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.
Showing posts with label Buster Keaton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buster Keaton. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Netflix Almanac: June 2007
So I have this addiction: More than 200 movies stashed away in my cider chest or hutch, taking up valuable space probably best used for the family china or Colonial-era blankets. The scary thing? It could be much worse if I didn’t use Netflix.
I discovered the online rental service a little more than seven years ago, shortly after I bought my first and only DVD player. Despite my love of film, I tend to be a careful buyer; I won’t purchase a movie that I won’t watch more than a few times. Which was a problem.
When DVDs first hit the market in 1997, most studios didn’t support the format, so several independent niche licensors like Anchor Bay Entertainment, Elite, and Tai Seng stepped in. Because they didn’t own their own movie libraries and studios were unwilling to let go of their big classic or contemporary productions, the licensors acquired the odds and ends: Hong Kong fantasy films, b-movies, old American independents, silents, European cinema, Hammer flicks, big screen turkeys, little cult films....
In other words, movies right up my alley.
By accident, DVDs opened up the film world to me, making historically obscure and difficult-to-find film suddenly available. But only if I could buy it.
My local video store didn’t carry most of the new DVDs, and they had just started to sell off their collection of out-of-print videos. Within a few years, that collection would be reduced to major Hollywood films and incomplete anime collections, with nary an oddity to be found. I was faced with the “blind buy,” and after the second-degree burn I got from Alex Cox’s Death and the Compass, that prospect was wearying.
Faced with dozens of new releases each season I wanted to see, Netflix came around at the right time. I joined in March of 2001, back when they had only one distribution center, and it was in California. My queue list grew as the discs trickled in, and by the time another center opened a half hour down the interstate, my waiting list began to resemble one for football tickets. Still, I managed to save money and space, and discovered some interesting film along the way.
Even though I no longer use Netflix as heavily as in the past, I still manage to watch several discs a month. Now that I have a movie blog, a chronicle of those odds and ends may serve as a guide to some unwitting movie lover or a window to my own peculiar taste.
Besides, I need something to write about once in a while.
Three Ages (1923)
Buster Keaton’s first feature, and he was hedging his bets. Done up as a parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Keaton tells and retells the same love story in three eras: Stone, Roman, and Modern Day. The Boy (Keaton) woos Beauty (Margaret Leahy), but the family prefers The Adventurer (the great Wallace Beery). Thus, The Boy must prove his worth to the family and reveal the true intentions of The Adventurer. Rather than run through each story piecemeal, Keaton intercuts among the three by story points. For instance, when The Boy needs advice about what to do with his intentions, in the Stone Age, he consults a witch woman, in Roman times a tottering oracle, and in the Modern a daisy (she loves me, she loves me not). As the stories continue to unwind, the intercut becomes quicker, matching the rising frantic energy on screen. Keaton gets a healthy dose of humorous mileage from the interplay among three vastly different times, usually using the Modern era as the punchline, especially in the film’s final joke. Unlike Keaton’s follow-up Our Hospitality, Three Ages is closer to his gag-driven shorts--a technical wonder far beyond what other silent comedians were doing at the same time, but strangely absent of any emotional investment. That would come later. But Three Ages remains worthy of a laugh--a very loud and never-ending one.
Android (1982)
A science fiction b-movie from Roger Corman’s New World factory, but not exactly what you expect. An eccentric scientist (Klaus Kinski) is working on an illegal project when his naive, android assistant Max 404 (writer Don Keith Opper, but billed as “Himself”) lets three escaped convicts land on their station. What follows isn’t a thriller but a study of the spiritual awakening of a machine. Shot economically on a small but well-designed set, Android shows a lot of care behind its ambition, and mostly avoids the exploitation that usually seeps into Corman’s productions. Unfortunately, the good intentions are undercut by human characters too narrowly drawn to be compelling and a plot that really stagnates between the film’s opening and closing sections. Opper makes a nice debut as an actor, but as a writer, he waits too long to introduce some story points and adds a last twist that doesn’t make much sense. In the end, Android is a nice, faulty film showcasing a nice character in Max 404. The rest is mostly forgetful.
Richard Jeni: A Big Steaming Pile of Me (2005)
I’ve already discussed my own feelings on Jeni, and this HBO stand-up special--his last recorded performance--makes me miss him that much more. Jeni, whose routines usually dealt with entertainment or relationships, ventures into the political arena, attacking both right and left with a sly grin. In one hour, he exposes ridiculous societal rhetoric better than a decade of Dennis Miller. Jeni left us too soon, but he left behind a great performance everyone should watch.
And if political humor gives you the gives you the jibbles, don't worry; Jeni still hits on his normal points:
Samurai Banners (1969)
The general conception of knights and samurai is one of honor. Yet, as this classic samurai epic clearly shows, honor is a many faceted thing. Toshiro Mifune stars as Kansuke Yamamoto, an ambitious ronin dreaming of a united Japan. Yamamoto becomes a warlord’s most-trusted strategist by concocting plots to raise both his and his lord’s prestige and power. But the intrigue only sets the table for a wonderfully complex character-study of three people: Yamamoto, his lord Shingen Takeda, and Princess Yufu, the captured daughter of a dead rival whom both love. The film also dissects the common conception of honorable actions, but that’s a post for another day. What makes Samurai Banners all the more interesting is that it is not some grand samurai but a historical film--the legend of Takeda is one of Japan’s greatest. The epic, with its bright and grandly staged battle scenes, is a gloss for a quiet story of three people who nearly changed a country, for better or worse.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
God, I love this movie. “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.” Hee.
A Man Called Sledge (1970)
James Garner does a Spaghetti western. He portrays Luther Sledge, a dour outlaw with no illusions to his ultimate fate. After a partner is killed in a card game, Sledge meets an old man who follows a weekly gold shipment from a mine to a prison. Sledge creates a heist plot to break the gold out of the prison. He succeeds at the cost of a friend, but then the gold begins to turn his gang against each other and, ultimately, him. Like most Spaghetti westerns, this story does not end well for anyone, even the survivors. Garner’s own inherent likeability and natural charisma gives this tale a bit of a twist, but otherwise, it’s pretty standard fare--too afraid to plunge into the nihilistic darkness of the human soul like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly or The Great Silence. An oddity, written and directed by longtime character actor Vic Morrow and featuring some notables like Garner, Dennis Weaver, and Claude Akins riding in territory to which they were not accustomed.
I discovered the online rental service a little more than seven years ago, shortly after I bought my first and only DVD player. Despite my love of film, I tend to be a careful buyer; I won’t purchase a movie that I won’t watch more than a few times. Which was a problem.
When DVDs first hit the market in 1997, most studios didn’t support the format, so several independent niche licensors like Anchor Bay Entertainment, Elite, and Tai Seng stepped in. Because they didn’t own their own movie libraries and studios were unwilling to let go of their big classic or contemporary productions, the licensors acquired the odds and ends: Hong Kong fantasy films, b-movies, old American independents, silents, European cinema, Hammer flicks, big screen turkeys, little cult films....
In other words, movies right up my alley.
By accident, DVDs opened up the film world to me, making historically obscure and difficult-to-find film suddenly available. But only if I could buy it.
My local video store didn’t carry most of the new DVDs, and they had just started to sell off their collection of out-of-print videos. Within a few years, that collection would be reduced to major Hollywood films and incomplete anime collections, with nary an oddity to be found. I was faced with the “blind buy,” and after the second-degree burn I got from Alex Cox’s Death and the Compass, that prospect was wearying.
Faced with dozens of new releases each season I wanted to see, Netflix came around at the right time. I joined in March of 2001, back when they had only one distribution center, and it was in California. My queue list grew as the discs trickled in, and by the time another center opened a half hour down the interstate, my waiting list began to resemble one for football tickets. Still, I managed to save money and space, and discovered some interesting film along the way.
Even though I no longer use Netflix as heavily as in the past, I still manage to watch several discs a month. Now that I have a movie blog, a chronicle of those odds and ends may serve as a guide to some unwitting movie lover or a window to my own peculiar taste.
Besides, I need something to write about once in a while.
Three Ages (1923)
Buster Keaton’s first feature, and he was hedging his bets. Done up as a parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Keaton tells and retells the same love story in three eras: Stone, Roman, and Modern Day. The Boy (Keaton) woos Beauty (Margaret Leahy), but the family prefers The Adventurer (the great Wallace Beery). Thus, The Boy must prove his worth to the family and reveal the true intentions of The Adventurer. Rather than run through each story piecemeal, Keaton intercuts among the three by story points. For instance, when The Boy needs advice about what to do with his intentions, in the Stone Age, he consults a witch woman, in Roman times a tottering oracle, and in the Modern a daisy (she loves me, she loves me not). As the stories continue to unwind, the intercut becomes quicker, matching the rising frantic energy on screen. Keaton gets a healthy dose of humorous mileage from the interplay among three vastly different times, usually using the Modern era as the punchline, especially in the film’s final joke. Unlike Keaton’s follow-up Our Hospitality, Three Ages is closer to his gag-driven shorts--a technical wonder far beyond what other silent comedians were doing at the same time, but strangely absent of any emotional investment. That would come later. But Three Ages remains worthy of a laugh--a very loud and never-ending one.
Android (1982)
A science fiction b-movie from Roger Corman’s New World factory, but not exactly what you expect. An eccentric scientist (Klaus Kinski) is working on an illegal project when his naive, android assistant Max 404 (writer Don Keith Opper, but billed as “Himself”) lets three escaped convicts land on their station. What follows isn’t a thriller but a study of the spiritual awakening of a machine. Shot economically on a small but well-designed set, Android shows a lot of care behind its ambition, and mostly avoids the exploitation that usually seeps into Corman’s productions. Unfortunately, the good intentions are undercut by human characters too narrowly drawn to be compelling and a plot that really stagnates between the film’s opening and closing sections. Opper makes a nice debut as an actor, but as a writer, he waits too long to introduce some story points and adds a last twist that doesn’t make much sense. In the end, Android is a nice, faulty film showcasing a nice character in Max 404. The rest is mostly forgetful.
Richard Jeni: A Big Steaming Pile of Me (2005)
I’ve already discussed my own feelings on Jeni, and this HBO stand-up special--his last recorded performance--makes me miss him that much more. Jeni, whose routines usually dealt with entertainment or relationships, ventures into the political arena, attacking both right and left with a sly grin. In one hour, he exposes ridiculous societal rhetoric better than a decade of Dennis Miller. Jeni left us too soon, but he left behind a great performance everyone should watch.
And if political humor gives you the gives you the jibbles, don't worry; Jeni still hits on his normal points:
Samurai Banners (1969)
The general conception of knights and samurai is one of honor. Yet, as this classic samurai epic clearly shows, honor is a many faceted thing. Toshiro Mifune stars as Kansuke Yamamoto, an ambitious ronin dreaming of a united Japan. Yamamoto becomes a warlord’s most-trusted strategist by concocting plots to raise both his and his lord’s prestige and power. But the intrigue only sets the table for a wonderfully complex character-study of three people: Yamamoto, his lord Shingen Takeda, and Princess Yufu, the captured daughter of a dead rival whom both love. The film also dissects the common conception of honorable actions, but that’s a post for another day. What makes Samurai Banners all the more interesting is that it is not some grand samurai but a historical film--the legend of Takeda is one of Japan’s greatest. The epic, with its bright and grandly staged battle scenes, is a gloss for a quiet story of three people who nearly changed a country, for better or worse.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
God, I love this movie. “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.” Hee.
A Man Called Sledge (1970)
James Garner does a Spaghetti western. He portrays Luther Sledge, a dour outlaw with no illusions to his ultimate fate. After a partner is killed in a card game, Sledge meets an old man who follows a weekly gold shipment from a mine to a prison. Sledge creates a heist plot to break the gold out of the prison. He succeeds at the cost of a friend, but then the gold begins to turn his gang against each other and, ultimately, him. Like most Spaghetti westerns, this story does not end well for anyone, even the survivors. Garner’s own inherent likeability and natural charisma gives this tale a bit of a twist, but otherwise, it’s pretty standard fare--too afraid to plunge into the nihilistic darkness of the human soul like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly or The Great Silence. An oddity, written and directed by longtime character actor Vic Morrow and featuring some notables like Garner, Dennis Weaver, and Claude Akins riding in territory to which they were not accustomed.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Reality Bites
Sometimes, I’m afraid to watch a movie. No matter how much I want to.
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across the trailer for a little film called He Was a Quiet Man. Rather than trying to describe it, just watch it, watch the whole thing, and you’ll meet my conundrum:
Maybe a few months ago, it would have been a no-brainer. My taste in movies makes room for off-key oddities, probably welcomes them warmly on the front porch. But after the events at Virginia Tech, I’m not so sure this time. The conceit of the film is that Christian Slater’s character is contemplating a suicidal shooting spree when somebody else beats him to the trigger. Slater’s character is disturbed and lonely, a man who never outgrew his violent, child-like fantasies about revenge for perceived slights and social torment. Opening with that spree, the trailer sings the problematic tune--He Was a Quiet Man is a black comedy.
Black comedies are tricky, and most attempts fail. Their goal is to make you laugh at situations normally deserted by laughter, mining humor by skewing reality to the absurd. But the shock of Virginia Tech is still too soon, and the reality clamors in, twisting the absurdity with bad timing.
It’s not the first time. When September 11th shook us, Hollywood suddenly became cautious. Sam Raimi pulled a sequence--originally shot for a teaser trailer--from the first Spider-Man movie because it featured the World Trade Center. Jackie Chan had to scrap a film set at the Towers, which climaxed with Jackie fighting to prevent a terrorist attack. Some film fans cried censorship, but the reality actually is capitalistic: Any producer or studio head knows that making entertainment out of a tragedy too soon creates discomfort for the audience and, in turn, spells financial doom. Even legendary producer Joseph Schenck realized that when he ordered Buster Keaton to change the finale for Steamboat Bill Jr. to something other than a huge flood--the recent, real-life Mississippi one had claimed far too many lives to be fun.
The climax became a cyclone, hatching Buster Keaton’s most iconic image.
The ripples tragedy leaves behind don’t have an expiration date, either. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 earned all kinds of critical acclaim for its honorable retelling of the one plane that didn’t reach its target on September 11th, but the film still struggled at the box office. Even five years after that event, the wounds were too sensitive to relive it all again. I know mine were.
Which brings me back to He Was a Quiet Man. I’ve watched the trailer several times and unearthed festival reviews, which tell of a “pitch black comedy” taking utterly unexpected turns. They also tell of spirited discussions after the credits roll--most of the festival showings came after Seung-Hui Cho’s rampage. But what the audience yearns to talk about is not recorded. I still don’t know.
I don’t. Watching a troubled man struggle against his worst instincts, perhaps to fail, perhaps to succeed by failing...the message may be one for which I’m not ready. Especially if that message is wrapped up in a laugh lost to echoing gunshots.
Then the trailer’s second half plays again, and makes me wonder.
The real problem isn’t the film’s timing; it’s whether the film understands the true nature of black comedy: to tear away the trappings of tragedy and horror to reveal humanity’s heart. A dozen late-comers have followed Heathers, attempted to carbon copy its twisted teen inanity, but none have matched it. Heathers succeeded because instead of finding hilarity in suicide itself, the film found the fragility in the acts of the people responding to it. While Heathers attacked the strange popularity and the cult of celebrity surrounding teen suicide in the late 1980s, it treated its lead characters as more than simple biological bags of quirks. A black comedy doesn’t vicariate its characters; a black comedy is about the tragic faults of the characters that lead them to mistakes...or enlightenment.
He Was a Quiet Man can be about exploitation, or it can be about healing. After an event like the campus massacre, we briefly ask why, then look for villains. But we forget that there are no real monsters. Something broke, something turned, something smoldered in Cho; failing to understand that helpless hate only deepens the tragedy. A film about a similar character driven toward a similar act, only to be stopped by circumstance to confront his own existence, may help me see past the assumption and dismissal of madmen. And that possibility makes me want to drive a hundred miles to see it.
I watch the trailer again.
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across the trailer for a little film called He Was a Quiet Man. Rather than trying to describe it, just watch it, watch the whole thing, and you’ll meet my conundrum:
Maybe a few months ago, it would have been a no-brainer. My taste in movies makes room for off-key oddities, probably welcomes them warmly on the front porch. But after the events at Virginia Tech, I’m not so sure this time. The conceit of the film is that Christian Slater’s character is contemplating a suicidal shooting spree when somebody else beats him to the trigger. Slater’s character is disturbed and lonely, a man who never outgrew his violent, child-like fantasies about revenge for perceived slights and social torment. Opening with that spree, the trailer sings the problematic tune--He Was a Quiet Man is a black comedy.
Black comedies are tricky, and most attempts fail. Their goal is to make you laugh at situations normally deserted by laughter, mining humor by skewing reality to the absurd. But the shock of Virginia Tech is still too soon, and the reality clamors in, twisting the absurdity with bad timing.
It’s not the first time. When September 11th shook us, Hollywood suddenly became cautious. Sam Raimi pulled a sequence--originally shot for a teaser trailer--from the first Spider-Man movie because it featured the World Trade Center. Jackie Chan had to scrap a film set at the Towers, which climaxed with Jackie fighting to prevent a terrorist attack. Some film fans cried censorship, but the reality actually is capitalistic: Any producer or studio head knows that making entertainment out of a tragedy too soon creates discomfort for the audience and, in turn, spells financial doom. Even legendary producer Joseph Schenck realized that when he ordered Buster Keaton to change the finale for Steamboat Bill Jr. to something other than a huge flood--the recent, real-life Mississippi one had claimed far too many lives to be fun.
The climax became a cyclone, hatching Buster Keaton’s most iconic image.
The ripples tragedy leaves behind don’t have an expiration date, either. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 earned all kinds of critical acclaim for its honorable retelling of the one plane that didn’t reach its target on September 11th, but the film still struggled at the box office. Even five years after that event, the wounds were too sensitive to relive it all again. I know mine were.
Which brings me back to He Was a Quiet Man. I’ve watched the trailer several times and unearthed festival reviews, which tell of a “pitch black comedy” taking utterly unexpected turns. They also tell of spirited discussions after the credits roll--most of the festival showings came after Seung-Hui Cho’s rampage. But what the audience yearns to talk about is not recorded. I still don’t know.
I don’t. Watching a troubled man struggle against his worst instincts, perhaps to fail, perhaps to succeed by failing...the message may be one for which I’m not ready. Especially if that message is wrapped up in a laugh lost to echoing gunshots.
Then the trailer’s second half plays again, and makes me wonder.
The real problem isn’t the film’s timing; it’s whether the film understands the true nature of black comedy: to tear away the trappings of tragedy and horror to reveal humanity’s heart. A dozen late-comers have followed Heathers, attempted to carbon copy its twisted teen inanity, but none have matched it. Heathers succeeded because instead of finding hilarity in suicide itself, the film found the fragility in the acts of the people responding to it. While Heathers attacked the strange popularity and the cult of celebrity surrounding teen suicide in the late 1980s, it treated its lead characters as more than simple biological bags of quirks. A black comedy doesn’t vicariate its characters; a black comedy is about the tragic faults of the characters that lead them to mistakes...or enlightenment.
He Was a Quiet Man can be about exploitation, or it can be about healing. After an event like the campus massacre, we briefly ask why, then look for villains. But we forget that there are no real monsters. Something broke, something turned, something smoldered in Cho; failing to understand that helpless hate only deepens the tragedy. A film about a similar character driven toward a similar act, only to be stopped by circumstance to confront his own existence, may help me see past the assumption and dismissal of madmen. And that possibility makes me want to drive a hundred miles to see it.
I watch the trailer again.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Living It Like Buster
Something silly to share. I tend to play this when the stress gets too hot, and all I want is a simple smile.
The clip is from one of Buster Keaton's 1930s Educational Films shorts, called Grand Slam Opera. In retrospect, that random dance, with Buster switching styles whenever the unseen orchestra changes, means much more than just a gag.
When the silent film era suddenly ended in 1928, Keaton signed a contract with MGM, his first real studio. Until that point, Buster had worked as an independent, creating such classic silent comedies as The General, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator. But The General--today considered one of the greatest films of all time--was a financial and critical flop when released in theaters. When Steamboat Bill Jr. also lost money, Keaton's producer Joseph Schenck convinced him to retreat to the security of MGM. The looming talkies worried many silent stars, and Keaton was in no position to take a risk.
Although the partnership initially produced another silent classic in The Cameraman, Buster soon discovered that MGM saw him as nothing but an employee. Buster never directed a feature again, nor did he have much input in the films in which he starred. By the time Keaton made his first sound film--the abysmal Free and Easy--he had become nothing but a square peg, forced into the round holes of "snappy" dialog-driven comedies, always portraying the dimwitted fool "Elmer," while the heroes of his silent classics had redeemed themselves with their ingenuity and tenacity. The complete loss of creativity, combined with his already-deteriorating home life, took away whatever joy he had left. He had already lost his wife's affection; now he lost his art. Buster essentially lived on the studio lot in a bungalow supplied by MGM, away from his beloved sons. His drinking escalated dangerously, to the point where he was finishing off a bottle of booze daily. In his last MGM film--What, No Beer?, the last of a trilogy of pairings with up-and-comer Jimmy Durante--Buster is embarrassingly inebriated, his eyes glazed and hollow, his words slurred, his once-sharp timing muddled. His wife had divorced him by then, taking everything but his paycheck. Soon he didn't even have that. Although Buster's sound films, in spite of their low quality, made more money than his landmark silents ever did, studio head Louis B. Mayer fired him on the final day of shooting.
That was January of 1933. Exactly five years after he had signed with one of the most successful Hollywood studios as one of the great comedians of film, Buster Keaton had nothing left.
The next couple of years probably should have killed Keaton. No major producing firm would hire him, and he bumbled into a second marriage to a nurse who probably did more harm than good. Several of his close friends died suddenly, including his mentor Roscoe Arbuckle, punching another hole in Keaton's life. In his last days, however, Arbuckle had worked with Educational Films, the cheapest studio in town, and now they offered Buster work. With the vaudeville stage fading and no where else to turn, Keaton took the job and began churning out extremely low-budget, sound two-reelers. But his alcoholism got worse.
In the middle of October 1935, with his second marriage sliding toward divorce, Keaton began drinking heavily and wouldn't stop. An old family friend, Dr. John Shuman, took him to a hospital while Buster was unconscious. The next morning, Keaton's alcoholic withdrawal was so great that he was restrained in a straitjacket. He stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Shuman and other doctors explained to Buster how the drinking was killing him, and if he continued, he wouldn't live much longer.
According to Tom Dardis's Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down, "Buster listened calmly and did not drink for the next five years."
Keaton returned to Educational Films sober and anew. Grand Slam Opera was the second short he made after his hospital stay, and it's the only one in which Buster has a writing credit. His timing, his energy, his creativity...in a bargain basement short, mostly lost to time and memory, Keaton's joy in creation is completely alive on screen.
Educational Films would go bankrupt the following year, but Keaton would find more work back at MGM, as an anonymous gag writer. He gave away his famous routines to the likes of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and Red Skelton, who remade Keaton's two MGM silents as sound films, but did them Buster's way. Most importantly, Buster Keaton would meet Eleanor Norris, a young dancer at the studio. Despite the differences in their ages, the two would marry in May 1940, and would live happily together until the end of Buster's life 25 years later. By then, audiences had rediscovered Keaton's silent features and shorts, and Keaton lived the last years of his life recognized as one of the giants of comedy.
Buster's Educational Films work mostly has been forgotten, and those who have seen the shorts call them "shoddy," "beneath Keaton," and "embarrassingly bad." But the 16 two-reelers Keaton made over those three years perhaps are among the most important of his life--they gave him work when he needed it, and when he was ready, allowed him to unearth the talent he nearly destroyed with the bottle. Few of us have traveled the road that Buster Keaton did, and for a time, that road was hopelessly perilous. Like the heroes he conjured for his silents, Keaton never gave in, despite the despair and melancholy that wrapped his existance. Even when hope left him, he continued on. When I watch that clip, made so soon after the darkest time of his life, I remember Keaton's dance lesson.
Swinging on the devil's dance floor? Buster did, and survived. And he's still dancing.
The clip is from one of Buster Keaton's 1930s Educational Films shorts, called Grand Slam Opera. In retrospect, that random dance, with Buster switching styles whenever the unseen orchestra changes, means much more than just a gag.
When the silent film era suddenly ended in 1928, Keaton signed a contract with MGM, his first real studio. Until that point, Buster had worked as an independent, creating such classic silent comedies as The General, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator. But The General--today considered one of the greatest films of all time--was a financial and critical flop when released in theaters. When Steamboat Bill Jr. also lost money, Keaton's producer Joseph Schenck convinced him to retreat to the security of MGM. The looming talkies worried many silent stars, and Keaton was in no position to take a risk.
Although the partnership initially produced another silent classic in The Cameraman, Buster soon discovered that MGM saw him as nothing but an employee. Buster never directed a feature again, nor did he have much input in the films in which he starred. By the time Keaton made his first sound film--the abysmal Free and Easy--he had become nothing but a square peg, forced into the round holes of "snappy" dialog-driven comedies, always portraying the dimwitted fool "Elmer," while the heroes of his silent classics had redeemed themselves with their ingenuity and tenacity. The complete loss of creativity, combined with his already-deteriorating home life, took away whatever joy he had left. He had already lost his wife's affection; now he lost his art. Buster essentially lived on the studio lot in a bungalow supplied by MGM, away from his beloved sons. His drinking escalated dangerously, to the point where he was finishing off a bottle of booze daily. In his last MGM film--What, No Beer?, the last of a trilogy of pairings with up-and-comer Jimmy Durante--Buster is embarrassingly inebriated, his eyes glazed and hollow, his words slurred, his once-sharp timing muddled. His wife had divorced him by then, taking everything but his paycheck. Soon he didn't even have that. Although Buster's sound films, in spite of their low quality, made more money than his landmark silents ever did, studio head Louis B. Mayer fired him on the final day of shooting.
That was January of 1933. Exactly five years after he had signed with one of the most successful Hollywood studios as one of the great comedians of film, Buster Keaton had nothing left.
The next couple of years probably should have killed Keaton. No major producing firm would hire him, and he bumbled into a second marriage to a nurse who probably did more harm than good. Several of his close friends died suddenly, including his mentor Roscoe Arbuckle, punching another hole in Keaton's life. In his last days, however, Arbuckle had worked with Educational Films, the cheapest studio in town, and now they offered Buster work. With the vaudeville stage fading and no where else to turn, Keaton took the job and began churning out extremely low-budget, sound two-reelers. But his alcoholism got worse.
In the middle of October 1935, with his second marriage sliding toward divorce, Keaton began drinking heavily and wouldn't stop. An old family friend, Dr. John Shuman, took him to a hospital while Buster was unconscious. The next morning, Keaton's alcoholic withdrawal was so great that he was restrained in a straitjacket. He stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Shuman and other doctors explained to Buster how the drinking was killing him, and if he continued, he wouldn't live much longer.
According to Tom Dardis's Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down, "Buster listened calmly and did not drink for the next five years."
Keaton returned to Educational Films sober and anew. Grand Slam Opera was the second short he made after his hospital stay, and it's the only one in which Buster has a writing credit. His timing, his energy, his creativity...in a bargain basement short, mostly lost to time and memory, Keaton's joy in creation is completely alive on screen.
Educational Films would go bankrupt the following year, but Keaton would find more work back at MGM, as an anonymous gag writer. He gave away his famous routines to the likes of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and Red Skelton, who remade Keaton's two MGM silents as sound films, but did them Buster's way. Most importantly, Buster Keaton would meet Eleanor Norris, a young dancer at the studio. Despite the differences in their ages, the two would marry in May 1940, and would live happily together until the end of Buster's life 25 years later. By then, audiences had rediscovered Keaton's silent features and shorts, and Keaton lived the last years of his life recognized as one of the giants of comedy.
Buster's Educational Films work mostly has been forgotten, and those who have seen the shorts call them "shoddy," "beneath Keaton," and "embarrassingly bad." But the 16 two-reelers Keaton made over those three years perhaps are among the most important of his life--they gave him work when he needed it, and when he was ready, allowed him to unearth the talent he nearly destroyed with the bottle. Few of us have traveled the road that Buster Keaton did, and for a time, that road was hopelessly perilous. Like the heroes he conjured for his silents, Keaton never gave in, despite the despair and melancholy that wrapped his existance. Even when hope left him, he continued on. When I watch that clip, made so soon after the darkest time of his life, I remember Keaton's dance lesson.
Swinging on the devil's dance floor? Buster did, and survived. And he's still dancing.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
So It Goes
One regret I’ll never dispel is that I never got to meet Kurt Vonnegut.
Like many people, I first encountered Vonnegut’s writing in high school, where his surreal storytelling seemed to make a lot of sense to an embryonic adult. The first novel I read was the mostly forgotten Jailbird, but it was good enough for me to seek out the granfalloons, artificial families, Tralfamadorians, and Kilgore Trout. My literary gluttony only ended when I grew sick with influenza; trapped to a bed, I was in the midst of Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first novel about a dystopian society where punch-card computers dehumanize the human worker. I had just reached the point where the story’s hero, the nervous and gentle Paul Proteus, finally rebelled and began running from the authorities. My fever was hot, and I began to hallucinate--suddenly, I was Paul, and I needed to get away. Right. Now.
No, I never finished the book. An absurdity that Vonnegut would appreciate.
I’m sure many will call him the modern Mark Twain; heck, they even looked like each other, especially late in life, when despondency overtook both. Vonnegut, however, was his own writer, a unique narrator who brought a fantastical brevity to modern literature, and a prose that turned a cynical but humorous eye to humanity’s foibles. Lord knows we need it.
War, as with other writers, shaped most of Vonnegut’s work, not just his penultimate novel, Slaughterhouse Five. As a prisoner, he survived the Allied bombing of the German civilian city Dresden, an event that the American government denied for years, yet fully demonstrated man’s inhumanity to man. A lesson like that cannot be forgotten, and Vonnegut struggled to write about it for two decades.
Despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, Vonnegut never lost his own love of humanity. The villains in his stories usually weren’t individuals but characters representing corporations, the science community, the military, even society itself, all twisting good intentions into bizzare contortions. In his most famous short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” people of talent and intelligence are purposely handicapped by the government so that everyone is equal--idealism run rampant. His heroes tended to be the meek, the Billy Pilgrims, Rabo Karabekians, and Eliot Rosewaters, who, for one reason or another, find themselves in the convolution of ridiculous tragedy brought on by a blinded adherence to a higher ideal.
For Vonnegut, humanity was forever building the tower of Babel, never realizing that the blueprints were in gibberish.
Still, the best of his stories, even dark satire like Mother Night, contain more than biting deconstruction of the human condition. Whenever I think of Vonnegut, Buster Keaton somehow slips in. The Great Stone Face persona was a myth--Buster’s characters weren’t emotional automatons going through the motions of comedic timing. He perhaps was the most subtle actor of the silents; joy, fear, nervousness, and frustration all were conveyed through his eyes, quick expressions, and body movement. What Keaton never did do was smile--no matter what chance or fate threw at him, Buster’s characters doggedly persevered, usually to the unheard laugher of his audience. Vonnegut fully understood Keaton’s art. One of my favorite Vonnegut novels is Slapstick, considered to be one of his lesser works. Flawed it may be, but the narrative is Vonnegut unfettered. His hero is a gifted freak who recounts his sad life from the shambles of Manhattan, of how his own well-meaning mistakes helped push away those close to him as the world slowly frayed. But the story is not a tragedy because the storyteller is not tragic; his telling is lighthearted despite itself, and a helpless hope still clings.
That is the essence of slapstick. And that is the essence of Vonnegut.
This week, we lost a voice for humanity, one that loved us enough to gently poke at our own grotesque grandiose. Vonnegut understood us, perhaps too well, and his stories will forever remind us that while we are still human, we sometimes forget the humanity of others. A lasting image of Slapstick is that of the hero’s pregnant granddaughter, crossing the Midwest with nothing but a shopping cart to find the grandfather who doesn't even know she exists. It’s an image that is both lovely and sad. And that’s Vonnegut’s gift to us: loving sadness.
I think I’ll finish reading Player Piano now.
Like many people, I first encountered Vonnegut’s writing in high school, where his surreal storytelling seemed to make a lot of sense to an embryonic adult. The first novel I read was the mostly forgotten Jailbird, but it was good enough for me to seek out the granfalloons, artificial families, Tralfamadorians, and Kilgore Trout. My literary gluttony only ended when I grew sick with influenza; trapped to a bed, I was in the midst of Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first novel about a dystopian society where punch-card computers dehumanize the human worker. I had just reached the point where the story’s hero, the nervous and gentle Paul Proteus, finally rebelled and began running from the authorities. My fever was hot, and I began to hallucinate--suddenly, I was Paul, and I needed to get away. Right. Now.
No, I never finished the book. An absurdity that Vonnegut would appreciate.
I’m sure many will call him the modern Mark Twain; heck, they even looked like each other, especially late in life, when despondency overtook both. Vonnegut, however, was his own writer, a unique narrator who brought a fantastical brevity to modern literature, and a prose that turned a cynical but humorous eye to humanity’s foibles. Lord knows we need it.
War, as with other writers, shaped most of Vonnegut’s work, not just his penultimate novel, Slaughterhouse Five. As a prisoner, he survived the Allied bombing of the German civilian city Dresden, an event that the American government denied for years, yet fully demonstrated man’s inhumanity to man. A lesson like that cannot be forgotten, and Vonnegut struggled to write about it for two decades.
Despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, Vonnegut never lost his own love of humanity. The villains in his stories usually weren’t individuals but characters representing corporations, the science community, the military, even society itself, all twisting good intentions into bizzare contortions. In his most famous short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” people of talent and intelligence are purposely handicapped by the government so that everyone is equal--idealism run rampant. His heroes tended to be the meek, the Billy Pilgrims, Rabo Karabekians, and Eliot Rosewaters, who, for one reason or another, find themselves in the convolution of ridiculous tragedy brought on by a blinded adherence to a higher ideal.
For Vonnegut, humanity was forever building the tower of Babel, never realizing that the blueprints were in gibberish.
Still, the best of his stories, even dark satire like Mother Night, contain more than biting deconstruction of the human condition. Whenever I think of Vonnegut, Buster Keaton somehow slips in. The Great Stone Face persona was a myth--Buster’s characters weren’t emotional automatons going through the motions of comedic timing. He perhaps was the most subtle actor of the silents; joy, fear, nervousness, and frustration all were conveyed through his eyes, quick expressions, and body movement. What Keaton never did do was smile--no matter what chance or fate threw at him, Buster’s characters doggedly persevered, usually to the unheard laugher of his audience. Vonnegut fully understood Keaton’s art. One of my favorite Vonnegut novels is Slapstick, considered to be one of his lesser works. Flawed it may be, but the narrative is Vonnegut unfettered. His hero is a gifted freak who recounts his sad life from the shambles of Manhattan, of how his own well-meaning mistakes helped push away those close to him as the world slowly frayed. But the story is not a tragedy because the storyteller is not tragic; his telling is lighthearted despite itself, and a helpless hope still clings.
That is the essence of slapstick. And that is the essence of Vonnegut.
This week, we lost a voice for humanity, one that loved us enough to gently poke at our own grotesque grandiose. Vonnegut understood us, perhaps too well, and his stories will forever remind us that while we are still human, we sometimes forget the humanity of others. A lasting image of Slapstick is that of the hero’s pregnant granddaughter, crossing the Midwest with nothing but a shopping cart to find the grandfather who doesn't even know she exists. It’s an image that is both lovely and sad. And that’s Vonnegut’s gift to us: loving sadness.
I think I’ll finish reading Player Piano now.
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