Crazy to Marry was released on 28 August 1921, latest film from the immensely popular Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, then the highest paid actor in Hollywood. The film quickly disappeared from the screens after the sudden death of actress Virginia Rappe, and a scandal cooked up by moral reformers crusading against the film industry and by Hearst’s newspapers. Arbuckle was arrested on 11 September and prosecuted for the rape and murder of Rappe. It was the end of his career and the beginning of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, later the Hays Office. The first act of Will H. Hays as president of the newly formed MPPDA was to cancel all bookings and showings of Arbuckle films, nearly 10,000 contracts.
On 12 April 1922, following his third trial, Arbuckle was not only acquitted, he received a formal apology from the jury: “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done to him… there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime… We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of 14 men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.” Six days later, Hays banned Arbuckle from ever working in American movies again. The ban was later lifted, but the former star remained ostracised, a non-person.
A single print of Crazy to Marry, lacking two out of six reels, seems to have survived, in Soviet Russia, where the film was released several times, from 1925 onward. As a result of the excellent relationships between Gosfil’mofond and Jacques Ledoux (1921-1988), director of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, many nitrate prints of non-Soviet films found their way from Belyye Stolby to Brussels during the Cold War. Among them, a print of Crazy to Marry was discovered and recently digitalised by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique.
Special thanks go to Tamara Shvediuk for providing the intertitles of the missing sections.

Mariann Lewinsky