The Mystery of “Honeymoon Hardships”

In his memoir, The Keystone Kid: Tales of Early Hollywood, Coy Watson, Jr., devoted considerable space to the Mack Sennett Comedies short “Honeymoon Hardships” (1925).

That section, headed “The Craziest Picture I Ever Worked On,” runs for nine pages, longer than any other in the book.

About half those pages are about learning to swim, which young Coy did in order to work on that movie safely. The rest describe the filming, limited of course to the scenes Coy himself appeared in.

Watson recalled two scenes in detail: a dinner party interrupted by the explosion of a water heater upstairs and a car full of relatives driving into and out of a lake.

According to Watson, the dinner party involved some pratfalls and gags with mashed potatoes, followed by the rain of lots of debris. The drive into the lake was performed in a disguised swimming pool, and the principal difficulty was getting all the cast, including plump actress Sunshine Hart, to fully submerge. On top of it all, some of the cast (including young Coy) were to find this all extremely laughable while others acted aghast and dead-pan.

“Honeymoon Hardships” can now be viewed on Youtube and the Internet Archive. It contains neither of those scenes.

Some other details of the movie don’t match what Watson wrote. He recalled the director as Del Lord. Modern references credit Ralph Ceder. Watson described his fellow child actors, the White triplets, as playing “city kids”; they appear to be from another country family. He dated the film to 1924, which was when he worked on it, but it was released in January 1925.

Filmographers have found inaccuracies in The Keystone Kid, not surprising in a memoir about working as a child in a poorly documented industry decades earlier.

In this case, however, Watson’s book offers two stills taken on the set, clearly showing him interacting with the White triplets and the movie’s adult cast: Hart, Billy Bevan, Alice Day, Raymond McKee, and so on.

Coy, Jr., barely appears in the surviving print, but he can be glimpsed in a couple of scenes—as the family decides to go fishing and then piles into their car, there are four boys instead of just three. So he was there.

Furthermore, the dynamic Watson described with a rural family laughing at one disaster after another while visiting honeymooners try to endure is indeed the main theme of the movie. The scenes Watson recalled could easily fit into the scenario on screen. He also wrote about his father working on special effects for those scenes, and we know Coy Watson, Sr., had that specialty.

My first thought about this discrepancy is that the 21-minute version on the web had been edited down from a longer original to fit the needs of a reissue or for television. However, an advertisement for “Honeymoon Hardships” said it was two reels, or about 20 minutes long. In all likelihood, we’re seeing what Sennett released to theaters.

I therefore conclude that the scenes Coy Watson, Jr., worked on so hard and remembered so vividly decades later were left out of the final cut.

The Sennett studio may have felt the movie needed a stronger climax. “Honeymoon Hardships” now ends with a train chase and the husband rescuing his new wife from a charging cow, with a hint that they’re never going back to their country cousins. That provides an ending to the story arc. Maybe Del Lord filmed the original scenes and Ralph Ceder oversaw the reshoots, thus getting final credit for the picture.

However it happened, there’s a version of “Honeymoon Hardships” with some elaborate special-effect scenes that survived only in Coy Watson, Jr.’s memories.