Matrimony's Speed Limit (1913)
Told as a prank that he must marry by noon to collect an inheritance, a young man frantically proposes to every woman he meets, while his real sweetheart races across town to reach him before his panic drives him to a rash marriage — or worse.
Matrimony’s Speed Limit was directed by Alice Guy Blaché, one of cinema’s first filmmakers and the founder of her own studio, Solax; it survives as one of only around 150 of her films still extant out of the more than a thousand she made or oversaw.
Background
Matrimony’s Speed Limit was written, produced, and directed by Alice Guy Blaché for her own studio, Solax, in Fort Lee, New Jersey — one of the first women to run a film studio and, by the mid-1910s, one of cinema’s most prolific early directors, credited with having made or supervised more than a thousand films. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2003, and its preservation was financed in part by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, established in 1995 specifically to restore films by women directors. Only around 150 of Guy Blaché’s films are known to survive.
What to watch for
The plot turns on a prank: told he must marry by noon to collect an inheritance, Fraunie Fraunholz’s character panics and proposes to every woman he encounters, while Marian Swayne, playing his actual sweetheart, races to reach him before his panic drives him into a hasty marriage to someone else. The farce builds to a last-minute rescue timed almost to the second, a structure that depends on crosscutting between the two converging story lines, an editing technique still relatively fresh in American film comedy at the time. The ending, played for speed and timing rather than slapstick, is a good showcase for how tightly Guy Blaché could construct a one-reel comedy.
