Skinner's Dress Suit

The best of comic actor Reginald Denny's silent vehicles, Skinner's Dress Suit is a surprising contemporary piece about status-seeking. Denny is an office worker whose wife Laura LaPlante hectors him into asking for a raise. Not only does Denny get the extra dough, but he's asked to take a cut in salary. Nonetheless, he tells LaPlante that he's gotten the increase, whereupon she delightedly makes plans to spend several hundred dollars on home and wardrobe improvements. Denny is fitted out with a new dress suit, which makes him a social success--and obliges him to stay one step ahead of the tailor whenever he's behind in his payments. Just when it appears as though Denny will be swamped in debt, a series of cute coincidences transform him into his office's most valued employee. This second film adaptation of Henry Irving Dodge's novel Skinner's Dress Suit is a vast improvement upon the 1917 filming, with a peppy Charleston sequence thrown in as a bonus.