Karoly Huzár, born in Budapest in 1888, was a busy European stage and film actor. After going to Hungary’s National Actors’ Society School, he made his professional stage debut in 1905. From then until the early 1920s he was busy performing in all kinds of legitimate theatre and cabaret. His ticket to the movies came from his popularity as the star of a series of “Pufi Huzár” (“Pufi” means “Fatty” in Hungarian) stage sketches, which led to them being made as one-reelers in 1914. The only rare survivor, Vig egyveleg, avagy Pufi es tarsai (1914), chronicles his misadventures trying to buy a pair of shoes. Looking very much like he does in his American comedies, it suggests that these were a blueprint for his later films. By the 1920s Huzár was appearing in character parts in well-known German films such as Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), and in 1924 he begins showing up in Hollywood pictures. Renamed Charles Puffy, he set up shop at Universal, where he became their answer to Fatty Arbuckle in a series of comedies from 1925 to 1928, which found him in the usual slapstick predicaments of trying to avoid an irate wife (as well as other wives’ irate husbands), being a tenderfoot Out West, or having to disguise himself as a woman.
Considered lost for many years, Not Guilty! was recently found by the Library of Congress, and begins innocently enough, with Puffy and his sweetie going to City Hall for a marriage license. Things quickly spiral into a nightmare slapstick version of Kafka’s The Trial. The film’s black comedy comes from the writer and director Harry Sweet, who had his own unique sense of humor. Sadly Sweet has been forgotten, as he died young at 31 in 1933 and most of his films no longer survive.
With the arrival of sound Huzár moved back to Germany and appeared in features like Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), but being Jewish his career took a bad turn. He fled back to Hungary to get away from the Nazis, but they eventually caught up with him there. In 1940 he accepted an offer from M-G-M and tried to get back to the United States, but disappeared on the way. It’s thought that he died in either Vladivostok or Japan sometime between 1941 and 1943.

Steve Massa