A Reckless Romeo
1917 film by Roscoe Arbuckle
A Reckless Romeo is a 1917 American two-reel short silent comedy film directed by and starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
Plot
A philandering husband's public flirtation with a beautiful girl—and the resulting brawl with the woman's boyfriend—are captured by a newsreel cameraman. When the husband takes his wife and her mother out to the movies, the footage is shown on-screen. The husband tries to flee the theater, only to be spotted and leaped upon by the woman's boyfriend, treating viewers to two simultaneous fights between the same two men, both on-screen and in the aisle.
Cast
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle as Husband
Al St. John as Rival
Corinne Parquet as Wife
Agnes Neilson as Mother-in-Law
Alice Lake as Girl in Park
Jimmy Bryant
Joe Bordeaux as Newsreel director (uncredited)
Production
The film was released by the Comique Film Corporation when it and many other early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at the beginning of the 20th century. Some shots were done at Palisades Amusement Park.
The film was originally produced in New Jersey as one of Arbuckle's last Keystone pictures. Filmed between July and September 1916 and later sold to Paramount, it was released as a Comique film on May 21, 1917, after The Butcher Boy and before The Rough House.
Censorship
Before A Reckless Romeo could be exhibited in Kansas, the Kansas Board of Review required the elimination of a scene where a policeman loses his pants, and the two intertitles "I left our address with the stork," and "He never left that one."
Preservation status
Thought to have been lost, until a damaged print was discovered in 1998 in the Norwegian Film Archive in an unmarked canister with another lost Arbuckle short, The Cook (1918).
“A Reckless Romeo” enters the record as 1917 film by Roscoe Arbuckle. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Reckless, Romeo and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“A Reckless Romeo” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Reckless, Romeo and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3067286. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1916, 1998 and 1918.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Reckless Romeo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.