Roomers versus Ruminant

Weird synchronicities pile up when you’re seeing multiple films in a day at a film festival, and the 13th HippFest was no exception: we discovered that Laurel & Hardy in ANGORA LOVE and Brian Aherne & Annette Benson both lived at number thirteen. And variant spellings of “Carabou” kept turning up, as the setting of WHERE THE NORTH BEGINS, the hometown of early woman animator Bessie Mae Kelley, and the name of the goat’s rightful owner in ANGORA LOVE:

One is reduced to muttering along with Ricky Jay in MAGNOLIA, “And I am trying to think this is all only a matter of chance.”

The other queer thing about ANGORA LOVE, a sort of rough sketch for the masterpiece that is LAUGHING GRAVY, only with a goat instead of an adorable puppy, is that I was convinced I’d seen it, but seeing it again evoked no recollection. I think I’d been fooled by the appearance of a goat (the same one, probably) in HABEAS CORPUS: so I’d seen Laurely & Hardy with a goat. I have the box set so I actually OWN a copy of AL, and have seemingly never watched it. I guess the idea of an inferior prototype of a short I loved never tempted me.

I should have watched it, as AL is a delightful little film in its own right. Saddled with an unwanted ruminant, the boys must conceal it from murderous landlord Edgar Kennedy (top). There are a number of pleasures here not ported over into the better-known talkie. Photographed by George Stevens, the film has a number of fast, if wobbly, tracking shots down LA streets, something we see again in LIBERTY, by the same cameraman.

There’s a close-up of a tack that Ollie, of course, is about to step on —

I got excited about this because of something I once read — was it in Karel Reisz & Roger Crittenden’s book on film editing, or was it merely Leslie Halliwell? The theory was put forward that, whereas most comedy depends on surprise, L&H comedy depends on the audience being forewarned of disaster, and thus being able to laugh before anything has actually happened. Of course, L&H use surprise A LOT, but it becomes even more delightful because it’s shuffled in with gags where everything is set up as obviously as possible. So you get surprised by the fact that you’ve been surprised.

Anyway, the example I’d read was about how L&H would treat a banana peal gag: rather than revealing the discarded skin at the moment it gets underfoot, they’d grant it an insert shot long before it comes into play. Well, I’m not sure that ever happens in an L&H film, and anyhow the wide-shot framing favoured by silent comedians means that, in, say, THE HIGH SIGN or SHERLOCK JR, Buster Keaton would reveal the presence of the banana skin well in advance also. But here is a tack. I think in this case the closeup is called for because the thing is too small to see in a wide shot. Nevertheless, it is fairly close to the banana skine xample described.

There’s also a gag apparently too racy for the canine remake:

Quite a modern notion, the serious foreground undercut by comedy business in the background.

The movie also has a rare expressive camera angle. Again, I’m tempted to credit Stevens rather than director Lewis R. Foster. Ollie is demonstrating how to use chest expanders silently (!) when Kennedy walks in. The sequence also benefits from cutaways of Stan, in bed, noticing the menacing landlord first.

The sequence makes a simple over-the-shoulder on Ollie into a big dramatic reveal by having Babe turn, with a dancing movement, into his medium close shot. We get to see his face fall, up close. The pay-off is an even closer view of Edgar’s scowling fizzog.

Penelope the goat may not be as adorable as Laughing Gravy, but there are good gags about it gradually consuming the contents of the room (Stan attempts to reattach a scrape of wallpaper by licking the back of it) and then the same punchline as Rin-Tin-Tin’s WHERE THE NORTH BEGINS — just after Ollie has pronounced his ardent desire to never see a goat again, from Penelope’s hiding place under the communal bed —

The Sunday Intertitle: The Idiot Stick

Afternoon, everybody.

Before Charlie meets the blind flower girl in CITY LIGHTS he was at one point going to spend five solid minutes struggling with a stick stuck in a grating outside a department store.

An entire sequence without a single intertitle, pure pantomime, and with no discernible connection otherwise to the film’s plot. Since the statue unveiling sequence is also non-plot-related, this would, I think, have delayed the start of the film’s real story by a dangerous amount, so cutting it was the right decision.

Still, I think it’s a great sequence — depending on the company you watch it with, it’s either progressively more hilarious or more frustrating. If you’re into it, the frustration is part of the hilarity.

Great supporting performances. I remember being astonished at who was playing the idiot messenger boy, then forgetting, then finding out again and being astonished all over again. It’s Charles Lederer, future screenwriter for Howard Hawks among others — he was Marion Davies’ favourite nephew, and Chaplin may have met him at San Simeon, where he was a regular guest, or through Marion, with whom he seems to have been intimate, or maybe through socialite-AD Harry Crocker.

Crocker himself plays the window dresser who gets so infuriated with Charlie, and he’s excellent. Though short, and ultimately deleted, it’s a much more challenging role than Rex, the King of the Air in THE CIRCUS. Long takes, lots of business and expressive pantomime. The actors have to sustain it and communicate it without the aid of title cards or cutaways.

The scene depends for its effect on a hierarchy of stupidity. The mouth-breathing Lederer, barely conscious or alive, is at the lowest end of the idiot spectrum, regarded with horror by Charlie. In an earlier film, at Keystone or Essanay, Charlie might have bullied the dolt, but here the only cruelty is in the simple observation. It’s still a bit cruel. We can call him an idiot, maybe, because he’s just a comic type, not a specific syndrome, though David Robinson goes further and calls him “a haunting figure whose malevolent, wooden-faced idiocy gives him the look of a distant and mentally-retarded cousin of Buster Keaton,” a beautiful turn of phrase except for the slur (if you look up the origins of the phrase “mental retardation” you discover it’s actually racist).

Charlie himself is in the middle phase of the idiot scale — his obsession with pushing the stick through the grating, even though he’s just passing the time, is one symptom, his inability to understand that pushing one side or the other results in an identical effect, and only pushing the centre can be expected to work, is the other plank upon which his dumbness rests.

But Crocker’s shop man is the third kind of idiot. Like Oliver Hardy, he’s just intelligent enough to think he’s smart, but not smart enough to realise he’s an idiot. He gets obsessed with Charlie’s stick problem, and excited and infuriated about it. Charlie at least is smart enough to know it doesn’t matter one way or another. He’s never agitated about his dumb stick. Although he does get possessive of it when the message boy shows an interest.

Charlie’s incomprehension of Crocker is a subtle joke in its own right: the gag being that Charlie is completely unable to understand a clear and explicit pantomime.

The fourth form of idiocy, I guess, is that of the street gawkers who stop to watch Charlie. They don’t even have any ideas to suggest. Their passivity may tell us something about Chaplin’s attitude to his audience, or that may be a reach. But once again, as in THE CIRCUS, Charlie finds himself an unintentional entertainer.

Chaplin was very pleased with this sequence — “a whole story in itself” — but it had to go, precisely BECAUSE it was so self-contained, so it was left to Kevin Brownlow to issue it as part of Unknown Chaplin, thirty years after it was shot, by which time Chaplin, Lederer, Crocker and probably everyone else in the crowd and behind the camera, were gone.

The Valentine’s Day Intertitle:

There’s a film I have to write about that would provide a PERFECT intertitle for today, but I’m sworn to secrecy so I can’t use it. And the only other silent film I’ve seen lately is A NIGHT OUT, which isn’t particularly romantic.

Never mind, though, here’s Charley Chase, directed by his brother James Parrott, in FLUTTERING HEARTS, with Eugene Pallette AND Oliver Hardy, but also the alluring and talented Martha Sleeper, the cause of the titular cardiac irregularity. AND it has Charlie Hall as Man Under Car, perhaps the role he was born to play. Isn’t it romantic?

My chosen intertitle for this saint’s day is “Metropolitan 38986 — ask for Tillie.” This occurs at the five minute six seconds mark, but stay with it, there are rewards for the patient viewer.