Mighty Like a Moose

In the annals of silent comedy, few premises are as delightfully perverse as the one found in Mighty Like a Moose. Mr. Moose, played with a frantic, buck-toothed energy by Charley Chase, and his wife, portrayed by Vivien Oakland—who sports a prosthetic nose of Cyrano-level proportions—decide independently to seek the wonders of modern plastic surgery. Without informing one another, they both undergo radical transformations on the same afternoon. When they cross paths later that day, neither recognizes their spouse. What follows is a bizarre, recursive comedy of infidelity where a husband and wife, now conventionally attractive, attempt to seduce one another under the guise of being total strangers. It is a film that weaponizes vanity and marital boredom into a twenty-minute masterclass of situational irony.