Music Boxing

HIS MUSICAL CAREER is an unusually subtle title, since the musical career in question turns out to be piano-moving, something customers could only be amused by AFTER paying for a ticket and starting to watch.

We see Charlie getting hired in the first scene, by Mack Swain, while the reliably weird-looking Billy Gilbert (not that one) shamelessly pulls focus in the bg. Expect to see this guy shown the door once Chaplin sees the rushes. And funny that both the major comedy shorts about piano-moving have guys called Billy Gilbert in them.

Charlie is STILL experimenting with his basic look: this time he has a little clay pipe to puff on, smokelessly. He gets some decent business out of it, but David Lynch would probably say the added face-detail makes Charlie’s head too FAST. The little moustache and dark eyebrows are detail enough.

Laurel & Hardy’s THE MUSIC BOX is the one to beat, clearly, and it’s doubtful that Chaplin at this stage in his career has a chance of doing it.

Still, Mack Swain as supervisor is a good idea: so he’s not just bigger than Charlie, he outranks him. Swain had spent so long (maybe only a year and a bit, but dozens of films) being pushed around by Chester Conklin that he was probably programmed against acting dominant, which means he’s no Eric Campbell.

There’s immediately a nasty gag about Swain drinking varnish — Chaplin seems to be consciously responsible for this, whereas it would be funnier as an accident. But Keystone was inclined towards cruelty and aggression, and Chaplin to some extent towed the line. His ineffectual attempts at helping the poisoned Swain are reasonably funny, but would have worked a lot better if he hadn’t switched the drink and varnish on purpose.

Plum role for Charley Parrot (later Chase) as the store manager.

Charlie shows off his tiny muscles. Thin but wiry!

Two customers, Mr. Rich (stout and top-hatted) and Mr. Poor (gesticulating melodramatic scarecrow). Pathos is something to be made mock of, at this stage of the Chaplin filmography.

Two addresses, 666 Prospect St. and 999 Prospect St., are introduced, setting up the potential for a mix-up. I note that Mabel lived at no. 666 in CAUGHT IN A CABARET, but I make no Satanic inference from this.

Before the film has reached the five-minute mark, Swain is trapped under the piano in an image resembling a Weegee death scene. So long as Chaplin is fecklessly responsible, this cruelty works (has deniability), but he keeps alternating between incompetence and malice. Look at his work as Chester Conklin’s assistant in MODERN TIMES to see how this vicious streak in Chaplin would evolve: Conklin suffers great indignities in that one, but Charlie means him no harm, is sincerely trying to help him at every turn. So the rather sadistic comedy comes about ironically, and is therefore much funnier, and character sympathy is preserved.

En route to 666 or 999, Charlie uses his pipe as a tiny ladle to steal booze from a slumbering Swain.

I’d love to have seen the camera set-up for Charlie and Mack riding the donkey-cart. Presumably they’re attached to the back of a truck or something, the camera positioned on it, the donkey getting a rest break. Just as well, since soon the poor beast of burden is being dangled in mid-air.

It seems wrong that the mix-up in addresses isn’t Charlie’s fault. This piano company has survived and even flourished before him coming along, so it seems to me that any disasters should be the inadvertent work of Charlie, Lord of Misrule. Chaplin needs to be more selfish and make himself fully the star comedian. There, never thought I’d complain that Chaplin wasn’t egotistical enough. I’m looking forward to him being supported by blander, less forceful talents like Albert Austin and Henry Bergman. Then, in the features, he can find room for some of his Keystone chums again, because the greater running time requires a few diversions from his own showmanship.

The inevitable “moving the piano up a staircase” routine comes and goes without ever evoking the majesty of the l&h version. It’s not bad, would probably get a good laugh in a crowded theatre. Now Chaplin tries playing up the idea of the Little Fellow as oppressed worker, with Swain as exploitative overseer, but it’s too late in the story to really make that stick. Still, it’s a more promising approach than what he’s been doing. And, interestingly, Mr. Poor and his daughter, formerly Dickensian pastiches, now become annoying fusspots so that nobody can decide where to put the piano and Charlie is forced to carry it to and fro on his shoulders, a proletarian Sisyphus.

The strain turns Charlie into a crouched, bow-legged Angelo Rossitto figure, a transmogrification effected solely by acting. Swain’s brutal repair-job again shows the characters working together as they should: the spinal crack is performed heartlessly, just to make Charlie capable of doing more hard work.

The rules of film grammar, as they are understood in 1914, require that we watch Charlie and Mack return downstairs and get on their cart, even though there are no gags devised to make the trip particularly entertaining. L&H could dispose of such A-B business with a wipe or dissolve. Still, Chaplin can splice in a title card to shorten the trip to number 999.

Mr. Rich also has a daughter, who is apparently suitable for flirting with (Mr. Poor’s daughter was innocent and respectable). The Riches also employ a liveried footman who seems somewhat out of keeping in L.A. Kicking him to the floor, Charlie and Mack abduct the upright, and go crashing into the bright street. At 12.31 Charlie does a little back-kick of one leg to literally kickstart himself, a signature move — I’m unsure if we’ve seen it done properly before this. Probably we have. The confrontation with the furious owner DOES seem a bit reminiscent of developments in THE MUSIC BOX.

The boys flee downhill, ruthlessly kicking aside an innocent passer-by (a moment mostly splinked out by a bad splice) and splash into what is presumably Echo Lake. Mr. Rich shakes his fist in stereotyped pantomime, and we have another of those very abrupt endings, not helped by what is likely a bit of missing footage, where Charlie for obscure reasons tries to play the now half-submerged piano. There’s a promising comic image there, but no time to work it out, seemingly.

Dystopian Cinema

Can’t you just feel the joi de vivre seeping out through the soles of your feet as you scan these images? Your eyes desperately scan the colours, the fashions, the faces, searching, searching in vain, for a sign of hope.

I don’t really know what these films are, though the titles flashed up multiple times during each trailer. I’ve blanked them. They seem without hope. They make me feel like a visitor from another world, where everything is peaceful. And I’ve arrived in the middle of a football match.

Even when the colour isn’t completely faded like a postcard sun-bleached in its rack, and the aspect ratio isn’t fucked up beyond all recovery, the images have a weird depressive affect. This is the kind of entertainment humanity likes. You like buy feelthy postcard, yes?

In this world, things are much harder than in the afterlife. In this world, you’re on your own.

Well, we were put here to suffer.

Here, have some more. I can take it if you can.

Put on a happy face.

Pain in chest. Numbness down one side. Is that good?

Lo! Carrying on the dystopian sixties-seventies theme, Tim Concannon delivers a late entry for The Late Show, delving deep into the mind-altering career of British sitcom star Richard O’Sullivan. Well, these things have to be done. The result, in this case, is quite brilliant.

Primal Screen

I didn’t particularly enjoy THE ANGEL’S LEAP but this image is nice, and neatly illustrates that thing Luis Bunuel was just saying:

Octavio Paz has said, “But that a man in chains should shut his eyes, the world would explode.” And I could say: But that the white eyelid of the screen reflect its proper light, the Universe would go up in flames. But for the moment we can sleep in peace: the light of the cinema is conveniently dosified and shackled.

I chose to watch this Marseilles-based thriller because I wanted some distraction as my favourite aunt just died from Covid-19, under the most miserable circumstances. It’s not director Yves Boisset’s fault that his film is full of death, hospitals, funerals, making it not perhaps the best distraction you could have. But it’s fairly mindless so it had that in its favour.

It’s a bit more visually attractive than Boisset’s Manchette adaptation, FOLLE A TUER, but much less involving. Basic revenge stuff. Jean Yanne, a good actor, is a rather doughy action hero, Sterling Hayden struggles to express himself in French, but Senta Berger is great as ever and Gordon Mitchell is an interesting screen presence. The only Italian muscleman star with an interesting rather than bland face, and (and this is a surprising thing to find) he wears clothes really well.

The main villain has a preposterous Bondian lair and keeps vultures as pets. Idiot. He gets slung off his balcony and lands on some power lines in front of a drive-in screen, all pretty preposterous (every aspect of it: why would a rich man live over a drive-in?). Boisset’s main visual trope is to track around his characters in a half-circle, which is nice enough but it’s the only thing of note the camera ever does. Like they had a length of curving track and they wanted to get the most out of it.

THE ANGEL’S LEAP stars Jean-Paul Marat; Elisabeth Sibelius; General Jack D. Ripper; Napoleon Bonaparte; Maciste; Victor Maigrat; Eurylochus; Alessio Karenin; and Louise Danton.