| He Did and He Didn't | |
| Director: | Roscoe Arbuckle |
| Producer: | Mack Sennett (uncredited) |
| Starring: | Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle Mabel Normand |
| Cinematography: | Elgin Lessley (uncredited) |
| Studio: | The Keystone Film Company |
| Distributor: | Triangle Keystone Mack Sennett Production |
| Runtime: | 20 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | Silent (English intertitles) |
He Did and He Didn't is a 1916 American short comedy film starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Mabel Normand.[1]
The dark plot, extremely sophisticated for its time, involves a corpulent husband who finds himself consumed by jealousy when his wife's dashingly handsome old schoolmate unexpectedly turns up for dinner. The film was also written and directed by Arbuckle.
Because it was billed as a comedy, the ending attributes the assumptions of the husband, including the murder, to eating bad lobster. After several lighthearted comedies featuring Mabel Normand and Roscoe Arbuckle, this seemed to be an added dimension to film genre in general, in that it attributed serious jealousy fantasies to human nature, but still managed to maintain a cheerful demeanor overall in its approximate 20 minutes. It may be the first "dramedy" in existence.
The film was shot when many early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at the beginning of the 20th century.