BADETS DRONNING — aka THE QUEEN OF THE SEASON or, more accurately, THE QUEEN OF BATHING — is a 1912 seaside comedy from Denmark. It’s quite sophisticated. While Sennett’s comics were just beginning to gesticulate and grimace, the actors here keep one foot in naturalism. They’re actors, not clowns. The filmmaker, Eduard Schnedler-Sørensen, offers up the prospect of slapstick — will the fat man fall in a tide pool? — only to refuse it, in favour of small-scale accidents and social embarrassments.
Although my first impulse was to view the film as a more advanced variation on the silent clown film, maybe it’s more accurate to position it as a pre-Lubitsch comedy of manners. After all, this kind of thing wouldn’t SUPERCEDE the slapstick comedy until talkies came in, it would just develop along its own path, merrily, blossoming into the screwball comedy and romcom.
As a group of men hover around an unaccompanied (but married) woman — the bathing beauty stuff anticipates Sennett — one actor stood out. (Well, actually, chubby Oscar Stribolt is fun, too. And the not-too-obscure object of desire is Else Frölich, Paul Gauguin’s sister-in-law).
This fellow, seen above in the centre, seemed a bit more theatrical than the others, and he’s drenched his hair in powder to whiten it. His eyebrows are pure products of the pencil. I thought he looked like a Torben Meyer type — the dialect comedian who essayed a series of prissy bald functionaries for Preston Sturges, for instance Clink the purser in THE LADY EVE and Dr. Kluck in THE PALM BEACH STORY.
It’s him! With hair! Presumably his own, since he’s felt the need to lighten it. He’s only twenty-eight, but has sized up his equipment and set himself down in the Spotlight directory of life as a character man. Incredibly busy up until 1926, he disappears for a year and then reemerges in Hollywood in ’28, a busy character thesp once more. It’s almost a quirk of history that, of the 250 credits the IMDb had tracked down, it’s his eight small roles in Sturges’ rep company that give him a toehold on immortality.
The film is lightly likeable. Schnedler-Sørensen pans confidently about, following the action, and likes having his characters bound past the camera, so that their heads disappear and their bodies become big, jouncing obstructions for a second or two. So that if his actors aren’t able to tumble and spill, things are nevertheless visually lively. The studio shots are convincing, no flat backdrops. He seems to have figured out POV shots, too — a considerable advance on most of his competitors.
THE CIRCUS continues. More evidence of the nasty ringmaster mistreating his daughter — he’s starving her. Presumably concerned that she needs to remain slim for the trapeze. This circus is a lot like a movie studio, only he’s not giving her speed a la Judy Garland.
A star is discovered — Chaplin, asleep in the chariot/cart — the seed has been planted — the audience called for him. The ringmaster knows he’s a meal ticket. It IS a bit like Chaplin’s own story, how he was on the verge of getting canned from Keystone for being so difficult, until the box office receipts came in from his first films. The audience had spoken. Mack Sennett does not seem to have been as mean as Al Ernest Garcia is here, though.
Garcia is one of those effective but colourless supporting characters Chaplin liked. He didn’t want the attention on anyone but himself, but the actors around him needed to be very skilled indeed. Garcia plays the drunken millionaire’s butler in CITY LIGHTS and the factory boss in MODERN TIMES, and I’d never put one and one and one together before and realised it’s the same guy.
I recognise Tiny Sandford, the head props man, though — he’s Charlie’s co-worker in MODERN TIMES.
Making breakfast the next morning — there’s a good chicken-strangling gag — and Charlie has a waistcoat pocket full of salt for his meagre repast, rather the way Harpo might. Charlie is very fastidious about food, as we saw earlier with the hot dog. This is all a set-up for the meet cute, for the girl is hungry. Charlie is at first furious when he finds her eating his single slice of bread. A thief — a rival thief — must be fought off. But a girl is another matter. He ends up sharing the bread, and then she eats it so fast she gives him indigestion. Production designer Danny Hall’s painting of a sword swallower doesn’t help him.
Immediately, Charlie is behaving like a father, a benign one to contrast with the nasty real one. It’s his first time in this role since THE KID, the first time his romantic interest has been acknowledged as rather young for him, the relationship ambiguous. A few films later we have MONSIEUR VERDOUX and LIMELIGHT, which take this further — the relationship is played as platonic and paternal. The Paulette Goddard films are slightly more romantic — maybe because they were a couple and it felt safer. It feels to me like Chaplin, unlike Woody Allen for decades, was becoming aware that audiences didn’t want to see him wooing and winning much younger women. Chaplin was rather handsome, but his Tramp guise negated some of that. And his scandalous divorce made any intimation of sexual desire dangerous.
So, anyway, Charlie has met the girl. Now he has to audition as a clown. Told to be funny, he does some Chaplinesque things. A backwards kick, a funny walk, hoisting himself up with his cane. “That’s awful!” says the ringmaster. Now we get a longish sequence where clowns demonstrate routines and Charlie tries to copy their schtick. This seems to be the stuff Walter Kerr objected to so strongly in The Silent Clowns.
For me, the problem is that none of it is particularly funny. The clown routines, performed by regulars Henry Bergman and Albert Austin with Heinie Conklin (a prospector in THE GOLD RUSH, and a specialist in racist caricatures), aren’t terribly interesting, though Charlie laughs and claps to try to convince us. His screwing them up isn’t interesting either. There’s a conflict of response, a confusion — is Charlie destroying the comedy, resulting in something unfunny, or is he destroying bad comedy, resulting in something that IS funny? Maybe the latter is the intention, but it’s not clear to me.
It SHOULD work, since Charlie is working in a mode he knew well — the incompetent and rascally assistant. In the William Tell routine, that’s also the role he’s actually asked to play. It’s the Auguste (Chaplin) and the whiteface clown (Bergman). Arrogant leader and minion who messes up. Workman and boss. Laurel & Hardy. Chaplin had been doing this since Keystone (WORK; HIS MUSICAL CAREER). But making the task performed a comedy routine seems to overcomplicate it.
The William Tell routine is something Chaplin had played with when Scottish comic Harry Lauder had visited his studio. There’s a piece of film. Here, Charlie elaborates it by substituting a banana skin for the apple, making a surreal mash-up of different slapstick ingredients, but it lands in that strange are of is-this-supposed-to-be-funny? It’s not clear that Charlie’s improvisation is worse than the original act.
Then there’s the barbershop act, which gets done very differently in THE GREAT DICTATOR, and had been done differently in SUNNYSIDE, but deleted. This one’s all buckets of foam getting slapped over everyone. There might have been a convincing conflict between a routine that’s all meaningless capering, and one based on character. This had been the actual conflict Chaplin faced and overcame at Keystone. But it won’t do here, I guess, because the Tramp character is not a comedian or a comic genius.
This is the trouble with comic plot ideas — they have to be serviceable story engines that move things along and lead to a climax — but they also have to create opportunities for amusing things to happen. Charlie’s inability to be funny on cue fulfils the former but not the latter, or at least, not in this scene.
Anyway, Charlie gets fired, not so much for failure to do the required gags, but for getting foam all over the boss, which we recognise as a real no-no. Chaplin now needs to find a narrative excuse to keep Charlie at the circus, and fortunately he’s really good at coming up with solutions. Here he relies on an old favourite (see, for instance, DOUGH AND DYNAMITE): an industrial dispute. The props men go on strike. A replacement must be found. Charlie is using an unconscious prop man as human furniture when Tiny Sandford finds him. He’s discovered again, hired again, the show’s on again.
Firstly — I’ve been remiss in not announcing that The Chiseler is back, at a new address, here. Add it to your bookmarks. Scroll down and you’ll find my piece on Segundo de Chomon.
Raymond François Émile Marie Pierre Frau AKA Raymond Dandy AKA AKA Kri Kri AKA Patachon AKA Bloomer — remarkable how many names these minor European silent clowns have — one for each territory, sometimes more — thwarted in love, wishes to make away with himself. Being a good citizen, he informs the police.
Originally from Senegal, Frau made his name(s) in Italy, a nation thronging with tumblers in the teens.
Luckily for us, this is not only a suicide comedy, it’s a behind-the-scenes movie, offering us yet another glimpse of the film industry in its baby-steps phase. “Bloomer is expected to work in the theatre. Potbelly goes to meet him.”
In reality, suicide has caused considerable trouble for filmmakers, particularly, it seems, in Italy, and the filmmakers have not always responded with sympathy. The first instinct is to worry about how to finish the movie. When gaunt-featured Canadian character player Al Muloch, one of the three hitmen at the start of THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY *and* ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, fatally defenestrated himself on location for the latter movie, Sergio Leone was heard yelling “Get his costume!” as the mortally injured actor was ambulanced away, still in his movie gear. On CITY OF WOMEN, Fellini’s slightly baffled response to feminism, former peplum idol Ettore Manni, playing the hypermacho Dr. Xavier Katzone, shot himself in the groin with his .44 Magnum one evening and bled to death. “At least it proves the film works,” mused Fellini, and rewrote the film’s ending to exclude his deceased thesp. Admittedly, we don’t know that Manni’s death was intentional. Maybe the gun went off while he was cleaning it. With his dick.
Bloomer/Patachon/Dandy/etc is discovered apparently dead from poisoning (this is hilarious so far) but then there’s some “he’s behind you!” panto poignancy as he filches a swig of booze while his friend Potbelly is setting up a long candle. The film looks set to play out mostly as a single set-up. Then he starts pranking his friend, which is oddly antic behaviour for a man bent on self-destruction.
It seems this is all a ploy to get revenge on Bloomer/Dandy/etc’s prospective father-in-law who’s refusing his daughter’s hand. Potbelly is persuaded to take the place of the corpse, though how this can be expected to convince given his physical mountainousness is anybody’s guess. Such are the ways of farce. “Bloomer is unrecognizable,” remarks a hopeful intertitle, as our man dons false pornstache and eyebrows. This development seems to be the only reason for the movie-making subplot. Frau/Dandy’s mastery of disguise must be alibied, or the whole thing will be unbelievable. We can’t have that.
GOOD ACTING from the boss of the Keystone Karabinieri and the unyielding Mr Pepper: their gestures are expressively Italianate without lapsing into the purely rhetorical or explanatory. At this time, Mack Sennett’s comics were still trying to illustrate the plot to the audience using hand-gestures and exaggerated lip movements. This favourable impression is slightly marred when Patachon/Dandy’s sweetheart throws a full-on fit of hysterics, but that seems to be what the plot requires. So far, our hero’s scheme is causing widespread distress and alarm. It must be working.
Looking somewhat like Fawlty Towers’ Manuel, Dandy/Bloomer arrives at the grieving household, personating his own (presumably non-existent) brother, and threatens to murder Mr Pepper. But, being a good sport, he’ll settle for twenty thousand lire/gilders/bucks — exactly the sum Pepper told him he needed to marry his daughter (do pay attention). There seem to be a number of crimes involved here — threats of violence, extortion, armed robbery, fraud — so it’s a good job the police are already involved.
However, under Italian comedy law, Mr. Pepper is now compelled to allow the marriage to go forth, as Kri Kri/Dandy/Frau/Patachon/Bloomer/Lazarus celebrates his resurrection by kissing his sweetheart and leaping into the arms of his mother-in-law-to-be with Harpo-ish enthusiasm.
shadowplay 