Not Guilty!

Charles Puffy has just got the marriage license, but he steps into the wrong judge's chamber and finds himself on trial for murdering his wife.

It's a funny black comedy under the direction of Harry Sweet, in which drunken witnesses identify Puffy as the villain who married his wife in the bathroom because she repeatedly opened the medicine cabinet while he was trying to shave. There are a couple of Von-Stroheim-like shots, showing the enraged Puffy, then cut to the confused and round-faced innocent.

Puffy was born in Hungary and achieved popularity there, then moved to Germany, and thence to Hollywood, where he was hired by Universal in 1926. In 1928, with sound looming, he lost his contract, and returned to Germany. When the Nazis took over, it was back to Hungary, and when the Nazis arrived there.... well, he and his wife disappeared. No one knows what the circumstances were precisely.

Not many of Puffy's Universal shorts survived. This one was thought gone until a 16mm. Print turned up at the Library of Congress.