The Oxford History of World Cinema (34 page)

AMERICAN COMEDIES AND MACK SENNETT

America had lagged behind continental Europe in developing name comedians who could

sustain regular series of one-reel films. The first true American comic star of the type was

John Bunny ( 1863-1915), a fat, genial man who had been a successful stage actor and

producer before recognizing the potential of films, and offering himself to the Vitagraph

Company. Although today his films, generally revolving around social mix-ups and

marital spats, seem woefully unfunny, his success with audiences before the First World

War was phenomenal, and encouraged other American companies to try comedy series.

Essanay's Snakeville Comedies introduced 'Alkali Ike' ( Augustus Carney) and 'Mustang

Pete' ( William Todd). Another Essanay series introduced a future star, Wallace Beery, as

Sweedie.

The transformation and pre-eminence of American screen comedy, however, may be

dated from the formation of the Keystone Comedy Studio under Mack Sennett, in 1912.

Keystone was the comedy arm of the New York Motion Picture Company, whose other

Hollywood studios were 101 Bison, producing Thomas Ince's Westerns and historical

films, and Reliance, specializing in dramas. Sennett was Irish-Canadian, an unsuccessful

stage actor who in 1908 had been reduced to working in movies. He was fortunate to be

recruited to the Biograph Studios, where his natural curiosity led him to observe and

absorb the discoveries of Biograph's principal director D. W. Griffith. Along with

Griffith's revolutionary techniques, Sennett studied the comedies coming from France,

and by 1910 had acquired enough skill to be appointed Biograph's principal comedy

director, a post which led to his appointment to run Keystone. He brought with him to

Keystone some of his former Biograph collaborators including Fred Mace, Ford Sterling,

and the beautiful and witty Mabel Normand.

Sennett was uneducated, intelligent, and tough, with an instinctive sense of comedy.

Because he was easily bored himself, he could tell what would hold the audience's

attention and what would not. Having mastered film craft at Biograph, he passed on his

lessons. The Keystone cameramen were dextrous in following the free flight of the

clowns; and the fast Keystone editing was adapted from Griffith's innovatory methods.

Keystone stars and films derived from vaudeville, circus, comic strips, and at the same

time from the realities of early twentieth-century America. Keystone pictures depicted a

world of wide, dusty streets with one-storey clapboard houses, hardware stores and

groceries, dentists' surgeries and saloon bars. The clowns inhabited a familiar world of

kitchens and parlours, seedy hotel lobbies, bedrooms with iron cots and rickety wash-

stands, bowler hats and wild beards, feathered hats and harem skirts, ModelTs and horses-

and-buggies. Comedy at Keystone was a wild caricature of the ordinary joys and terrors

of everyday life, and the guiding rule was to keep things moving, to allow the audience no

pause for breath or critical reflection. Sennett built up a stock company of outrageous

grotesques and fearless acrobats, including Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle -- a fat man with great

comedy style and dexterity -- cross-eyed Ben Turpin, walrus-whiskered Billy Bevan and

Chester Conklin, giant Mack Swain, obese Fred Mace. Other comedians who emerged

from the Keystone Studio included the future stars Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon,

Charlie Chase, who became a notable director as Charles Parrott, Charles Murray, Slim

Summerville, Hank Mann, Edgar Kennedy, Harry McCoy, Raymond Griffith, Louise

Fazenda, Polly Moran, Minta Durfee, and Alice Davenport. At least two Keystone Kops,

Eddie Sutherland and Edward Cline, as well as two Sennett gagmen, Malcolm St Clair

and Frank Capra, later became notable comedy directors in their own right.

The Keystone comedies remain a monument of early twentieth-century popular art,

transmuting the evident surfaces of the life and times of the 1910s and 1920s into a

comedy that is basic and universal. The Keystone shorts were uncompromisingly

anarchic. In an era of determinedly materialistic values, the Sennett films celebrated

orgiastic destruction of goods and possessions, of cars and houses and china ornaments.

As in all the best comedy, authority and dignity were tumbled and ridiculed.

Sennett's greatest year was 1914, when his most famous star, Charlie Chaplin, won world

fame for himself and the studio in a few months of phenomenal discovery, innovation,

and comedy creation. When his one-year Keystone contract expired, Chaplin, recognizing

his immense commercial value, asked for a large raise on his $150 a week salary. Sennett,

short-sightedly perhaps, was unwilling to meet his demands. Chaplin was to move in turn

to the Essanay Studios and contracts with Mutual and First National which gave him the

increased independence of operation which he craved. Keystone survived the loss, but the

Chaplin year had been the studio's apogee.

Sennett's success at Keystone spurred many rival studios, some short-lived, to set up in

comedy production. His most serious rival was Hal Roach, who teamed up with a fellow

film extra, Harold Lloyd, to make a comedy series starring Lloyd as Willie Work, a pale

imitation of Chaplin's Tramp. Subsequent collaborations fared better, and the creation of

Lloyd's bespectacled 'Harold' character launched their careers to joint success. After the

parting with Lloyd, Roach was inspired to team two comedians who had been working

solo for years. Laurel and Hardy were to pass into universal mythology, the sublime

partnership of the tiny, diffident, tearful Stan with the large, pompous, unwisely over-

confident Ollie.

The style of the Roach stars over the years -- Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the troupe of child

comedians Our Gang, Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts, Charlie Chase, Will Rogers, Edgar

Kennedy, Snub Pollard -- exemplify the difference between Roach and Sennett. The

latter's films tended to frenetic action and slapstick. Roach preferred well-constructed

stories and a more restrained, realistic, and ultimately more sophisticated style of

character comedy. Harold Lloyd and Stan and Ollie are recognizably human, sharing the

foibles, feelings, and anxieties of an audience which is also engaged in the permanent

battle with the perilous uncertainties of the contemporary world.

THE HEYDAY OF SILENT COMEDY

At least until 1913 the standard length of a film was one reel; multi-reel feature films

were at first resisted in many quarters of the film trade. It was, then, a dramatic revolution

when Sennett announced the first multi-reel comedy at the end of 1914. Tillie's Punctured

Romance ( 1914) was designed to star the famous comedienne Marie Dressler in an

adaptation of one of her stage successes. Charlie Chaplin was cast as her leading man.

Despite the success of this film, it was to be several years before the feature-length

comedy was established. Chaplin made his first two-reeler, Dough and Dynamite ( 1914),

at Keystone, but not until 1918 and A Dog's Life did he embark on featurelength films.

Keaton made his first feature in 1920, Lloyd in 1921, Harry Langdon in 1925.

Harold Lloyd in For Heaven's Sake ( 1926)

Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon -- the four giants of American silent film comedy --

all emerged from the oneand two-reeler period to reach the apogee of their careers in the

1920s. Chaplin trained in the British music hall and, in the manipulation of the image at

Keystone, created in his Tramp character the most universal fictional human image in

history. Like Chaplin, Keaton was above all a highly accomplished actor, who gave each

of the characters he played-they ranged from millionaires to cowhands-its own validity.

The myth of 'The Great Stone Face' misrepresents his startlingly expressive face and still

more eloquent body. A lifetime of creating comedy and solving stage problems (he was

working professionally from the age of three) gave him an impeccable sense of comic

structure and
mise-en-scéne.
The characteristic, escalating Keaton gag enchainments

make him the equal of any director working in 1920s Hollywood.

Harold Lloyd was exceptional among the silent film comedians since his background and

training were not in vaudeville. Stage-struck from youth, he had worked in little stock

companies before landing a job as a $5-a-day extra at Universal Studios, where he met

Hal Roach. Lloyd joined Sennett after the Willie Work films and a disagreement with

Roach; but they reunited to make a new series, with Lloyd as a hayseed, Lonesome Luke.

The films proved successful enough; but in 1917 Lloyd put on a pair of horn-rim glasses

for a film called Over the Fence ( 1917), and discovered a far better character which was

to bring him lasting fame. The Harold character evolved through a series of shorts, and

was fully formed by the time of his first feature A Sailor-Made Man ( 1921). Harold was

always aspiring to be the all-American boy, the Horatio Alger hero, an enthusiastic go-

getter. The drive for social or economic betterment that always motivates the plot of a

Lloyd comedy probably represented a sincere moral beliefLloyd was in real life the

embodiment of his own success stories.

With Safety Last ( 1923) Lloyd introduced the special style of comedy of thrills with

which his name is always associated. The plot somehow called upon the innocent Harold

to take the place of a human fly; and the last third of the picture is a rising crescendo of

gags as Harold encounters ever more horrible hazards in attempting to scale the side of a

skyscraper. Lloyd's eleven silent features, including Grandma's Boy ( 1922), The

Freshman ( 1925), and the culminating The Kid Brother ( 1927) and Speedy ( 1928), were

among the biggest-earning comedies of the 1920s, even outgrossing Chaplin's films.

Harry Langdon's output was smaller and more uneven than the others; but he merits his

place in the pantheon of great clowns on the strength of three features, Tramp, Tramp,

Tramp, The Strong Man (both 1926), and Long Pants ( 1927) -- the first scripted by Frank

Capra, the others directed by him. Langdon's screen character is quiet, cute, and rather

weird. His round, white face and podgy figure, his tight-fitting clothes, and his stiff

slightly uncontrolled movements give him the look, as James Agee pointed out, of an

elderly baby. This childlike, guileless quality gives an eerie edge to his encounters with

the grown-up world of sexuality and sin.

In this enchanted age of comedy, the reputation of other comedians has been unjustly

eclipsed. Raymond Griffith emulated the sartorial elegance of Max Linder and

encountered catastrophes and peril with insouciant ingenuity; his masterpiece Hands Up!

( 1926) cast him as a Civil War spy. Marion Davies's fame as the mistress of William

Randolph Hearst has eclipsed her contemporary celebrity as a comedienne of particular

charm whose fun was seen at its best in the films in which King Vidor directed her, Show

People and The Patsy (both 1928). The Canadian-born entertainer Beatrice Lillie left her

mark in a single wonderful silent comedy, Exit Smiling ( 1927). Migrants from Europe,

the Italian Monty Banks ( Monte Bianchi) and the English Lupino Lane enjoyed

successful if brief starring careers; Banks subsequently turned director. Larry Semon, with

his distinctive white mask like a Pierrot lunaire started the 1920s as Hollywood's highest-

paid comedian, but his later features met with diminishing success, and hardly bear

revival today. W. C. Fields and Will Rogers made sporadic forays into silent films, though

their essentially verbal style of comedy was only to come into its own in the era of talking

pictures.

The extraordinary flowering of silent film comedy in Hollywood was not to any great

extent reflected anywhere else in the world -- perhaps indeed because American comedies

enjoyed such huge international distribution and popularity that there was no chance of

competing with them. In Britain, Betty Balfour, who made two feature films in her

character of Squibs, was the nearest to a star comedienne: attempts to put popular music

hall comedians on the screen lacked both skill and success. In Germany the child star of

1909, Curt Bois, grew up to be the bright star of a few comedies, the best of them The