Shorts (1923-1929)

During our second week of shorts from the 1920s, we watched a Chaplin film, an experimental French film, three Disney shorts, and two silent shorts from Laurel and Hardy.

In The Pilgrim (1923) -- which at 47 minutes I've rather arbitrarily classed as a short -- Chaplin plays an ex-convict who disguises himself as a priest, and is taken in by a community who mistakes him for another priest. This is complicated by the fact that one of his friends from prison is in the same town and recognizes him. Chaplin reliably plays his normal persona, and has many of his typical cast-mates present: Edna Purviance, Mack Swain, and his brother Sydney Chaplin. Like many of his films, it's divided into a sequence of set pieces, but it's one of his more muted outings -- comedically, visually, and from a story perspective.

Ménilmontant (1926) came in a DVD set called "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s," an imposing title. The film itself is relatively accessible though, its most "experimental" feature being its lack of title cards. This makes it occasionally opaque; however we have seen a number of commercial films that used few or no title cards (including notably 1924's The Last Laugh.) It tells the story of two sisters played by Nadia Sibirskaia and Yolande Beaulieu, who are orphaned early in the film, and their subsequent lives in the city. It was written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, a Russian working in France. The film begins and ends with violence, a jarring framing device -- though what occurs during the main body of the movie could potentially have worked independently. In addition to the lack of title cards, another technique which felt innovative was the use of a few striking images of characters fading in and out, showing elapsed time. I expect there are earlier precedents for this, but it was used effectively, and was less clichéd than showing clock hands turning, or using more conventional cuts.

Steamboat Willie (1928) is the most iconic short that we watched during this session, having introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and having been excerpted and parodied extensively. The short's events are fairly random, but the through-line is Mickey, Minnie, and Pete traveling on a boat, making music using various on-board animals. Although this film has synced sound, there is little if any dialog; the sound is confined mostly to music tracking the on-screen action, with some additional interspersed muttering. I should remark, too, that the gracious and thoughtful Mickey Mouse of which I got a lifetime's supply on the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse animated TV show when the kids were growing up -- had not yet emerged. This Mickey Mouse is rather less benevolent, particularly to the other animals that don't seem to have been granted Mickey's mysterious ability for abstract thought.

That carries through to Plane Crazy (1928) in which Mickey builds a plane, looking with admiration at an image of Lindbergh (before he became disillusioned by Lindbergh's politics during WWII.) In his drive to become an aviator, he again uses animals in various cavalier ways. At one point, while airborne, Mickey terrifies Minnie by recklessly steering the plane in an attempt to get her to consent to a kiss. When she still refuses, he kisses her anyway, and in response she jumps out of the plane. Dark stuff. As with the previous film, there's very little dialog; I believe Minnie says "Who me?" at one point.

The third Disney film The Skeleton Dance (1929) doesn't feature any of Disney's famous characters, but is pretty well described by its title, and is basically five and half minutes of skeletons dancing around and making music -- as well as some black cats and owls.

It's hard to judge how innovative or impactful any of these Disney films were at the time. It's certainly true that we haven't seen anything like them previously in this project, and that within a few years Mickey Mouse had attained an iconic status that persists to this day. But it is also true that we didn't find any of these cartoons particularly funny. This may in part because we were brought up with their superior successors, including the Looney Tunes cartoons that became popular in the next decade -- but I find it hard to believe that even by the standards of the time a lot of the gags in these shorts weren't a bit limp and repetitive.

Along similar lines, Big Business (1929) was the first of two Laurel and Hardy shorts we saw, both silent, and although Laurel and Hardy became more famous in the sound era, their act, with its barbed friendship, already appeared to be largely in place. It involves them as two traveling salesman -- selling Christmas trees -- and particularly their feud with a hostile customer, played by James Finlayson. This particular short was not on the same level as the canonical silent comedians that we saw last week, with much less visual imagination, but it did have a certain sense of escalating destructiveness which was well-executed.

The second short of theirs that we watched -- Liberty (1929) -- was not quite as focused. They play prison escapees, and a huge chunk of the film involves them trying to rectify having earlier put on each other's pants. Also a live crab somehow winds up in one of the pairs of pants. This is all exactly as clever and high-brow as it sounds. James Finlayson from Big Business shows up again, as the owner or employee of a music store outside of which Laurel and Hardy wreak havoc. Eventually they end up on supposedly elevated girders of an in-construction building -- a situation both contrived and derivative, echoing the last week's Harold Lloyd short Never Weaken, except a decade later. However, on the plus side, and in a bit of continuity from Ménilmontant, this short has very few title cards -- and the ones that it does have could easily have been eliminated (e.g. "What did you do that for?")

That completes our sampling of short films from the 1920s, and our survey of the 1920s in general. I plan to summarize that experience in another post at some point, but next week we're moving on the 1930s with our first feature from 1930, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers.

Shorts (1920-1922)

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.

The Circus (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 8/10/2018

The Circus was our seventh film from 1928, and the fifth Chaplin feature that we've seen, the most recent being 1925's The Gold Rush.

This film began with a song playing over the opening credits, sung, as it turns out, by Chaplin himself. The kids found this quite surprising, though we'd heard some tinny isolated singing on a Movietone track during 1927's Sunrise. But Chaplin's voice in this case seemed to me a little too clear and resonant to truly be of the era -- and sure enough when I researched it, it turned out to be an addition he'd made in the late sixties, when he was nearing eighty. He added a new score along with his vocals, raising the question of how different the film we watched was from the one audiences saw at the time. Hopefully the changes were minor.

Chaplin again plays a variation on his tramp, starting the film penniless and in trouble with the law, but eventually being hired by the circus -- because he is unintentionally funny. There is a love triangle between him, the ringmaster's daughter (played by Merna Kennedy), and a tightrope walker (played by Harry Crocker), though it takes quite a while for that story to develop. The majority of the film consists of various medium length bits -- such as a chase through a hall of mirrors, or Chaplin getting locked in a cage with a lion. There aren't as many long set pieces as we've seen in his previous films, and there are a few surprisingly violent scenes showing how Kennedy's father, played by Al Ernest Garcia, mistreats her. There was one recurring bit that we kind of enjoyed -- a donkey that had somehow taken a dislike to Chaplin, and would occasionally appear from nowhere and attack him. In essence, though, with the plot being as thin as it is, the film became the sum of its parts -- and its parts ranged from tedious to mildly amusing. I think it is notable too that this film has very few of the iconic scenes that are shown in Chaplin clip reels -- in strong contrast, for instance, to The Gold Rush. I wasn't a huge fan of the earlier movie either, but it was far more ambitious than this one.

It is interesting how few films Chaplin was making by this point. By comparison, Buster Keaton starred in a film or two every year from the early twenties up through the mid-thirties (though he had lost creative control by the time sound films arrived.) Harold Lloyd appeared with similar frequency during the same time period. Chaplin, though, starred in four major films in the twenties, two in each of the thirties, forties, and fifties, and a final film in the sixties. It is probably too easy to ascribe this to his personality or his increasing exactitude about his films -- though I've read stories along those lines. But to the extent that his perfectionism played a role in his decreased appearance on the screen, it seems like a misplaced impulse, in part because his films are not notably stronger than his peers'; in fact most of them, including this one, are in the same "pleasantly amusing but hit-or-miss" category.

Next week we move on to The Man Who Laughs, our eighth film from 1928 -- featuring two German émigrés, Paul Leni as the director, and Conrad Veidt as the lead. Veidt, of course, we saw way back in 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It also will be our first film with Mary Philbin, who plays the female lead. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Show People (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 7/27/2018

Show People was our third film from 1928. It was directed by King Vidor, and starred Marion Davies and William Haines, all of whom we've seen before during this project -- Marion Davies in 1922's When Knighthood was in Flower and 1927's The Red Mill, William Haines in 1926's Tell It to the Marines, and King Vidor as the director of 1925's The Big Parade.

This was another film with a Movietone soundtrack, signaling the incipient end of the silent era, and the kids were impressed that, for the first time, we heard the MGM lion roar. ("Whoa!" they said.) Until recently I had actually believed that the point of the MGM lion -- and its roar -- was to signal to audiences that they were watching a sound film -- but we've seen the lion roaring silently on films dating back a few years, so obviously that was incorrect.

Show People is a Hollywood movie about Hollywood, similar in some ways to 1923's The Extra Girl, but its humor is broader than that film, which is especially notable when you remember that a long sequence in the earlier film involved Mabel Normand not being able to tell the difference between a dog dressed up as a lion and a real lion. Marion Davies in this case plays the newcomer to Hollywood, and is eventually helped out by William Haines, who is a slapstick comedian at a minor studio. Haines, as we saw a few months ago, held his own against Lon Chaney in Tell It to the Marines, perhaps surprisingly. But he does less well up against Marion Davies in this picture. She is clearly the star of the film, and gives her normal charismatic performance, though she is a bit less charming and more self-centered than in previous films. In fact, the major arc of the film follows her rise up the Hollywood ladder, forgetting her friends along the way. But she is obnoxious not only on the way up, but also when she rights things at the end. Haines also is fairly obnoxious in his role, and never quite shows his character's core of seriousness as he did in Tell It to the Marines.

Neither The Extra Girl nor this film was intended as a brutal satire of Hollywood exactly, but this film has a little more of an insider feel than the earlier one, which gives it that much less bite. It reminded me of the phenomenon of celebrities who have been mocked on Saturday Night Live showing up in person, to signal that the mockery is all in good fun -- whether or not that is (or should be) the case. And there are a number of celebrity cameos throughout the movie, playing themselves, including William S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks, and John Gilbert. Some show up only briefly in a single shot, but some, like Charlie Chaplin, are mentioned by name, and actually have a short scene with the lead characters. The Extra Girl had a few celebrity cameos as well, but nothing close to the star power of this film.

I think I would have preferred if this film had taken a stronger approach in one direction or another -- either to have been funnier, or to have had less two-dimensional characters, or to have been more scathing about Hollywood. But it was entertaining, and it was certainly interesting to see the impression Hollywood had or wanted to create for itself at this point in its history.

Next week we move on to The Crowd, our fourth film from 1928, which was also directed by King Vidor. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.

The Gold Rush (1925)

Originally posted to Facebook on 12/24/2017

The Gold Rush was our third film from 1925, and our fourth feature starring Charlie Chaplin -- the third which he directed. By this time Chaplin was deep into auteur mode, obsessively re-shooting scenes and pouring enormous resources into something that by design was going to be received as essentially light-hearted. This of course is not unique to Chaplin -- the same is true of the Marvel movies and many other films -- but it does sometimes intrude on the viewing experience when you realize that a joke which barely registers was the result of weeks of shooting and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although, given the amount of care that was given to the film, it is a little surprising that the plot is as ramshackle as it is -- being basically an excuse for a series of set pieces. It involves a search for gold, a romance, and a story about surviving the elements -- but they are awkwardly integrated, and the romance -- if it even rises to that level -- seems particularly perfunctory. (Chaplin re-edited and re-released this film in 1942 -- and perhaps tightened things -- but in the spirit of this project, we watched the 1925 version.)

I think, too, that The Gold Rush is a victim of its own fame. Many of the bits have become so well-known and endlessly copied that it is difficult to see them fresh. It is impossible that Chaplin eating a shoe, or turning into a giant chicken in the eyes of his cabin-mate, or pantomiming dancing dinner rolls, would register in the same way as it did to an audience in 1925. One thing that I did learn on seeing this film for the first time, though, is that the dancing dinner rolls sequence literally occurs because Chaplin's character explicitly announces that he is now going to do a funny bit involving dinner rolls -- and in a dream sequence at that. This brazen approach seems worth copying; there's no need to invest in lengthy set-ups if a character can just announce, "Now here's a funny bit!"

The foregoing notwithstanding, I enjoyed the film -- and perhaps would have enjoyed it more if I'd seen it outside the context of its status as a classic. Alli remarked that a scene where the female lead, Georgia Hale, and her friends stood Chaplin up for dinner made her feel sad -- so I guess Chaplin's pathos still has some power, as manipulative as it can be. (Georgia Hale, BTW -- whose character's name is "Georgia" in this film, possibly for the same reason that Tony Danza's characters were often named Tony -- had a very short career, but, in addition to this film, also had a significant role in one of the missing silent-era films that I most hope is rediscovered: 1926's The Great Gatsby.)

Next week we see Ben Hur, our fourth film from 1925, and our second film starring Ramon Novarro. It is also the second time in this project we've seen an adaptation of this story, the first being a short from 1907. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

The Kid (1921)

Originally posted to Facebook on 3/2/2017

The Kid was our first film from 1921, and our third feature starring Charlie Chaplin. But it actually feels more like our first proper Chaplin film, because the first (1914’s Tillie’s Punctured Romance, which some claim is the first surviving feature length comedy) was before Chaplin had really refined his screen persona, and the second (1918’s Shoulder Arms) was only forty-five minutes long, and was more akin to some of his shorts than a full-length movie. The version of The Kid that we saw was actually somewhat edited by Chaplin himself in 1971, apparently to remove a few scenes in which he didn’t appear. The main victim of this editing according to the internet was his regular female costar Edna Purviance. His other co-star -- the title character -- was Jackie Coogan, the archetypal child actor who was cheated out of his earnings by his parents. He also famously starred as Uncle Fester in the 1960s TV version of The Addams Family, and continued appearing in movies up through the 1980s. The clarity of the print was unusually sharp, possibly due to its popularity and various re-releases over the years, and it was the most relaxed of Chaplin’s films that we’ve seen, with fewer acrobatic or closely-timed sequences than usual. Most of the comedy was of a domestic sort, with Chaplin trying to raise Coogan in a less-than-ideal fashion, after finding him abandoned as a baby. The most elaborate bit is a dream sequence in which Chaplin imagines himself in a sort of an urban heaven. I didn’t find the movie enormously amusing, but it was pleasant and charming, and certainly showed Chaplin’s increasingly polished style. Additionally Coogan was not as annoying as you might imagine a young child in this sort of role might be.

Our next film from 1921 is Tol’able David, which stars Richard Barthelmess, whom we saw just last week as the male lead in Way Down East. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Summary 1910-1919

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/22/2017

Late last year we finished up our chronological viewing of the 1910s, and are now four films into 1920. I thought this would be a good time to single out the films that I most enjoyed or found the most interesting from that period. We watched nineteen shorts and thirty-one features, though the dividing line between the two was a little fuzzy at times, and included some ~45 minute "features." One of those shorter features that I liked was The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs [1912], directed by Léonce Perret and produced in France at Gaumont Studios. As I mentioned in the write-up, it could very easily have been adapted as an episode on the old Alfred Hitchcock show, and coming when it did at the dawn of features it seemed markedly more realistic than the shorts we'd been watching previously, which were largely melodramas or the tail-end of the Melies or Melies-inspired camera-trick films. Two other films, also from Gaumont, were the crime serials Fantomas [1913] and Judex [1916], both of which were over five hours in total length, and both of which were directed by Louis Feuillade. Judex is more consistent in tone, and is probably the better film; I could easily imagine it being rebooted for a modern audience. But Fantomas is more tongue-in-cheek, and more bizarre (for instance the drive-by attempt at murder via python, foiled only by the hero having the foresight to wear a python-proof suit.)

The two films that are likely on any in-depth film history curriculum -- and deserve to be -- are Cabiria [1914] and Intolerance [1916]. The shock of seeing the camera begin moving into a scene during Cabiria -- rather than just panning -- cannot be felt by a modern audience in the same way it must have been felt by a contemporary audience, but one can still apprehend that something new is happening. And it is has a number of elaborate and impressive set pieces as well -- including the dark and weird scenes where children are tossed into an oven embedded in the stomach of a statue of a local god. Intolerance builds upon Cabiria, and adds the famous Babylonian crane shots, as well as an insanely ambitious attempt to make a coherent movie out of four distinct time period. It doesn't completely succeed, and spends a lot of time burrowing down some weirdly misguided moral rabbit-holes, but it's an impressive film, both in its ambition, and in what it accomplishes. Both films are long, and periodically lose focus. Cabiria, though, at least, seems to always have entertainment on its mind, rather than trying to teach some questionable moral lessons.

Besides Feuillade and Leonce Perret, there were three other directors whom we saw more than once: D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Victor Sjöström. Victor Sjöström is the only one of the three all of whose films I liked. Probably the best of his three films we saw was Ingeborg Holm [1913]. Like The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs, it was markedly more realistic than the films we'd been seeing up until that point, and stopped short of some of the sentimental cliches it could have employed, at least up until the very end. It was Dickensian in a sense, in that it told a story about an individual's misfortunes, but also had a focus on the institutional failures that had played a role.

The final feature I'll mention was the one that I personally found the most entertaining from this period: the Douglas Fairbanks feature When the Clouds Roll By [1919], directed by Victor Fleming. It was the funniest of the various comedies we'd seen -- including the films we saw by the canonical three silent comedians -- Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. To be fair to those three, all of their greatest work came in the twenties, and only Chaplin was making features in the 1910-1919 period. Fairbanks, too, probably did his major work in the twenties, but by 1919 he was already well established, and this film features his typical athleticism along with some intricate stunts and some fancy editing. Also it helps that he and his leading lady actually seem to like each other, always helpful in a romantic comedy, and surprisingly missing in a lot of the films we saw from this period (and even today, really.)

As far as shorts are concerned, I can't say there was anything that really stood out for me. Griffith's The Girl and Her Trust [1912] was a good short from the period just prior to features becoming common. I understand there were several other versions with a similar story that Griffith and others shot, but this was the one we saw, and it was a good straight-forward western, sort of a natural evolution of The Great Train Robbery. The Immigrant [1917] was probably the best of the Chaplin shorts we saw, especially the first half which was set shipboard. From Hand to Mouth [1919] by Harold Lloyd was also intermittently amusing. Lloyd's films don't have the touch of obsesssiveness that Chaplin's and Keaton's do, but he does have more of an everyman quality that makes his protagonists a little more sympathetic.

So that's it for the teens for a while -- probably forever in that concentrated a dosage. I'm looking forward to the twenties quite a bit, because I'm expecting the films to be better and stranger and more ambitious, which certainly seems to be the case four films in.

Shorts (1918-1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/1/2017

Last week we watched our second and last batch of shorts from the teens. They included:

A Dog's Life (1918)
The Bell Boy (1918)
From Hand to Mouth (1919)
Bumping into Broadway (1919)

All three of the canonical silent comedians are represented: Chaplin in A Dog’s Life, Keaton in The Bell Boy, and Harold Lloyd in the other two.

We’d seen three Chaplin shorts the previous week, and the new one was along much the same lines, including the presence of Edna Purviance as his leading lady. Quality-wise it was in the middle of the pack: not as good as The Immigrant, but better than The Tramp. Much of the plot revolves around Chaplin trying to obtain money and food, which is essentially the premise of the earlier shorts as well.

That basic plot is also the basis of Harold Lloyd’s From Hand to Mouth, though Lloyd is a somewhat more accessible leading man. Chaplin often has a slightly alien presence -- including his unusual appearance, and his ignorance or lack of concern with normal human conventions. Lloyd comes across as more of a normal human being down on his luck. His co-star in this film was Mildred Davis, who eventually became his wife of forty-plus years.

Bumping into Broadway was another Lloyd short from the same year, and had many of the same supporting cast, excepting his co-star, who in this case was Bebe Daniels, an actress whom we’d seen in a bit part in Male and Female, and who was active in movies and TV well into the 1950s. Interestingly both films end with dozens of policeman chasing people around, which conforms to a stereotype of silent comedies. Neither film was made for Keystone, so these weren’t technically Keystone Cops, but seem likely to be a derivative of some sort.

I’d taken the kids to see 1928’s Speedy back during the fall at the Alamo in Winchester, so this wasn’t their first time seeing Harold Lloyd. He’s a decade younger in these shorts, but his persona already seems to be basically intact.

The remaining short, The Bell Boy, was a Fatty Arbuckle picture, and co-starred both Keaton and Arbuckle’s nephew Al St. John, whom we'd seen in the previous week’s Fatty and Mabel Adrift. This is the first time we’ve seen Keaton however, and although he isn’t the star of the picture his talents are prominently on display, and you can see an athleticism and apparent willingness to endure pain for the sake of a gag that are unlike Chaplin or Lloyd. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, he reprised much of this short twenty years later in the sound era, with 1937’s Love Nest on Wheels, and also used a portion of it almost fifty years later, in a 1966 short called The Scribe. Like all of the shorts this week, this film has a lot of scattershot jokes, some of which are better than others. Interestingly there are some topical references to Rasputin and to Kaiser Wilhelm, making this and Shoulder Arms the only two films we’ve seen to directly reference World War One while it was actually occurring.

Next week we begin the 1920s, with our fourth film by Cecil B. DeMille, titled Why Change Your Wife?. I’ve also added a new set of films from 1921. As with 1920, I’ve failed to keep to my original plan of targeting four films a year, and have instead selected five. This should take us into early March. I’m definitely hoping to hit sound films this year, since I would like to finish this project before the kids go to college, but we shall see. The updated list is shared here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Shorts (1915-1917)

Originally posted to Facebook on 12/14/2016

This was our first of two weekends watching shorts from the teens. We saw five films:

The Tramp (1915)
A Burlesque on Carmen (1915)
Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916)
Teddy at the Throttle (1917)
The Immigrant (1917)

Three of them were Chaplin shorts, the best of which was The Immigrant, which included a brief scene that I half-recognized from somewhere, specifically a few seconds in which Chaplin is half-walking / half-hopping in order to keep his balance on a rocking boat. The Immigrant is split into two parts, the first of which takes place on a ship bringing immigrants to the United States, including their sighting of the Statue of Liberty (which, as I believe I mentioned when discussing 1915’s The Italian, had been built just thirty years earlier.) The second section takes place mostly at a restaurant, once Chaplin and his co-star have settled in America. The best scenes are on board the ship; things slow down a bit once he comes ashore. His costar in all three shorts is Edna Purviance, who was also his co-star in 1918’s Shoulder Arms, which we saw several weeks ago. (The distinction between shorts and features during this period is a bit arbitrary; The Immigrant was half an hour, while Shoulder Arms was only forty-five minutes.)

A Burlesque on Carmen was interesting in that it was a direct parody of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 version of Carmen, which we watched back in May. The sets and costumes and plot points were quite similar, though the jokes were mostly shoehorned into the plot, rather than constituting any real satire of the earlier movie.

The Tramp was the earliest of the three, and probably the least inventive, with most of the jokes consisting of people being hit with bricks or poked with pitchforks or having things fall on them.

Fatty and Mabel Adrift starred Mabel Normand (who we last saw in 1914’s Tillie’s Punctured Romance, with Chaplin) and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The villain was played by Al St. John, Arbuckle’s nephew. His acting in this short was extremely broad, even by the standards of early silent comedies, but apparently he went on to a long career as a Western sidekick in the thirties and forties, including many B movies with Buster Crabbe. This movie was basically about Arbuckle and Normand’s characters' romance and eventual marriage, and St. John’s jealous attempts at sabotage.

Teddy at the Throttle starred Gloria Swanson, whom we saw a few weeks ago in Male and Female. Her costar was Bobby Vernon, who was only an inch taller than Swanson at 5’2. The main villain was played by Wallace Beery, who was married to Swanson at the time. Like her, he bridged the gap between silents and talkies, winning a Best Actor Oscar in 1932. He was also famously referenced in Barton Fink (“Wallace Beery. Wrestling Picture. What do you need, a roadmap?”) The plot of this was similar to a few other films we’ve seen, in that Swanson and Vernon are due to inherit some money if and when they are married, and Beery and his sister attempt to use this information to enrich themselves.

I can’t say any of these films really struck me as worthy of recommendation, but The Immigrant and Teddy at the Throttle were probably the best of the bunch. Next week we see four more shorts, and then move on to features from the 1920s. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Shoulder Arms (1918)

Originally posted to Facebook on 10/27/2016

Shoulder Arms was our second film from 1918, and also the second time we’ve seen Chaplin. Chaplin’s brother Sydney has a significant role in the movie as well, and this is the first film in which we’ve seen Chaplin’s frequent female co-star Edna Purviance. The plot concerns an American GI during WWI, training and eventually fighting overseas. This is the the first movie we’ve seen in which WWI is explicitly referenced, though we have previously seen it generically alluded to. This film is still not what I would think of as laugh-out-loud funny, but it made me smile intermittently, and was more creative in its set-ups and much more methodical about presenting actual jokes than the first Chaplin film we saw, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, which was basically just a long parade of characters kicking, hitting, and throwing things at each other. The trenches in this film, for instance, turn out to be the basis for a lot of creative set pieces, including one brief tracking shot that reminded me of the similar but more elaborate scene from Paths of Glory. The ending was a bit of a let down, and I imagine a cliché even in 1918.

Our next film from 1918 is The Outlaw and His Wife, the third feature we’ve seen directed by Victor Sjöström, and the second one in which he is also the lead. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/29/2016

Tillie’s Punctured Romance was our third film from 1914. It is claimed that this was the first feature-length comedy, and would therefore also be the first feature film of many of the comedians present, including Chaplin. It is definitely the first film we’ve seen that contained a significant number of people that are still somewhat famous today. Charlie Chaplin, of course, is the most famous, but it also contained Marie Dressler, who starred in many silent films, and had a resurgence in popularity in early sound films twenty years later, winning an Oscar for Best Actress, and being nominated for another. Also present was Mabel Normand, who was a popular silent star, and Edgar Kennedy, who I remember as the food vendor tormented by Harpo and Chico in Duck Soup, but who also appeared in many films up through the forties. However, this assemblage of talent sadly does not result in anything very funny. There were a few moments where I smiled, such as when people were throwing bricks at one another, or when Chaplin slapped a newspaper boy, but in general it is full of people chasing each other, and falling down and knocking each other over, to such an extent that it becomes monotonous. Chaplin does not play his Tramp character, though he looks somewhat similar. Instead he plays a character given in IMDB as “The City Stranger,” who woos Marie Dressler because he thinks she is rich. Mabel Normand plays his actual pre-existing girlfriend, who is not terribly happy about the whole situation. Marie Dressler is also not happy when she finds out that Chaplin already has a girlfriend. They both express their frustration via violent and repetitive slapstick. So, anyway, something of a disappointment. On the plus side, the film print was bright and clear, which was the first time that’s been true for a couple of weeks. Also, I liked the title -- even without knowing you’d almost guess that “Tillie’s Punctured Romance” was a silent movie title, or failing that a single by The Decemberists.

Next week we watch our final film from 1914: Cabiria, which apparently was one of the first films where camera movements beyond simple pans began to be used routinely. The spreadsheet, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT