For our penultimate week covering the 1920s, we watched six shorts from 1920-1922. All six were in the 18-26 minute range, and all were from the three canonical film comedians of the 1920s: Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd.
In the first short, One Week (1920), Buster Keaton and his new wife (played by Sybil Seely) struggle to build a mail-order house. Having the house as the focus of most of the bits makes this one of the more focused comedy shorts we've seen, although, like a Road Runner cartoon, people are injured and things are broken that are completely fine in the next scene. It is solid and consistent and amusing, and strikes me as a good portal into Buster Keaton for a newcomer.
In Neighbors (1920) Keaton courts a woman (Virginia Fox) who lives in the house behind his. Both sets of parents forbid them from seeing each other. Keaton's father in the film is played by his real-life father Joe Keaton, and Fox's father is played by Joe Roberts, who is in all three of the Keaton films we saw this week. The short unfortunately features a quasi-blackface sequence, which seems for a second as if it is going to be a bit of social commentary -- as a policeman only pursues Keaton when his face is blackened. But that tack is never really developed, and there is additionally another racist scene in which a black family is scared of Keaton under a sheet, believing him to be a ghost. This material is particularly disappointing because there are some really astounding sequences with three men (including Keaton) standing on each other's shoulders in order to reach the upper stories of Fox's house.
The last of the three Keaton shorts we saw was The Goat (1921), and it was the most scatter-shot of the three. The first half is dominated by Keaton trying to evade the police, eventually fleeing to another town. (It is a little strange how police were such consistent punching-bags in silent film; if someone made a comedy today where the main character spent an entire film knocking policemen down and throwing things at them, it would probably be remarked upon.) The second half is kicked off by the iconic scene of Keaton sitting on the front of a train as it pulls in very close to the camera. In the new town, however, he is mistaken for a wanted criminal, and also falls in love with the police chief's daughter (Fox again), while trying to avoid her father (Roberts again.) None of this makes much sense, but it ends strongly, with a solid last five minutes in which Keaton's creativity and athleticism are on full display.
The next two films we saw starred Harold Lloyd. High and Dizzy (1920) was the first, and mostly involved Lloyd and a friend (played by Roy Brooks) wandering around drunk. Mildred Davis, Lloyd's frequent co-star and future wife, appears briefly at the beginning where it is established that she is a sleepwalker -- so that it is only slightly random when she shows up in the last third and sleepwalks along ledges that through fake perspective appear high above a city -- in an early iteration of the famous Safety First scenes. The movie was agreeable and didn't wear out its welcome, but didn't aspire to be much more than a collection of middling gags.
Fake perspective also featured in the second Lloyd film, Never Weaken (1921), in which Lloyd spends the last third navigating a series of ostensibly high-up girders -- for no particularly good reason. His co-star in this film is again Davis, and he spends the first third trying to scare up business for the osteopath for whom she works, and then the second third trying to kill himself (in what seems like an extreme overreaction) after misapprehending that she is going to marry someone else. This film is much of a piece with the previous one -- in that it is essentially a string of gags -- with nothing particularly distinctive besides the perspective trick.
The last film was a Chaplin short named Pay Day (1922), the first portion of which chronicles his working day, and the last portion of which shows him trying to enjoy his evening after work while avoiding his wife, played in a thankless role by Phyllis Allen -- who was 28 years his senior (though she doesn't look it.) His regular co-star during this period, Edna Purviance, shows up as well, but in only a minor role as his foreman's daughter during the first and most enjoyable section of the film. That portion also has one memorable sequence with workers throwing bricks up to Chaplin perched above, and him catching them acrobatically. This is transparently accomplished by running the film backwards, but it nonetheless has a striking effect. The second section is marred by the ugly stereotype of the shrewish wife, but is otherwise a typical sequence of visual jokes -- in this case revolving around him going out and getting drunk, trying to get home, and, as above, trying to avoid his wife's wrath. It also is the source of the meme of Chaplin looking at a passing young woman while his wife glowers at him.
Next week we'll watch another selection of shorts from the 1920s, and then move on to the features of the 1930s.
The ongoing list of films remains at https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.
