Book Report: "Silent Comedy" by Paul Merton

[post 224]

There are a ton of books about silent film comedy, many of them excellent, but they're not written by performers. Paul Merton, author of Silent Comedy, is on the other hand a popular British comedian — mostly improv and stand-up, rarely silent  —with a love for the heyday of slapstick. He has even done several lecture tours on the subject, bringing screenings with live music to theatre festivals and other venues throughout the U.K. In the past two years he has produced two documentaries on early film (not just comedy) for television: Paul Merton's Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema (BBC Bristol, 2010) and The Birth of Hollywood (BBC2, 2011). He has also done an interactive presentation on early British film comedy for the British Film Institute, which you can view online here.

Merton is, first of all, a good writer! The problem I have with most historical works is that they're too thorough. I know the impulse: you've done all that research, naturally you don't want it to go to waste — "I suffered for my art; now it's your turn!" — but the result is more info than the reader needs. You can't see the forest for the trees. Merton's chronicle is full of fascinating tidbits and anecdotes, but he marshalls those facts to make a point. They all contribute juice to the narrative flow and actually tell us something significant about the performer. The result is a rich and entertaining read, 329 mass-paperback pages, though obviously you'll get a lot more out of it if you can view some of the films he's talking about, easy enough with YouTube and a basic DVD collection. Think of it as a companion volume to the actual movies.

Merton chooses to limit his study to Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Laurel & Hardy. He is dismissive of Harry Langdon; other comedians such as Fatty Arbuckle and Charley Chase play only minor roles, and there's no mention at all of Lupino Lane or Charley Bowers. Instead of separate sections on each comedian, the approach is chronological, which might sound boring and unimaginative, but isn't because he switches back and forth between these powerhouses every year or two to show how they continually tried to outdo one another. This works very well, bringing fresh insights into their working methods; for example, how Lloyd's success with the thrill comedy Safety Last spurred Keaton and Chaplin to create similar moments in Three Ages and The Gold Rush, respectively.

As a performer, Merton is always thinking from a performer's point of view, getting inside their heads better than most silent film historians. To his credit, he notices what stunts are real, and very much appreciates the virtuoso skill and hours and hours of practice required. However, not being a physical performer, he's not as sharply attuned to physical comedy vocabulary. It does not occur to him, for example, that the topmounter in the running 4-high in the elopement scene from Keaton's Neighbors is — in most of the shots — very likely a rag-doll dummy, and not Virginia Fox.

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"Slapstick comedy has a format, but it is hard to detect in its early stages unless you are one of those who can create it. The unexpected was our staple product, the unusual our object, and the unique was the ideal we were always hoping to achieve." — Buster Keaton

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As much as he admires the creativity of this golden age of cinema, Merton is not afraid to address its uglier aspects, specifically negative racial and gender stereotypes widely prevalent in those days. But he is also quick to point out progress made during the 20s in both areas, for example in Keaton 's The Paleface (1922) and The Cameraman (1928).

Keaton and Chaplin in Limelight (1952)

With his successful silent film tours offering solid evidence, Merton is bully on the appeal of silent film comedy when presented in the right circumstances, a point I was emphasizing in my recent Revenge of the Silents post.  Here are just a couple of examples Merton offers:

In January 2007 at the Colston Hall, Bristol, I presented Steamboat Bill Junior to over 1,500 people on a big screen with superb musical accompaniment from Neil Brand and Gunther Buchwald. The house front falling towards Buster is a tiny moment in a cyclone sequence that runs for nearly fifteen minutes, but when the stunt happened the audience cheered and applauded spontaneously. A few days after this ecstatic response I heard the playwright Mark Ravenhill extolling the virtues of Steamboat Bill Junior on a BBC Radio 4 arts programme. I seem to remember that he had seen the film on a big screen at an open-air festival many years before. 

The other people in the studio, who sounded like professional critics, had each been given a DVD of the film to take home and watch. Their verdict was unanimous: it simply wasn't funny because in their view humour dates very quickly, and black and white silent comedy couldn't be more dated if it tried. How could they get it so wrong? Well, watching a silent film on a small television screen with inappropriate music as accompaniment can destroy the magic. It's easy to see nothing….

Laurel and Hardy's last silent film release before their first talkie has often been considered their best ever. I've watched Big Business more than thirty times with a live audience, and the responses have been remarkably uniform. They always laugh in the same places with the same regular rhythm. Stan and Leo [Mc Carey] previewed their films in exactly the same way as Harold, Buster and Charlie, and the films were recut according to the audiences' reactions. That's one of the reasons they still work so well today.

A page from Merton's book, above, and a few more short selections below....

He [Keaton] was always proud that he didn't use a stuntman. Larry Semon's films are chockfull of stuntmen all pretending to be him, but it was Buster's belief that stuntmen didn't fall in a comical way.
[NOTE: Keaton did have a stuntman pole-vault into the dorm window for him in College, which I believe was the only time he was doubled, at least in the silent era. —jt]


The tiresomely idiotic debate on Keaton versus Chaplin is, in my experience, overwhelmingly used by proponents of Buster to attempt to rubbish Charlie… It’s an appealing mind-set for some people, who say: "We’ve all heard that Charlie Chaplin was meant to be the greatest comedian in the world, but my preference for Buster Keaton demonstrates my ability to think for myself. Chaplin was overly sentimental, but Keaton’s coolness and cynical eye chime exactly with our Modern Times...." Well, the good news is that they are both fantastic. There’s no need to choose between them. Enjoy them both! That’s one of the main aims in my book. I shall examine the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, not in isolation, as has been the usual practice, but showing how they influenced each other in a creative rivalry that also featured Harold Lloyd. This rivalry and desire to make better and better comedies ensured a stream of high-quality pictures. Great works of art were created.

As much as he [Keaton] liked Roscoe [Arbuckle], he was trying to get away from unmotivated slapstick. In all the years they worked together, the only disagreement Buster had with Roscoe was over Roscoe's assertion that the average mental age of an audience was twelve and that you should pitch your comedy at that level.

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As for Paul Merton the comic, he is hardly silent, known instead for his surreal rants, often delivered dead pan, though he denies mimicking the Great Stone Face, Buster Keaton: "It comes from one of the first things I did as a stand-up in the early 80s called A Policeman on Acid, which was basically this policeman recounting in court the time someone gave him some acid and describing his trip. And I realized then it was much funnier if the policeman himself didn't find anything he was saying funny, so the deadpan approach came from there, and I suppose that kind of set a style. I wasn't deliberately copying Keaton at that point."

Here's the clip:



Merton is returning to touring his own comedy in 2012 in a "night of sketches, music, magic, variety, and dancing girls (two of them aren’t girls)." Click here for more information.

Beating Yourself Up for Fun & Profit

[post 158]

If you've ever played around with slapstick or stage combat, and I'm betting you have, you know that the victim's reaction is key to selling the effect. As my old friend Joe Martinez put it, what we're doing is Combat Mime, the illusion of fighting, not the painful reality. It's not surprising, then, that many a comedian has had the clever idea of eliminating the attacker altogether, of playing victim to an imaginary foe.

The earliest reference I found to this idea was something I wrote about the acclaimed 19th-century British clown Billy Hayden, who made his reputation in Paris at Franconi's, first as an acrobatic clown, though later as a talking clown:  "He practiced acrobatics alone in the ring for two hours every morning — dancing, tumbling, falling, delivering blows at imaginary partners, and being struck by imaginary feet." (Clowns, p.200) I'm not sure how much from these practice sessions actually ended up in his act.

If you're having a hard time imagining what this might look like, the sofa sequence from Donald O'Connor's classic physical comedy piece, "Make 'Em Laugh," from Singing in the Rain (1952) is a short but sweet example:

Silent film comedian Charley Chase had actually taken this idea several steps further 26 years earlier in his wonderful Mighty Like A Moose, though his fight is heavily (and jokingly) dependent on film editing. The silly but useful premise is that Charley and his wife (Vivien Oakland) are embarrassingly homely, he with buck teeth, she with a big nose. They both have plastic surgery without telling the other, and when they accidentally meet, they flirt heavily without recognizing each other. (Yes, it takes more than a little suspension of disbelief, but then so does Twelfth Night.) Charley figures it out first and, as a staunch advocate of the double standard, is determined to teach her a lesson by staging a mock fight between husband and lover.




Now here's Peter James from the old Spike Jones Show who says "I like to slap myself" and who was breakin' way ahead of his time.




This is the talented Alex Pavlata from his show Francky O. Right, showing what happens when Romeo breaks up with Juliet.

And finally, here's Rowan Atkinson (see this previous post) being tormented by an unseen adversary during his morning commute: A Day in the Life of the Invisible Man.

Drop me a line if you know any more examples!


July 4th Update:  Blog reader Paul Reisman has done just that, providing us with a worthy addition to our collection. Paul writes: "It's from a pretty horrible movie called Trial and Error [1997], but the clip of Michael Richards getting beat up by invisible enemies has always stuck with me."



Let's just say I liked it a whole lot better than that audience of casting directors.

July 18 Update: Steve Copeland writes that the physical comedian on the Spike Jonze show was Peter James. Click here to check Peter James out on IMDB. Click here for a very watchable video about Steve and his partner Ryan Combs and their life on the American one-ring show, the Kelly-Miller Circus.

October 29, 2012 Update: Here's James Corden at the Tony Awards performing his schizoid self-fight from One-Man, Two Guvnors:



Links:
• Four short instructional videos based on material from Combat Mime.
• The World of Charley Chase web site.
• The Francky O. Right web site.
• Official site for Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean.

DVD Report: The Max Linder Box Set

[post 108]

The rediscovery and remastering of silent film classics, reintroducing these artists to the public by way of annotated DVD box sets, has been a  great gift to the physical comedy fan. First it was Chaplin and Keaton, then Lloyd and Langdon, followed by Charley Chase, Douglas Fairbanks and, most recently, that modern silent clown, Pierre Etaix.  And now finally the father of silent film comedy, Max Linder, is being justly celebrated for his pioneering career that spanned over 400 films, about 130 of which have survived, in a handsome 6-disc DVD set complete with historical commentaries and new musical scores by New York's own Ben Model.

Okay, I just made all that up. Yep, the DVD cover picture too.  (Blame Photoshop.) Sorry about that, but there's no Max Linder box set, no definitive collection, no historical retrospective. Which is a shame, not only because his work is so deserving of it, but because the passage of time means no one is still alive who worked with him (he died in 1925) to answer all our questions.  (Yes, I have questions.) Keaton and Chaplin were rediscovered in the 60s when they and many of their collaborators were still kicking, resulting in a treasure trove of material on their incredible body of work. No such luck here.

What we do have are two DVDs showcasing some of Linder's work, and it is these I will review here:

Laugh with Max Linder
Image Entertainment (2003)

The Actors: Rare Films of Max Linder

Classic Video Streams (2009)

Laugh with Max Linder was compiled by his daughter Maud and is most valuable for containing his wonderful feature film, Seven Years Bad Luck. It also has a musical score composed to go with the actual films, whereas the Rare Films DVD uses some generic Dixieland music as a background throughout, which does more harm than good.  Oh well, just wait for that definitive DVD box set!

The Rare Films of Max Linder DVD is more recent but contains mostly early films from 1905 to 1912. To give this some chronological perspective, keep in mind that by the time Mack Sennett founded Keystone Studios in 1912, Linder had already made a couple of hundred films.  In 1913, Sennett hired Chaplin, who did not debut his tramp character until the following year. As for Keaton, his first film appearance wasn't until 1917, when he had a role in Fatty Arbuckle's   The Butcher Boy.

So Linder was pretty much on his own, ahead of his time and far from Hollywood, in the beginning grinding out a film a day for Pathé in Paris. In the process, he pretty much invented the comic narrative film. While early filmmakers often used gags as their subject matter (see these previous posts), it was Linder who developed a recognizable character — that of an often inebriated Paris dandy — and began to develop stories around him.  The first movies were nothing more than simple gag ideas, but over time Linder developed his foppish character, his storytelling skills, and his use of film language.

By the time you get to Linder's "feature-length" films (about an hour long), the artistic progress is very much in evidence. Now working in Hollywood and Paris, his fame eclipsed by Chaplin, Linder is still somewhat ahead of his time in shooting features.  Here are the dates of his four features:

The Little Cafe (1919)
Seven Years Bad Luck (1921)
Be My Wife (1921)
The Three Must Get-Theres (1922)

And the dates of the very first features made by Hollywood's fearsome foursome:
• Chaplin — The Kid, 1921
• Lloyd — A Sailor-Made Man, 1921
• Keaton — The Three Ages, 1923
• Langdon — Tramp. Tramp, Tramp, 1926

Max Linder: Character Actor

Max Linder the actor (né Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle) always played the character Max Linder, a well-to-do Parisian with a knack for getting himself into trouble, usually with women, often from too much drinking.  Here's a sequence from the opening of Seven Years Bad Luck:




Later in that movie, disguising himself to hide from the train conductors after having lost his ticket money, Linder shows his versatility as a comic actor:

Max Linder: Gag Meister

Most gags are older than the hills and were not invented by the famous performers who usually get all the credit. Linder's broken mirror routine predates the Marx Brothers by more than a decade, but of course he was hardly the first.  But you know me, I do get my jollies pointing out earlier versions of gags, so here are a couple from Linder's films that you may have seen elsewhere — and many years later.

Ye olde getting your coat caught around a pole routine, from Linder's  Max and the Quinquina (1911):

In case you were wondering about the card bit at the end:  nice plot device. In the first half of the movie, a drunken Linder insults every big shot in town, inciting each of them to challenge him to a duel at dawn, for which they each hand him their business card. In the second half, every time he gets into trouble he produces one of these cards, is immediately mistaken for the big shot, and is given preferential treatment.

And here's Buster Keaton ten years later in The Goat (1921):

And as Hovey Burgess reminds me, Soviet clown Oleg Popov did the same thing in his slack wire routine, "accidentally" wrapping his coat around the wire.  (I haven't been able to find a clip of him doing that exact bit, but probably have it somewhere and will add it here if I do locate it.)


Here's another classic bit from Be My Wife, his 1921 feature film of which only 13 minutes survive.  Max is disguised as a piano teacher so he can get closer to his beloved. When he discovers the piano is too far from the bench, he tries to move the piano rather than the bench. His girlfriend's aunt Agatha shows him the easier way:

And now here's the legendary Swiss clown Grock doing the same gag:

Grock started working with his first partner in 1903, so for all we know he may have beaten Linder to the punch with this one.  In any case, it's Grock who gets the most comedy out of it, fleshing out the gag with his clown's dumb determination and then allowing us to share in the joy this naive character experiences at the revelation that there is indeed a better way.  With Linder it doesn't really work because his far more clever character would never do that, unless as an intentional joke.


Also from Be My Wife is this extended sequence in which Linder stages a mock fight (with himself!) to impress his beloved Mary and especially her aunt that he is the better potential husband, and not Simon, the cowardly milquetoast rival that Aunt Agatha is promoting for the position.

And a similar sequence from Charley Chase's classic Mighty Like a Moose (1926).  Here's the wild situation: Charley and his wife both find themselves unattractive and both secretly undergo medical procedures to improve their looks.  They meet outside the home, fail to recognize each other, and start flirting. Charley is the first to realize the truth of the situation and, as a firm believer in the male's innate right to the double standard, schemes to punish his wife for cheating on him with himself.  Yes, wacky!  So Charley the husband beats up Charley the lover.




Although I hope to get around to writing in more depth about the variations on the broken mirror routine, any introduction to Linder would not be complete without his superb version of it from Seven Years Bad Luck.  In this clip, two amorous servants have just accidentally broken the mirror, and one of them enlists a buddy to hide the misdeed from Max.




What I most like about Linder's gag work, however, is how he learned to develop and integrate gags into his story.  His broken mirror routine can certainly stand on its own, but it is also integral to the plot because the seven years of bad luck that Max spends the whole movie hoping to avoid is triggered by the second breaking of the mirror.  Likewise in the same movie, you'll find a nifty gag wherein an imprisoned Max is cowered into scratching the back of his tough and bullying cellmate.  The reprise of this in the courtroom scene totally works...  but you'll just have to see the movie to know what I'm talking about!

Max Linder: Cinematographer

Coming from the theatre and making his first film in 1905, Linder was an early adapter to the form, no doubt learning through trial and error what worked in the new medium, how to use time, space, and special effects to create comedy beyond what he could do on stage.  In my interview with her, Maud Linder singled out the 1906 short, Max Takes a Bath, as a good example of her father's early use of film. 




Fast forward to 1921's Be My Wife, whose opening scene is a cute visual gag where an overprotective Aunt Agatha is fooled by an optical illusion.




Linder's success and the parallel progress of the art of film allowed him to work with other talented artists who brought greater production values to his movies.  One of these was Charles Van Enger, whose cinematographic talents are very much in evidence in the framing and lighting for Seven Years Bad Luck. Here's his bio from the Turner Classic Movies site.

Charles Van Enger (1890-1980), a leading cinematographer of the silent era, worked with Maurice Tourneur on films such as The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and with Ernst Lubitsch on The Marriage Circle (1924) and Lady Windermere's Fan (1925). Although credited as an assistant cameraman on The Phantom of the Opera (1925), he reputedly set up many important shots in that film. He spent much of his later career at Universal, working on everything from Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). By the late 1950s, he was working mainly in television on shows such as Gilligan's Island.

Wow! From Max Linder to Gilligan's Island — now there's a career span.
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Here's a rundown of what you'll find on each DVD:

Rare Films of Max Linder

A Skater’s Debut (1905) = 4:21
His First Cigar (1906) = 5:05
Max Gets Stuck Up (1906) = 3:01
Max Takes a Bath (1906) = 4:38
Legend of Ponchinella (1906) = 7:32
Max’s Hat (1908) = 8:55
Troubles of a Grass Widower (1908) = 9:48
Max and the Lady Doctor (1909) = 5:59
Max Fears the Dogs (1909) = 2:44
Max and the Quinquina (1911) = 16:44
Max Plays at Drama (1911) = 7:01
Max Juggling for Love (1912)     6:42
Max and his Dog (1912) -- 6:33
Max and the Statue (1912) = 9:58
Max and his Mother-in-Law (1912) = 24:12 (!!)
Be My Wife  (1921) = 13:33


Laugh with Max Linder
Boxing with Maurice Tourneur (1912) = 2:40
Love's Surprises (1913) = 6:13
Max Takes a Picture (1913) = 13:06
Max Sets the Style (1914) = 8:53
Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) = 61:52
Be My Wife  (1921) = 13:33

Both of these DVDs are available from Amazon. Laugh with Max Linder is also available from Netflix and on Amazon video on demand.