Doubling for Romeo

Synopsis: Feature film. A burlesque. Sam Cody is a clumsy cowboy who, because he is a diffident lover, loses his girlfriend, Lulu, to another man. Sam goes to a film studio to learn how to make love as they do in the movies. He works as a stunt double, first as a villain and then as a lover and fails as both. When he returns home Lulu says she will not have him until he can woo her like Romeo. He falls asleep while reading Romeo and Juliet and dreams of himself as Romeo with his girlfriend as Juliet. In the dream characters in the frame story fade in individually and are transformed into the characters of the play. Includes a burlesque of the balcony scene, a quarrel with Tybalt, A Capulet feast from which Romeo escapes, Douglas Fairbanks style, by swinging on a rope (Fairbanks is Lulu’s hero)- all accompanied by jokes and quips in the intertitles.
Country: United States
Medium: Film
Technical information: Black-and-white / Silent
Year of release: 1921
Recording date: 23 Oct 1921
Duration: 66 mins; 6,000 feet

Director

Clarence Badger

Producer

Samuel Goldwyn

Cinematographer

Marcel Le Picard

Screenplay

Bernard McConville

Production Design

Cedric Gibbons

Art Direction

Cedric Gibbons

Cast

Stills: Ball reproduces a still of Rogers and Breamer on the balcony from the collection at the Wisconsin Center for Theatre Research..
Reviews: Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968 (p. 267-8).