The Sunday Intertitle: Before Comedy was King

An evening of Laurel without Hardy and Hardy without Laurel sounded uncertain — I was reminded of the cheap tapes and DVDs that would package together whatever low-quality public domain bits they could scrape together and publish, without a shred of honest, as “The Best of Laurel and Hardy.” But, viewing as an amateur historian, and without the residual feeling of having been cheated, this was pretty great.

This is the intertitle, folks.

THE SERENADE (1916) stars Plump & Runt — an early attempt at putting Ollie in a double-act based on physical opposites: this time, a fat guy and a short guy. Well, that doesn’t work. Absorbing the twosome into a larger troupe, as musicians in a slapstick band, also doesn’t help things. When Stan & Ollie appeared as musicians early on, they made sure they were the only funny ones except for irate conductor James Finlayson.

Hmm, Babe made thirty-eight of these suckers, so I guess they thought they’d established things… I have zero recollection of ever reading about this series.

There are one or two ACTUAL SHOTS in this, such as the introduction of Runt (Billy Ruge) from behind his own feet. And some neat trick shots. Lots of stuff of Ollie blasting people out of frame with his mighty tuba, a kind of early sonic weapon. It isn’t any damn good, but it has spurts of invention.

Larry Semon rips off EASY STREET in THE RENT COLLECTOR (1921) with Babe Hardy in the Eric Campbell part, looking like Paul Sorvino in a spray-on beard. Hardy played heavy a lot in his early films, but whereas the examples I’ve seen were notable for how similar to his later performance style Ollie’s characterisations were, in this one it’s more interesting to see how unformed the persona is.

(There’s that wild west one where villainous O.N.H. spots the heroine skinny-dipping, and displays lustful scheming by hitching up his pants with a side-to-side rotation of the waistline, a pure Ollie gesture employed in unexpected and very unfamiliar circs.)

Larry Semon is funny-looking (hire Paul Rubens for the remake), and distinctive, though when he adds a jacket to his derby and baggy dungarees he again seems to be ripping off That Other Clown.

Some inventive special effects, jump cuts and undercranking and even overcranking, so you could fairly say, as the saying goes, it’s both good and original, but the parts that are good etc…

NB: Larry Semon definitely faked his own death. DEFINITELY.

Ollie has a henchman, another fat guy who’s even fatter. Two fat guys NEVER works.

Then we moved on to Stan Laurel in DETAINED — the title is funny, somehow. An escaped convict forces Stan into that stripy prison attire he’d be seen in several times in later years, resulting in his immediate incarceration — in other words, it’s Keaton’s CONVICT 13, and promptly devolves into a series of spot gags featuring Stan’s nascent idiot persona. He grins a lot, especially at us, and is much more, uh, proactive, than his later incarnations. There’s an electric chair scene played in a vaulted dungeon which is probably a recycled set from the Chaney HUNCHBACK — see also Stan’s DR. PYCKLE AND MR. PRYDE.

Some of Stan’s “freak gags” appear — his neck is literally stretched by a noose. Hal Roach might have actually been right about those — they’re always unsettling and rarely funny. Still, the tunneling to freedom stuff does show Stan annoying another, larger convict, and the foreshadowing of THE SECOND 100 YEARS is very clear. Towards the end, he does some running about in a panic, and some weeping, so it feels like he’s getting born.

Argh, take it away!

MOONLIGHT AND NOSES (1925) is a vehicle for Clyde Cook, paired with the reliably gruesome Noah Young, as a couple of burglars. Stan directed this one. and thriftily recycled chunks in future shorts — at first it looks like he’s using the burglars sketch his father wrote, and which he kept trying to turn into a successful short, but then it throws in a mad scientist (James Finlayson in fulsome side-whiskers) and grave-robbing, and a certain ingenue named Fay Wray, and turns into a practice run for HABEAS CORPUS.

Cook plays a hapless idiot, and Young plays a domineering idiot — you see where this is going — it’s like a rehearsal for mature Laurel & Hardy comedy, with a shopsoiled Chuckle Brother and a murderous gargoyle cast as the boys. Absolutely fascinating. Not a laugh in it. But I’m really glad I saw it. It has the quality of a dream, where all your familiar friends have been replaced by unsuitable stand-ins.

The byplay between Cook & Young is actually skilled, and I like comedy of terror a lot, so I had a fairly good time with this. Maybe no laughs but some muted snorts of appreciation.

And then comes WHEN KNIGHTS WERE COLD (1923), one of Stan’s parody films, which are often outrageously funny (remember Rhubarb Vaselino?). This one, though incomplete, is a joy. The ridiculous gags mainly consist of throwing everything at the situation — whatever’s easiest. This being a Fairbanks Robin Hood parody, we get anachronisms and absurdities from the off. (Well, the actual off is missing, but from the off that’s left.)

Stan enters on horseback, but it’s a puppet horse he’s wearing, with floppy fake human legs draped over the saddle. British comedian Bernie Clifton used to wear an outfit like this, only he rode an ostrich I believe it was. You can ride anything using this technique.

Stan is being chased by an army of knights, all wearing their horses in the same manner. It’s very MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, only he found a more expensive way of doing the coconuts, which wouldn’t have worked in a silent movie, I guess.

Much battling on recycled sets ensues — Mae Laurel is glimpsed, I think — and the gags come (extremely) thick and fast. When an enemy is booted from a window, he lands on some power lines just for added cruelty and anachronism. The incessant piling-on of jokes means that Stan doesn’t get to make that much of an impression as an actor — you could substitute anybody you like, including Bernie Clifton, and it would make not too much difference. But it’s a riotous and unrelenting guffaw-generator, completely stupid and wonderful from (truncated) beginning to end, and fully justified the whole evening’s conceit.

Neil Brand’s piano throughout this programme brought the films to life, not in a ghastly electro-galvanistic way, which nobody would thank him for, but by infusing zest and charm and basic coherence where it needed to be and wasn’t always to be found, and brought into being the final short’s very specific musical requirement: a ragtime version of The Wedding March.

Frame grabs by Mark Fuller, mostly, to whom appreciation is due as always.

The Sunday Intertitle: Harold Lloyd be thy name

I read about FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, a Harold Lloyd vehicle directed by the skilled Sam Taylor (EXIT SMILING) over at Observations of Film Art, where my all-time favourite annual event takes place — Kristin Thompson’s annual look back at the cinema of ninety years ago (with a modest assist from David Bordwell).

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, plotwise, is a nothing, predicated on a premise that doesn’t seem to have anything to it. Harold Manners, millionaire, funds a mission in the slums by mistake, but then falls in love with the daughter of the founder. He has some misadventures helping with the mission, then his rich buddies kidnap him to stop him marrying the poor girl, there’s a chase and a happy ending. Pretty flimsy stuff — but sufficiently solid to attach Lloyd’s “islands” — his comic set-pieces. (Kubrick spoke of “non-submersible units” by which I take him to mean something similar, but with fewer pratfalls. Military enthusiast that he was, Kubrick used the pontoon bridge as his metaphor.)

The pun in this intertitle is so good, the whole movie may have been built around it. Which would account for the gossamer-thin plot. But that doesn’t matter, as the set-pieces are SO good.

Harold’s character is interesting — rather than being a boy next door, he’s a touch feckless and over-privileged, but this doesn’t make him unsympathetic. It makes him superhuman. Most Lloyd movies show him struggling to gain mastery over some hazardous situation, with our hero being handicapped by shyness or gentility which he has to overcome. Here, Lloyd’s victories are mainly effortless until the last act, when he gets a good work-out.

To round up a congregation for the new mission, Harold provokes fights with all the neighbourhood roughnecks so they’ll chase him into the building. The action is fast, furious, inventive and hilarious, and all the time we’re wondering what he’ll do with them when he gets them indoors. It turns out that he has no plan at all, and is rescued by the timely arrival of the police, which is a little disappointing but leads us into the next amusing situation.

(The lead yegg is Noah Young, whose praises I’ve been singing lately. A peerless plug-ugly.)

The climactic rescue is in itself easy enough, but Harold’s rescuers — Young and his gang, now allies — are all smashed out of their faces, and Harold’s new task is to get them to the church on time without them getting lost, arrested or killed. The sozzled bozos are incapable of sitting still, and rounding them up becomes an extended piece of Sisyphean slapstick eventually accelerating into a hair-raising sequence on a runaway bus.

Walter Kerr observes that, unlike Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd had no shadow about him, he seems always equipped for happiness should it come along — so to be interesting, he has to stack the deck against himself and pile on colossal odds against his victory. This pleasing, laid-back romp mainly eschews this until the end, letting us simply watch a guy lead a charmed life, much of the comedy coming from his blithe unawareness of how damned lucky he is.

 

Pie-Eyed

Biggest laugh sensation of this year’s Hippfest was THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY, because Laurel & Hardy are always the biggest laugh-getters anywhere they appear. This was on a triple-bill with PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP (a triumphal return to Bo’ness) and THE FINISH TOUCH (a debut), but was undoubtedly the crowning glory, and not just because it’s newly restored — it’s the best film of the (excellent) bunch.

The film had been missing its first reel for decades. It’s still missing a bridging scene in which Eugene Pallette (a rare L&H appearance for him) sells Ollie accident insurance on Stan. The loss of this scene is unfortunate, as it breaks the film in half, and the two halves are pretty slenderly related. To my relief, Pallette does turn up during the climactic pie fight, which is one of the biggest ever staged, and brilliantly inventive. It also features regular L&H enemy Charlie Hall, participant in their best slow-burn tit-for-tat routines, and the elegantly hilarious Anita Garvin.

But the restored bit is a prize-fight where Stan demonstrates his worthlessness (again) to Ollie, leading to the later insurance scam. This has been cleaned up like new by Lobster Films of Paris, and if it weren’t for the bridging photo-strip of the missing scene, you would think the whole film had been made yesterday, except it’s too good. Stan is failing to fight Noah Young, perhaps silent Hollywood’s pre-eminent plug (Bull Montana his main rival). Young battled Buster Keaton in ONE WEEK (I think) and Harold Lloyd in FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE (for sure), and here he’s almost as terrifying as Johnny Barnes as Sugar Ray Robinson in RAGING BULL. This amazing restoration should be good for his reputation, although unless Young, who died in 1958, enjoys another amazing restoration, he won’t know anything about it.