Silenced Laughter

Awaiting its cue, the unaccompanied grand piano sits to the side of the stage, camouflaged by dimmed lighting. The Academy screen adorns the wall behind, looking far too small for the posh theater. But when the projector hums and whirs, the films that flicker across the silver curtain match its diminutive size. Ancient shorts, from the silent and early days of sound, starring jesters of the pratfall, but these clowns aren’t the well-known and well-shown masters of yesteryear. These are the forgotten ones, remembered, if at all, as a faded photo or an unexplained footnote.

No Chaplin, no Lloyd. Buster may attend, but only unannounced with a good-natured sales pitch. Laurel and Hardy are here, but they came separately. Mabel’s alone but the center of attention for once, while Langdon is regarded as royalty. All around, other old ghosts gather to laugh again, their tricks and gags perhaps cruder than their greater peers, but still better than cinematic history would relate to memory.

Welcome to Slapsticon 2007, the sanctuary of lost slapstick.

A few months before, while milling around the Weinberg Center lobby before the start of a Keaton feature, I stumbled across a cut-and-paste flyer. After a quick glance I pocketed it and, like most things I collect, forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago. What I had thought was a little showing of shorts actually was a four-day celebration of rare and obscure films from the Teens all the way through first two decades of the sound era, when many of the discarded silent stars continued to ply their trade in low-budget quickies.

Film historians tend to parrot the works of the giants, and deservingly so; Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were pioneers in their art, their creative skill overcoming the shifts in societal taste. But at the same time, those historians often dismiss other comedians as pretenders or imitators, using their fall into obscurity as evidence. Most of these players are more heard about than seen, their work judged by a chosen few. The chance to actually judge these films on their own merits is a chance that doesn’t come too often.

I didn’t have time to attend all four days (I don’t think I would have survived 35 hours of slapstick, anyway), but by late Saturday morning, I was heading toward the Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, for two showings.

The first began with the Keaton surprise--There's No Business Like No Business. Shortly before the festival, the organizers of Slapsticon uncovered this lost industrial film that Buster did late in his life for the long-gone Maremount auto parts company. Keaton has great fun as the hapless owner of a service station who keeps ignoring golden opportunities to help his customers and make some money. At one point, Buster opens the hood to see a smashed carburetor, a leaky radiator, and a burned out generator--not to mention the dinner roll serving as a head gasket. He gazes at the mechanized disaster with concern, pours a bit of water in the radiator, puts back the dinner roll, and sends the driver on his merry way! The acrobatic physicality of Buster’s silent work is absent here, but he aptly replaces it with quick, subtle visual gags that pile on, inducing giggles and at times outright laughter, such as when Buster joyfully bounces when his cash register begins spontaneously adding up.

Following Buster is the Queen of Silent Comedy herself, Mabel Normand. Mostly remembered today for either the scandals that derailed her career or as the frequent female costar for Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel was the silent era’s most gifted comedienne whose popularity led to several starring feature roles as well as many of her own shorts. Slapsticon obtained two Mabel Normand silents that bookend her career. The first, the 1914 Keystone comedy Hello Mabel, features a typically frenetic pace long on energy and short on logic. Mabel plays an apartment building phone operator who gets caught up in a comedy of misunderstandings between her, her boyfriend in the building, a flirtatious tenant, and his unforgiving wife. Broad and bawdy, Hello Mabel doesn’t cater to Normand’s talents, but she manages to stay afloat among the nonsense. The short is most notable for the plethora of future stars in cameo roles, including Charley Chase, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, and Al St. John.

The second Mabel short is the five-reel version of her comeback film, Raggedy Rose (1926). After two scandals and several health problems brought on by hard living, Normand returned to the screen after three years away thanks to her good friend F. Richard Jones. Jones supervised the making of Raggedy Rose, even ghost-directing some scenes, while Richard Wallace and Stan Laurel shared the director’s chair. The film took months to reach theaters, as Pathe Studios rejected the feature several times before finally agreeing to handle a three-reel version late in 1926. The film was a huge success with critics and audiences, but Normand’s fragile health limited her to four more two-reelers before retiring from filmmaking. Graced with a talented supporting cast, Raggedy Rose is an era away from the Keystone short. Normand is like a hyperactive Lillian Gish while playing a poor young woman working for a junk dealer (Jewish comic Max Davidson, who had his own collection of shorts at Slapsticon). In a hilarious opening in which Mabel and Max use two cardboard cats to trick an affluent neighborhood to toss junk into the street, Rose is knocked senseless when a handsome millionaire throws his shoe at the faux kitties and accidentally hits her. A series of silly mischance leads a purposefully unconscious Rose being delivered to the millionaire’s doorstep to wait for a doctor. While Rose thinks she’s in the hospital (which is where she hoped to get a good meal), the millionaire’s gold-digging girlfriend and her mother conspire to get rid of her. Meanwhile, the butler has gone nuts. He thinks. Like many slapstick stories, what starts as a sweet comedy spins faster and faster into inanity, throwing logic out the window until Rose conks the millionaire on the head by accident. Normand’s performance, leaning more on her visual timing and quirky character than stunts, serves as the rubber cement to the increasingly illogical plot threads--the audience is too high on the fumes to notice the cracks. Unfortunately, bits of this five-reel version feel padded, while the print is missing some footage, especially most of the resolution after Rose realizes who she conked. Time ravages Rose in other ways, too: Some of the humor with the junk dealer feels anti-Semitic, a discomfort somewhat disfused by Davidson’s natural warmth.

The final two shorts of the program feature a lesser known comedian and another known more for his decades-long work in sound. The first, the 1924 independent Wedding Belles, stars Monty Banks, who looks for all the world like a pudgy, erstwhile playboy version of The Tramp. Banks, however, is completely upstaged by his main costar: Pal the Dog. In Wedding Belles, Monty’s girlfriend believes that the strange dog in his apartment (snuck in by a neighbor hiding it from the landlady) is from another woman and demands that he get rid of the it. Only the dog likes Monty, and no matter what he does, the dog keeps outsmarting him. Banks’ standard performance pales next to Pal, whose timing and personally is creepily humanistic and provide the vast majority of the laughs.

The final short, on the other hand, is about the funniest silent short I have ever seen. Small wonder when the young star is Edward Everett Horton, who would become a well-regarded character actor in film and television, including his work as the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle and as Chief Roaring Chicken in F Troop. Horton got his start as a silent comedian in the 1920s, even getting his own brief series under Harold Lloyd’s production company. Dad’s Choice is one of those films, and Horton’s character--an erstwhile young suitor of a wealthy man’s daughter--easily could have been played by Lloyd himself. But I actually prefer Horton’s laid-back, put-upon turn over Lloyd’s usual driving ambition. Horton is extremely likeable as he first keeps bumbling across a battle-axe store customer again and again and then mistakes the bodyguard as his girlfriend’s father. The best bits come when Horton thinks the father is the gardener and asks for help in eloping with the girlfriend. Dad actually goes along for the ride, relishing every minute. Unlike other slapstick shorts, Dad’s Choice never leaves the realm of believability, even when employing the typical plot devise of misunderstandings. In fact, that could describe the whole film: tired comical tactics revived by whimsical tension, excellent timing, and some unexpected character turns. Horton’s two foils drive the film, allowing the lead to deliver an understated, reactionary performance. The battle-axe, who becomes a living running joke, is essayed by Elinor Vanderveer, whose stony facial expressions are gags by themselves. Otis Harlan, meanwhile, creates a gruff but loveable father whose own behavior becomes unpredictable. Sadly, neither actor had much of a career outside of bit parts, but both help Horton carry this little unknown short to heightened hilarity that matches anything Keaton or Chaplin have done. When Harlan can make a modern audience erupt in laugher by simply jogging across a driveway, you know he’s doing something wonderful.

A short intermission later, during which I started a new collectable hobby, and its time to discover perhaps the best-kept secret of silent film comedy: Charley Chase.

A mixture of John Cleese and Weird Al Yankovic, Chase began his career as a director at the famous Hal Roach Studios under his real name, Charles Parrott. He helped usher Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to fame and directed many of the early comedian stars before replacing Harold Lloyd in front of the Roach camera. Charley Chase was born, and he became the studio’s most popular money-maker of the 1920s, continuing to make shorts after the sound era arrived. He embraced the new technology, altering his playboy persona to something more flaky and directing his own starring shorts well into the 1930s. He even appeared in a couple of features, one of which was the Laurel and Hardy vehicle Sons of the Desert. Unfortunately, Chase died from a heart attack in 1940, before his sound career would take hold.

For its “Chasing Charley Chase” program, Slapsticon obtained five silent and sound shorts, including a fragment of his lost feature sound debut Modern Love. Because of a technical problem (namely, the film was upside down and backwards), the first short is a sound one: His Silent Racket, directed by Chase in 1933. Chase plays a sap conned into buying interest in a failing dry cleaning business. When the local protection racket leaves a mysteriously ticking package that Chase tries to deliver to his partner, the pace finally begins to pick up, dropping gag after gag until the denouncement, when the “bomb expert” drops the package in a tub of gasoline. When the explosion's smoke clears, all of the staggering cops are suddenly wearing the dresses from the delivery truck. Yeah, it didn’t make too much sense then, either. Until the absurdity kicks in, the short is pretty predictable but buoyed by some nice throwaway gags. Chase actually feels drowned in the goings on.

Not so with his most famous short, the silent classic Movie Night (1929). His last silent comedy, Chase plays a husband and father who attempts to take his family (including his wife’s brother, who was staying with them “until he was old enough to be hung”) to the movies. Mishap after mishap occurs--from his young daughter’s reoccurring and contagious hiccups to a misplayed scam to get a child’s ticket. Chase is at his best here, giving a textured character that goes beyond the one-note heroes of most silent shorts; his frustration and reactions recall Cleese’s best work. The funniest bits feature Chase’s little girl, played by Edith Fellows, who kindly torments her screen father with an unpracticed innocence. The print used for this showing was the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s restoration, which returned several previously lost sequences to the middle of the short.

Hopefully, restoration will return a complete Modern Love (1929) to audiences as well. During the transitional years between silent and sound, Chase was loaned out to Universal to replace another actor in this marriage comedy. A hybrid sound–silent feature, most of Modern Love has been lost, with surviving elements spread across various different celluloid formats. Universal, the same studio that dumped their silent library into the San Francisco Bay in the 1940s, is attempting to construct a complete print, but until then, Slapsticon obtained reels 3 and 4 of the silent version. Dropped into the middle of an obviously complicated story is a bit bewildering, but what’s most evident is Chase’s easy charisma in full force, and he delivers an engaging performance as the frustrated “secret” husband. Most comedians relied on personas to sell their films, but based on these reels and Movie Night, Chase appears to have delivered something richer, allowing for more complex, character-driven comedies that expand the humor beyond the basic setup, gag, and pratfall.

That ability served Chase well when he finally started making his own sound pictures. While audiences of that transitional era frightened filmmakers into movies of wall-to-wall dialogue, Chase understood how to balance the new talkie-driven stories with his visual gags. One of his earliest sound shorts is Crazy Feet, made in the same year as Modern Love. Unlike the hybrid film, the footage for Crazy Feet is intact--except for a soundtrack. Made as a talkie, the original sound elements have been lost. Yet, outside of opening setup, the film still works wonderfully as a silent. Chase pretends (badly) to be a chorus dancer to be near company star Thelma Todd, who was at the beginning of her career. Todd and Chase did several shorts together, and their chemistry glows in a climatic, wildly prancing dance number that will have Monty Python fans doing whiplash double-takes.

The last short brings Chase’s career retrospective to a close. In The Nightshirt Bandit (1938), Chase plays a new criminology professor who discovers that he’s a sleepwalking kleptomaniac and frantically tries to recover some stolen money in a girl’s dormitory. Chase’s screen persona has been fully transformed to a meek and awkward caricature, a far cry from the deeper, more assured roles he played before. Part of the problem is that the film is directed by Jules White, notorious for his obvious and loud slapstick. Chase, however, handles the predictable violence with aplomb, delivering the short’s best lines and stunts and squeezing entertainment from a leaden stone.

Before the lights come up, Chase teaches me a simple truth: While the popular legend is that the silent clowns couldn’t adapt to the sound era, the reality is that audiences simply were no longer interested in their shtick. The silent comedians, discarded in favor of the screwball and farce, really didn't lose any of their ingenuity when handed talkie projects, but under the pressure to quench the public's fascination with the new technology, the clowns were reduced to cheap programmers where their "outdated" act wouldn't lose money. The irony is that these bargain-basement oddities are far more timeless than many of the successful talkie films of those days. For every Thin Man, dozens of comedies that didn’t know when to shut up filled theaters, delighting audiences with the gimmick of gab. Gimmicks eventually fade, though, exposing the technology as vapid technique. Meanwhile, the slapstick artisans continued making movies they knew worked; people simply had forgotten. Forgotten like much of the silent era, thrown away like precious canisters in a metropolitan bay.

Only today, two generations and nearly a century later, do we realize what may have been lost. Slapstick was only a part of the beginnings of cinema, but it is the one that most people understand. Laughter is contagious, and silent laughter is universal, scaling the barricade of language to infect us all. Through slapstick, people can begin to understand the unique gift of the silents--storytelling that reaches beyond culture and language. All film is emotional. Sit in a theater and laugh with an audience, cry with strangers. During first days of cinema, a movie could play anywhere in the world and connect. Without translation, a German film could play in America, while its American counterpart could tour Europe and Asia. The stories were understood, with no spoken explanation. Only the silents could do that.

That entire era of film, the era that forged the one true communal art of the modern age, is gone. Silenced. Not every film will be recovered, not every star will be rediscovered. But what those movies gave us should never be forgotten, and laughter is the best place to start.