Wilfrid North | Bunny's Honeymoon / 1913 [Difficult to obtain or lost]

the cure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Thomas (screenplay), Wilfrid North (director) Bunny’s Honeymoon / 1913 | difficult to obtain or lost

 

In this 11-minute film from 1913, John Bunny is visited by his niece, Valeria (Dorothy Kelly) who explains that she is love with an alcoholic young man whom her father won’t let her marry. The father has given the kid a break, but having encountered him drinking once more, he has demanded that his daughter break off with her relationship.

      What can she do? How do you cure a drunkard?

      Always looking for an opportunity to show off his cross-dressing skills, Bunny brings the drunken kid, Cutey (Wally Van) home, whereupon he dresses up in feminine attire and hires out several children for the morning ritual. When the boy awakens, a bit woozy, the very next morning he is told that Bunny is his wife, previously widowed and left with a passel of badly behaving brats.

      Shocked by the situation, Cutey vows that alcohol shall never again cross his lips. And Valeria and he can now be happily married.

       You might say that Bunny has gone a bit too far in this one, bringing hope to a cute drunken boy and luring him into bed in drag, all to be witnessed by children and adolescents. But silent film writers and directors, it seems, seldom realized the implications of their comic devices. Or perhaps they realized all too well and chuckled at their audiences' ready acceptance.

 

Los Angeles, February 8, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (February 2022).