Bang: the very earth itself explodes, and Tweedledum is blown into the air, lands on a desert island—somewhere in the cosmos?—and finds that the only other inhabitant is a flirtatious native girl (also played by Perez). Romance blossoms. A title card helpfully announces: "1,000 Years After," and we find this mysterious planet populated with Tweedledum clones. After that outlandish set-up, the story which unfolds seems superficially like a typical Keystone-style comedy: a wife conducts a romance with a lover behind her husband's back; her husband goes hunting, shoots game out of season and runs afoul of a local sheriff; the hunter returns home unexpectedly, forcing the lover to hide in the closet; the lover is discovered and chased; police are summoned, etc. But here there's one major difference: every character on screen is played by Marcel Perez.
How does he do it? Very cleverly. The trick effects combine precise inter-cutting, doubling (i.e. by an actor of the same height & build as Perez who keeps his face turned away from the camera), and occasional deftly executed split-screen effects. The filmmakers pull this off with admirable skill. And beyond the camera trickery Perez displays great energy and resilience as a performer: the short reaches a climax when he is hoisted out of the ocean by an immense crane and dumped onto a pier, a genuinely impressive stunt. The film as we see it today ends somewhat abruptly, but my guess is that it originally concluded with a wrap-up sequence depicting Tweedledum's rude awakening.
According to the opening credits, Marcel Perez plays a total of sixteen parts in A Busy Night. I didn't stop to add them up, but that sounds about right. What the plain arithmetic doesn't capture is the sheer exhilaration of the experience, as conveyed by Perez and his colleagues. They look like they were having a blast doing this! And that pleasure still comes across when we view the film today.
