By Scott Ross
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Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies 1915 (2015) A Flicker Alley centenary Blu-ray collection from the period following that (see below) during which Charlie Chaplin became the most famous man in the world… to the knowledge of everyone, apparently, other than him; he was so busy toiling over the Keystone comedies that were making him immortal he didn’t quite realize how they were being received, with something approaching a national, and then an international, mania.
The Essanays aren’t as rich, as well-conceived or as excruciatingly funny as the Mutuals from 1916 and 1917, but they show Chaplin growing as a creative filmmaker. Many of his Keystone associates came with him to Essanay including the combative Billy Armstrong; the perennially outraged Ernest Van Pelt; the boyish hulk Bud Jamison; Charlie’s old Karno colleague Fred Goodwins; Leo White with his face like that of a cartoon Frenchman; the statuesque Charlotte Mineau; and, briefly and enticingly, Ben Turpin. (Chaplin quickly felt the cross-eyed comedian was deliberately upstaging him.) Leaving Keystone also separated Chaplin from Mabel Normand but his new leading lady, Edna Purviance, is now the screen actress with whom he is most firmly identified. Edna was not the knockabout Normand was, and she’s a more limited actress, but she’s so lovely in an Edwardian manner and has such a charming presence one can easily see why Charlie was besotted with her, off-screen and on.
Among the highlights of this Flicker Alley boxed set are A Night in the Show, Chaplin’s variation on the “Mumming Birds” sketch that made him famous when he was touring with Fred Karno and in which he plays two roles; The Champion, which is almost a rehearsal for the great boxing sequence in City Lights; The Tramp, which adds a note of pathos at the end… although Charlie cheers himself up before walking off alone; the very funny Keystonesque romp By the Sea; A Woman, in which Chaplin does a more than credible drag routine; The Bank, which also goes in for wistfulness (although I think Chaplin the director holds too long on Charlie the actor’s look of hurt); and the hilarious Shanghaied, which anticipates the later The Immigrant and contains a curious homosexual encounter between Charlie and a coquettish cabin boy that seems, surprisingly, to show the Tramp as erotically fluid. The Burlesque on Carmen shows the work of other hands (and isn’t that funny anyway) and Chaplin does a cameo in a “Bronco” Billy Anderson short called His Regeneration (Anderson was the “A” in “S and A”) which among other things illustrates what an appalling over-actor Anderson was.
The Gnome-Mobile (1967) Ellis Kadison’s mildly entertaining adaptation for Walt Disney of the delightful fantasy novel by Upton Sinclair. It’s not as good as it could be, but still superior to many of the Disney live-action comedies that succeeded it. Considering that Sinclair was a Socialist and that his 1934 run for the governorship of California was vehemently opposed by the Hollywood studio grandees, who forbade their employees to vote for him (O, how today’s liberals must envy that power!) it’s a bit odd that Walt would have championed one of his books. Particularly so since Sinclair’s 1936 novel The Gnomobile was, beneath its wit and magic, a warning about clear-cutting and the Disney company was then in the early stages of clearing an eventual 48 square miles of Everglades for its Orlando theme-park. (Look! Over there! Someone else is harming the planet!)
What’s most enjoyable about the picture are the double casting of Walter Brennan (with and without his teeth) as a paper mill magnate (with) and an excitable 1,000-year old gnome (without); Ed Wynn as another ancient gnome; Richard Deacon as Brennan’s long-suffering assistant; and the company, along the trip, of such old pros as Charles Lane, Gil Lamb and Maudie Prickett. Some of the effects are dodgy, however, and I could have done without the gimmick casting of, as the studio insisted on calling them, “the Mary Poppins kids” Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber. As if that was going to bring ticket-buyers into the theater.
Daddy Long-Legs (1955) Considering the source (Jean Webster’s charming 1912 novel) on which this Fred Astaire/Leslie Caron musical was based, and how gifted Johnny Mercer, who wrote its songs, was, that the movie is so poor is dispiriting. It’s hardly even a musical, since there are only three proper songs (including “Dream” and one of those New Dance Sensations That Aren’t, “The Sluefoot”) and, although its co-stars were nothing if not dancers, not much dancing, either… and what’s there is sub-par for an Astaire picture. The big “Daydream Sequence” ballet, for example, is a pale imitation of what the people in the Arthur Freed unit at MGM had been doing for years. It also says something significant about a Fred Astaire number when the ballet music (by Alex North) is of much greater interest than what Astaire is doing. Jean Negulesco’s widescreen direction is pleasing, anyway, as is the color cinematography of Leon Shamroy, and the lyrics for “Something’s Gotta Give” are among Mercer’s wittiest. Henry and Phoebe Ephron were responsible for the contrived and slightly creepy adaptation (at least in the book the girl’s benefactor wasn’t pushing 60) and, if you’re interested, it took the combined talents of Alfred Newman and Cyril J. Mockridge to compose the unmemorable score and five arrangers (Edward B. Powell, Billy May, Earle Hagen, Skip Martin and Bernard Mayers) to craft the merely adequate orchestrations for the songs. In supporting roles, Thelma Ritter and Fred Clark try to inject some humor into the proceedings but the script lets both of them down. Anne Codee, however, gives a brief, lovely performance as the head of the French orphanage and if you get bored (and you will) you can look for Barrie Chase in one of the dream ballet segments or note that the charming little French boy in An American in Paris who says “Non!” is, a couple of years older, one of the orphans.
The Circus (1928) This least well-known of Charles Chaplin’s silent masterworks is a beautiful, funny, haunting comedy that deserves a far higher reputation than it currently enjoys. In it, the Tramp stumbles into a down-at-heels circus, befriends (and pines for) the owner/ringmaster’s abused step-daughter and becomes the unintentional comic hit of the show. The great irony is that the circus needs him to satisfy the customers but he can only be funny when he isn’t trying.
The gags are marvelous, aided by a camera which allowed for special effects photography within the frame and enabled Charlie to seem to be in a lion’s cage with the cats, or for his disembodied spirit to enact vengeance on his romantic rival. Among the most hilarious sequences are the Tramp’s routine as an animated fun-house automaton and the way he ruins the magician’s act. The funniest recurring bit is both the simplest and the least explicable: The mule that goes insane and chases Charlie every time it sees him. The most astounding episode involves the Tramp having to improvise on the high wire, where he is beset by a bunch of terrified monkeys, one of which attacks him, repeatedly biting him on the nose. How Chaplin endured that without calling “Cut!” I can’t imagine, but it’s surely a testament to his artistic determination.
Merna Kennedy is the circus rider with whom the Tramp falls in love, Al Ernest Garcia plays the Ringmaster and Chaplin’s longtime associate Henry Bergman plays an ageing clown. The Circus, which contains one of Chaplin’s most memorable finales, was a famously troubled production. Not only were there delays and a major fire that destroyed the set but Chaplin was in the midst of a well-publicized and acrimonious divorce. (The period was so miserable he barely mentions the movie in his autobiography.) The 1967 reissue featured a pleasing new score by the writer/director and star that includes an expressive vocal at the beginning, which Chaplin’s amanuensis tricked him into recording. The words to the song are banal, but the sound of his worn yet still eloquent 78-year old voice is strangely touching.
The Parent Trap (1961) This enormously popular Disney marital comedy is also, mirabile dictu, an utter delight 60-plus years after its release. Adapted by David Swift from a novel by Erich Kästner (who also wrote the wonderful Emil and the Detectives) and directed by him, the movie has a charm and a direct, uncomplicated appeal that set it apart not only from many of Disney’s live action comedies but from the bulk of pictures made for children. Kids of all ages loved Hayley Mills as identical twins who, thrown together as antagonists at a summer camp, discover they’re related and decide to switch places and bring their estranged parents together. I imagine the adults in the audience felt more than compensated by the presence of Maureen O’Hara, Brian Keith, Una Merkel, Joanna Barnes, Cathleen Nesbitt and the ever-delightful Charlie Ruggles; and that’s not to mention, in smaller roles, Leo G. Carroll, Linda Watkins, Ruth McDevitt, Frank De Vol and Nancy Kulp. Swift’s screenplay is unusually intelligent and sophisticated, the movie was exquisitely shot by Lucien Ballard, the split-screen photography is generally excellent, and there are some pleasant songs by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, on their way to becoming Disney’s favored house songwriters.
Now for the note of dissonance, and it’s major: If you’re of a logical turn of mind you can certainly argue it’s utterly unlikely that divorcing parents, if they were entirely sane, would like metaphorical Solomons split their children up in infancy. Especially twins. Wouldn’t shared custody of both girls have been more likely, and more healthy? That’s the picture’s only real lapse, but it’s a major stumbling block to plausibility — and, ultimately, to appreciating the Keith and O’Hara characters. What sort of parents divvy up their children like family heirlooms and then never again see the child they don’t have custody of? And who, even a troubled adolescent, would want to bring such insensitive creeps back together?
A Night in Casablanca (1946) A minor (very minor) Marx Brothers comedy that is at least marginally better than the garbage Louis B. Mayer had been relegating Minnie’s boys to at MGM. It started as a Casablanca parody (the correspondence between Groucho and Warner Bros. about A Night in Casablanca is more entertaining than the movie) before being revised. But there is something wrong with a Marx Bros. comedy when it delays Groucho’s entrance by 10 full minutes, which it spends developing the plot. Did any of their fans ever go to see a Marx movie for the Goddamned plot? Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby used to be able to knock that off in a few lines. I won’t bore you with what the screenwriters Joseph Fields and Roland Kibbee are up to. Suffice it to say that Groucho becomes the manager of the Hotel Casablanca, Chico is the proprietor of a Yellow Camel taxi service, and Harpo is the valet of the Nazi villain played by Sig Ruman. (Just don’t think too hard about why an elderly Jew is a notorious Nazi’s general factotum.) Ruman wears a wig, we are told, because the identifying scar on his pate would give him away. Yet he walks around with an even bigger scar on his cheek? That’s the level of logic in this mishegoss.
Groucho has a few sharp lines, a nice running gag involving a champagne bucket, a phonograph, two glasses and a brace of roses, and a good scene in which he accuses a pompous businessman (Paul Harvey) of trying to book a room for an assignation with his outraged wife while Harpo and Chico each get a pleasant instrumental solo. The movie’s composer, Walter Janssen, apparently thought he was scoring a thriller; his is one of the weirdest comedy scores you’ll ever hear. And the director, Archie Mayo, seems fascinated by incidentals: Instead of focusing on Chico playing the piano Mayo repeatedly cuts to close-ups of his hands, and in a scene in which Groucho’s telephone rings adds an insert of the ‘phone even though Groucho is sitting right there beside it. The aeroplane finale is fairly ho-hum but the sequence preceding it, in which the boys keep removing Ruman’s clothing from his trunks as he’s trying to leave the hotel, is hilarious. The former animator Frank Tashlin was an uncredited writer on the picture, and I’d be willing to bet he devised this scene, which has the perfect logic, and the brilliant gag sense, of a great Warner Bros. cartoon. The rest of the thing is so tentative that when, in a pale retread of Walter Woolf’s horrible treatment of him in A Night at the Opera, Harpo is beaten by Ruman, none of his blows come close to landing and the filmmakers don’t even bother adding “slap” sound effects. This is the worst a bloodthirsty Nazi officer can do? Well, at least we’re not exhorted to cheer for the Nazis in this movie the way we’re being told we must either root for actual Jew-hating Nazis in Ukraine or risk being labeled anti-Semites(!) If A Night in Casablanca was being made today, Ruman would be the hero.
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! (1933) One of the strangest movie musicals ever made. Al Jolson is Bumper, the Mayor of Central Park, where he presides over a motley citizenry of dedicated hobos, subsists on daily handouts from the Mayor of New York (Frank Morgan) and enjoys the freedom of homeless sleep beneath the trees. (No one ever says what he and his constituency do during those New York winters.) Bumper inadvertently gets himself involved with the Mayor’s suicidal/amnesiac girlfriend (the gorgeous Madge Evans), goes to work in a bank to pay her bills and then…
The picture was the brainchild of Ben Hecht and the screenplay was written by the witty playwright S.N. Berman with a few incidental songs (and occasional rhyming dialogue) by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who appear in brief cameos. The direction was by Lewis Milestone, who indulges himself with fast cuts and camera tricks, only a few of which — like the framed photograph in which Morgan sees an event unfold from his recent past — work. Curiously and despite the title the musical numbers do not include the Harry McClintock Wobblies song which is the picture’s namesake (there’s a new one with the same name) and which Chaplin used so memorably in City Lights two years earlier. It does, however, contain the glorious ballad “You Are Too Beautiful,” sung with unexpected delicacy by Jolson. His entire performance in fact seems almost calculated to win over those who, like me, usually find him unbearable. It succeeds.
Morgan’s part is essentially dramatic but the baby-faced former silent comedy star Harry Langdon has a fine role as a Marxist sanitation worker, and is marvelous. The supporting players include the Keystone comic Chester Conklin and diminutive Edgar Connor as Bumper’s pal Acorn, who complains that Evans is the first woman who’s come between them and whom Jolson can’t seem to keep his hands off. I leave that to others to interpret.
To Catch a Thief (1955) A bright, colorful bauble that virtually defines the word “fluff.” It bears a strong relationship to Alfred Hitchcock’s British thrillers in its wit and air of lightness, although it’s slighter than the best of these because nothing terribly important is at stake, only the freedom of Cary Grant, and that’s an issue that’s not in doubt for a moment. The picture isn’t about anything except having a good time (and, possibly, giving the Hitchcocks a European holiday) and that, admittedly, it gives its audience. Although based on a novel by David Dodge it bears a certain faint resemblance to Raffles (which I suspect also influenced Blake Edwards when he and Maurice Ricklin wrote The Pink Panther). The sparkling screenplay was written by John Michael Hayes, whose collaboration with the director included the unnecessary remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and the sly black comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955). His first picture with Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954), was a masterpiece of setting, character, humor, observation and mounting terror; it was all lean, no fat. To Catch a Thief isn’t nearly that good but it does afford the viewer an opportunity to watch Grant and Grace Kelly, two of the screen’s most beautiful people, lob light but loaded barbs at each other with exquisite precision. Of course, Hitchcock can’t leave well enough alone and so lards his engaging narrative with the sort of daring innuendo only a bluestocking would find objectionable, such as Kelly offering Grant some chicken and pointedly asking whether he prefers a breast or a thigh. (Oh, Mr. Hitchcock! you devil!) That at least is brief. Alas, the extended sequence of the pair making love intercut with shots of fireworks going off outside their window, is not. Hitch never met a Freudian symbol he couldn’t shoehorn into a movie.
Robert Burks performed his usual miracle work as the picture’s cinematographer but Lynn Murray’s musical score is, as was so often the case with Hitchcock’s music in America between the time he worked with Franz Waxman and before his collaboration with Bernard Herrmann, wan and without distinction. The cast, however, is splendid. Grant had one of his two best 1950s roles (the other was also for Hitchcock, in North by Northwest) as John Robie, the former cat burglar and Resistance hero forced to seek out the imposter imperiling his liberty and that of his pre-war compatriots, and shows off his breathtaking handsomeness and his flair for clothes-horsery.Kelly, who is still not fully appreciated because of her enviable blonde beauty, was always interesting to watch. Appropriate to the niece of one of the early 20th century’s wittier playwrights she always had a way with a good line and even in dramatic roles she never pushed too hard or embarrassed herself with the effort; Kelly had the pulchritudinous fascination of Monroe but without the pneumatic excess or the unattractive neurosis. She was awfully good in Rear Window and I think she’s awfully good here. Brigitte Auber contributes a beautiful performance as the young French girl, daughter of one of Robie’s Resistance cohort, who smilingly twits him yet whose jests and gentle barbs mask her feelings, and John Williams gives his standard delightful performance as an insurance man hoping to save his employers from having to shell out money for yet another set of stolen gems. The strongest performance is by Jessie Royce Landis as Kelly’s wealthy widowed mother. By turns sly, forthright and witty, her character is a realist who is quickly tiring of the trappings of sudden wealth and, while maternal and affectionate is not above dressing down her daughter for what she sees as her romantic small-mindedness. It’s a marvelous performance that lends weight to an enterprise in need of something to keep it from floating away.
Filmed largely on the Mediterranean coast of France with lush, glamorous stars wearing attractive clothing and driving sporty cars around breathtaking scenery in VistaVision, To Catch a Thief was, naturally, a big hit.
The General (1927) I regard this tragical-comical-historical-pastoral epic based on a Civil War episode as Buster Keaton’s finest achievement and one of the absolute glories of the silent screen specifically and American movies generally. However, I am about to commit heresy about it, and him. Not because I prefer Chaplin’s pictures as a rule over Keaton’s — I’ve said elsewhere in these pages that comparing the two is a fool’s enterprise and I stand by that — but because Keaton is nowhere near the auteur he is claimed by his boosters among the cineastes. That Keaton is reflexively assessed as a great director (far greater than Chaplin, the line usually continues) by people who seem to have no idea that none of his best work was done without a co-director, is what gets my dander up. We’ll skip the early “Fatty” Arbuckle shorts in which he appeared, and with which Arbuckle is credited, since Buster wasn’t the star of them. But all of his own solo shorts, many of them (One Week, The Scarecrow, The Play House, The Boat, Cops, The Blacksmith, The Balloonatic) among the funniest of the silent era, were co-directed, usually with Edward F. (Eddie) Cline, who also directed the feature Three Ages with Keaton. All of Keaton’s best features had a co-director: Donald Crisp on Keaton’s funniest picture The Navigator, James W. Horne on College, Charles Resiner on Steamboat Bill Jr. and Edward Sedgwick on the often paralyzingly funny The Cameraman. Aside from the visually ingenious short feature Sherlock Jr., the pictures Keaton directed alone are among his weakest: Seven Chances (which despite that marvelous chase at the climax is a bit dull overall), Go West, Battling Butler. Even The General contains the credit “Written and Directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton.” Note that in his titles Keaton’s name always follows that of his co-director. Was this merely generosity, or an indication of who was carrying the greater load? The unthinking, reflexive urge to credit Keaton with everything is the way with auteurists: They load up with half the required data and make ignorant proclamations which become, through repetition, fact.
Bruckman co-wrote several of Keaton’s best movies including Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator and The Cameraman. (The adaptation of William Pittenger’s book The Great Locomotive Chase, later filmed under that name in a good serious version by Walt Disney, was by Al Boasberg, Charles Smith and an un-credited Paul Gerard Smith.) So is it to Bruckman, to Keaton or to both of them that we must credit the austere beauty of The General‘s photography, those images which have caused countless Keatonites, including Orson Welles, to swoon and deem them moving evocations of Mathew Brady’s art? And if so, isn’t that due as much to the cinematography of Bert Haines and Devereaux Jennings as to the director(s)? Yet no one ever mentions them either, only Keaton. This seems to me to be carrying auteurism to extremes. Is it perhaps superfluous collective guilt over how Keaton was treated? But how is giving him too much credit now any better than withholding the praise he deserved and had only begun to receive when he died?
Issues of authorship to one side, there are probably more great moments in The General than in any other (non-Chaplin) feature-length silent comedy. It isn’t as funny as some of Keaton’s feature work, due I suspect to its subject matter. Yet it’s every bit as clever, and as perfectly worked out, as his best purely comic pictures. Interestingly, Buster was pilloried by contemporary critics for finding humor in the grim Hell of war but the movie is far less gruesome than many of his short films, which rival in their embrace of the macabre even the most horrific of Stan Laurel’s black comedy ideas. The only gag I can recall that treats death comically in The General is the one involving Buster’s sword, and the “victim” of that is a Union sniper who’s been picking off Keaton’s comrades; I see nothing objectionable about it, and anyway it’s not the death the movie makes fun of but the faulty sword that keeps escaping its hilt, and Buster’s childlike faith that he can rise above it. Keaton’s initial chase after the stolen locomotive, on foot, handcar and, eventually, in another engine, is both brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed, the sight gags building organically from the props at hand. As funny as many of them are they’re also almost shocking in the physical risks Keaton takes, and that we can clearly see him taking, as when he sits, dejected, on the coupling rods of an engine, not aware at first that the train is moving or when he braces himself against the cow-catcher and hurls one railroad tie at another that’s blocking the tracks. Even as we laugh in surprise and delight we’re holding our breath.
Black Magic (1949) An initially engaging Dumas adaptation starring Orson Welles that gradually boils up and overflows the pot. Briskly mounted by Gregory Ratoff from a Charles Bennett and Richard Schayer screenplay (which Bennett said later was rewritten by Ratoff and Welles), the picture was beautifully shot by Ubaldo Arata and Anchise Brizzi. Welles has a high, hammy time of as Cagliostro, Akim Tamiroff provides good support as his surrogate father, Stephen Bekassy makes a meal of his role as the chief villain, Margot Grahame has a deliciously icy turn as Madame du Barry and Frank Latimore is a notable stiff as the hero. In the dual role of Marie Antoinette and the hypnotized object of Welles’ desire, Nancy Guild gives a truly weird performance. As the queen she is appropriately arch, regal and entirely European. As Marie’s innocent look-alike, however, she’s entirely American, and staggeringly bad. How did she manage that?
Doctor Zhivago (1965) The best things in this visually striking David Lean/Robert Bolt adaptation of the splendid Boris Pasternak novel are those scenes and dialogue that are not in the book, chief among them the sequences with Rod Steiger as the amoral Komarovsky and Alec Guinness as Zhivago’s half-brother. Steiger is so good, and Bolt’s lines for him so memorable, you may wish the narrative was centered on him instead of dewy-eyed Omar Sharif. Although Guinness is far too old for Yevgraf in his early scenes and is unconvincingly made up, his performance in the framing device — also created for the movie — could not be bettered; the way he speaks the movie’s final line (“Ah… then it’s a gift”) is so perfect, and conveys so many layers of meaning, it ends the picture on such a genuine high you don’t even mind the umpteenth reprise of Maurice Jarre’s balalaika theme for Julie Christie.
Most of Zhivago‘s cast in fact is excellent, from Christie’s ravishing Lara and Geraldine Chaplin’s Tonya, wiser and more perceptive than her husband knows, to Ralph Richardson’s rich evocation of her gentle father and Tom Courtenay as Lara’s doctrinaire radical husband Pasha, who becomes the feared and hated Soviet killer Strelnikov. Only Sharif struggles, in a role that calls for him to be emotive at periodic intervals and to act with his big, limpid eyes, through which is supposedly reflected Yuri’s poet’s soul. The worst example of this device is the St. Petersburg massacre of peaceful protesters, “seen” through Zhivago’s eyes, which although he is looking down from a balcony, frequently look upward. To Heaven? It’s as phony and “pictorial” — as studied — a sequence as can be found in Lean’s filmography.
Although for once I find Lean’s visual mastery overdone, there is much in the picture that, like the goggles hanging on the branch at the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia and the marchers whistling “The Colonel Bogey March” in Bridge on the River Kwai, can stay with you for decades: The funeral of Yuri’s mother; the soldiers on horseback thundering over the ice; Komarovsky running through the house when Lara’s mother attempts suicide; Zhivago’s trek across the snow-bound roads, his beard and mustache caked with frozen condensation; Lara’s red gown and the gun in her hand; the ridiculous but ethereally beautiful “ice palace”; the shock-cut to Courtenay’s Strelnikov just before the Intermission. Freddie Young’s cinematography, superb in a theater, still looks remarkable on a plasma screen.
The Shop Around the Corner (1940) That loveliest of all romantic comedies, with perfect direction by Ernest Lubitsch, a witty and rhapsodic script by Samson Raphaelson, glorious photography by William Daniels, a typically marvelous performance by James Stewart, a charming one by Margaret Sullavan and wonderful support from everyone else.
Chaplin at Keystone: An International Collaboration of 34 Original Films (1914) A nearly complete collection of restored titles from the year, and the studio, that made Charles Chaplin the most famous (and, more significantly, the most well-liked) man on earth in a single year. This 4-disc DVD set includes all the extant shorts in which Chaplin appeared and which saw his development as a natural screen comedian as well as the refinement of his Tramp character. Charlie isn’t the Tramp in every short; indeed, for most of them he’s not, although he’s usually clad in the same oversized boots and too-large trousers even when he’s supposed to be a workingman or a bourgeois. The Keystone Tramp is not quite the character Chaplin further refined during the year at Essanay (see above), and he’s often both lewd and aggressive. Mack Sennett’s studio emphasized the crude and the physical, and the whole team seemed at times inflicted with a curious fixation on the human rump. Charlie here is as eager as everyone else at Keystone to kick someone in the ass (men, women, children — it scarcely seemed to matter whose backside was assaulted) and as likely to have his own kicked. The Sennett plots were rudimentary, and they invariably end in some sort of chase. I suspect that, at the close of his Mutual contract, Chaplin was both invoking and saying a final farewell to the Sennett chase with his screamingly funny two-reeler The Adventurer; it’s the greatest Keystone comedy Mack Sennett never made.
It’s remarkable how often in his Keystone shorts Charlie portrayed a cad or a villain. In Mabel at the Wheel, for example, he reminds me of no one more than Jack Lemmon’s otherwise peerless Professor Fate in The Great Race. (I have a feeling that although he dedicated his picture to Laurel and Hardy, Blake Edwards had this two-reeler in mind when he and Arthur Ross created the character for Lemmon.) Although it was his second outing for Sennett, Kid Auto Races in Venice was the first in release, and started the vogue for the Chaplin Tramp. It’s marvelous to see it now, and to study a screen legend in situ, which but for Chaplin’s genius at pantomime might have been, as indeed it was intended, just another gag character in just another raucous Keystone comedy. It’s instructive to watch him at work opposite Ford Sterling, whom he was hired to replace. Sterling is Keystone personified, every gesture and facial tic amusingly oversold (no one in life has ever leapt into the air prior to running away, but everyone does it at Keystone) where Chaplin, who is often called upon to be broad, is broad in far subtler ways. This is not mere hindsight; you can see how his style contrasts with everyone else’s including that of the adorable Mabel Normand. We get in these shorts the rare opportunity to see Chaplin as he looked in life (Tango Tangles, during which Sterling hilariously plants a big kiss on Charlie’s lips) and in drag (A Busy Day, where he’s a pantomime termagant; and The Masquerader in which he is altogether more refined). We also see the germs of other, better, work to come.
The Flicker Alley set includes the Marie Dressler vehicle Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first feature-length American movie comedy. Although the picture is only occasionally funny it’s fascinating to see Charlie as a heartless gold-digger and Dressler as a knockabout clown. (She gets kicked in the slats a lot too.) Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle stars in a couple of titles here and among the great supporting Keystone comedians are Chester Conklin, the Amazonian Alice Davenport and Phyllis Allen, Al St. John, Hank Mann, Edgar Kennedy, Harry McCoy, Slim Summerville, the young (and usually mustache-less) Charley Chase, the absurdly self-named Jess Dandy, the treasurable Minta Durfee, the great Mack Swain and even, on occasion, Sennett himself.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 