Alice Guy Blaché | His Double / 1912

mirroring the count

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Guy Blaché (writer and director) His Double / 1912

 

In several of Alice Guy Blaché’s films she introduces issues of “doubling,” relating it to the process of dressing up in costume which often in her early works is represented by cross-dressing. Three of the most notable examples appear, I presume not by accident, in the early selections in Kino Pictures DVD collection, Alice Guy Blaché Volume 2: The Solax Years. The three films His Double (1912), Cousins of Sherlocko (1913), and Officer Henderson (1913)—the latter also titled in some instances, What Happened to Officer Henderson, the title I prefer because it opens it up to other, personal issues that might lay outside the story—help us to comprehend something that one almost might say “haunts” many of her films.

       The first of these, if we look back through the years since her early contributions, has become almost a standard trope of heterosexual film comedy. Grace (Blanche Cornwall) loves Jack (Darwin Karr), but Mr. Burleston, her father, is furious about his very presence in the house. He intends to marry her off to a foppish count who wears a ludicrous upturned moustache and spends hours a day preening himself in the mirror, mostly stoking his mustache into the upright position—almost as if it were another body appendage—and running his hands through his hair. Grace cannot stand the sight of him and immediately sends him packing.

       Jack notices the Count as he exits the house and quickly returns to Grace once his rival has left with a splendid idea. He will dress up exactly as the count, win her hand, and marry her before her father discovers the truth. As the intertitles declare, “All’s fair in love and war.”

      He immediately does transform himself into the lookalike count, truly becoming “his double,” and returns to Grace who is so irritated that the Count has returned to woo her that she violently slaps his face. Jack laughs at the mistake and the two are delighted to discover how successful he has managed to look just like their mutual enemy. Jack also has another idea, that Grace should dress up like spirit holding a gun.

       Meanwhile, inexplicably, workers come to remove a cracked mirror in the living room, which will soon play an important role in the series of comic events.

       When the Count returns, Jack stands behind the empty frame, and as Grace’s unpopular suitor peers into it to look himself over, Jack stands up to serve as the man’s reflection. Not nearly as funny, but certainly establishing the comic situation of the Marx Brothers’ routine in Duck Soup (1933), Jack imitates the motions of the Count, totally revealing his vanity, and when his double turns briefly away quickly sticking out his tongue to mock him.

       Greeting the Count, who leaves in one direction, Grace’s father is startled to see the man returning immediately after from the other room, commenting on the strangeness of the event, which leads the Count to wonder if his possible father-in-law is truly sane. When the Count moves off to the next room and encounters the ghostly Grace dressed in a shawl with a gun pointing at his head, he quickly jumps out the window falling into a bucket of water that Jack has placed there for precisely his exit.

        The remaining Count (Jack) suddenly declares that Grace loves him and orders a minister to be brought to the house immediately so that they might be married. The delighted father calls for the minister who arrives and quickly marries the couple at the very same moment that the now dripping wet Count returns to face his double, kissing his intended wife.

        Jack tells his new father-in-law that you can’t blame any man who outwits another.

 

Los Angeles, May 20, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).