Live Your Life Smiling

The only complete survivor of Pauline Brunius's six Vinner-family shorts, Swedish situation comedies that played in front of the feature in 1920 to 1924. Olof and Frida Winnerstrand, a real married couple from the Stockholm stage, play a lawyer and his wife; Brunius's son Palle is their boy Putte. One morning Mrs. Vinner, reading the Swedish edition of Douglas Fairbanks's self-help book Laugh and Live (Lev livet leende), tells her grouchy husband to take the slogan as a rule. He smiles at everyone. He is taken for a drunk, a madman, and a flirt. He ends by sending Fairbanks a bill for pain and suffering. Brunius, who would become the first woman to run the Royal Dramatic Theatre, never mentioned these films in her memoirs. This one is the proof she could already do what sitcoms would later industrialize: a single comic premise, run until it breaks.