Joseph Cawthorn


I don't love this move - a little too much "extravaganza" for my taste and some more than usually offputting racial attitudes - but it's worth watching once just for the delightful Joseph Cawthorn (Mr. Van Horn). He made an entire career of playing a gruff but henpecked husband, and he's in terrific form here and the rich, tubby lowbrow married to a bruiser with social pretensions and a whim of iron.

To get a flavor of Cawthorn's humor, here's a legal download from Archaeophone of his 1916 hit, "I Can Dance with Everybody But My Wife." Here again he plays the small man dominated by a large wife who, in this case, insists on his learning to dance with her. The heart simply bleeds when he relates how he's "even taken pains/ to ask my wife to put on chains/ because I know that if she ever skids I'm gone." Enjoy! :-)

http://www.archeophone.com/sounds/9010/ICanDance.wma

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