Mr. Fix-it

"This sparkling 1918 romantic comedy from director Allan Dwan catches Douglas Fairbanks on the cusp of superstardom. Fairbanks stars as Remington, aka Mr. Fix-It, a happy-go-lucky American at Oxford whose school chum, Reginald Burroughs (Leslie Stuart), has been called back to the States by his starchy, upper-crust aunts (Ida Waterman, Alice Smith, Mrs. H.R. Hanckock) and uncle (Frank Campeau) whom he hasn’t seen in 15 years. Reginald knows his snobbish family will never approve of his English fiancée (Marjorie Daw), so Remington offers to go in his place, impersonating Reginald long enough to (hopefully) change everyone's minds. “Reginald” arrives in America to find his aunts have arranged for his marriage to an unhappy debutante (Margaret Landis), but he soon finds a true love of his own when meets Mary (Wanda Hawley), a poor orphan who has been left to care for her much younger brothers and sisters. As the irrepressible MR. FIX-IT sets about playing matchmaker while untangling numerous romantic complications, what begins as a genteel comedy-of-manners culminates in a fast-paced chase across tenement rooftops and down through the city streets, showcasing just the kind of physical derring-do that would soon make Fairbanks the biggest male movie star in the world. George Eastman House’s preservation of MR. FIX-IT began in the early 2000s using the only known copy of the film in existence: a fully tinted nitrate print that had arrived at Eastman House as part of the Roberto Palme Collection. From this rare element a duplicate negative and color positive print of the film were made, but like many U.S. silent films exported for international distribution, the original English language intertitles had been replaced with a foreign language translation. Thanks to generous funding provided by William and Nancy Goessel, the Goessel Family Foundation and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, all 160 titles have now been painstakingly restored to English and printed using t