Raymond Griffith: A Physiognomic Appreciation

You’ll be hearing a lot about this young fellow!

I first took note of him after stumbling across THE SURF GIRL, a better-than-average Keystone knockabout. Griffith intrigues in it by his lack of exaggeration and ability to suggest more than one thought or emotion flickering across his countenance at a time: an unheard of thing at the Sennett studio.

Now I’ve seen a few more of his features (cinematic, not facial) and will be writing about all of them as Griffith strikes me as a major and, yes, Forgotten talent.

But first, his face.

Although svelte of form, Griffith has heavy, slightly jowelly lower features. Rather like Doug Fairbanks in that sense, perennially super-fit and nimble as he appeared: zero per cent body fat, sixty per cent chin fat. The bell-bottomed face is really the only unattractive thing about Raymond, in principle, but he exults in using his face to create delightfully unpleasing effects: but not by any contortion or grimacing. He just smiles in a subtly but distinctly horrible way (the curl of the lip), or otherwise makes himself uglier than he naturally is.

It’s a sort of inverse William Powell effect. Powell had a face like a raccoon, but made himself suave and dashing through elegant styling and an air of almost genetic debonairness. He could act handsome and make you believe it. Raymond Griffith was a decent-looking fellow who enjoyed making himself seem positively indecent.

While other comics of the period celebrated the moustache in all its more baroque and rococo variations, Griffith adorned his philtrum area with a simple, Dabney Coleman-type brush, such as you might see hanging around any street corner. Even today, when the facial fuzz is less favoured, you might still pass a half-dozen moustaches of the Griffith style in a day’s perambulation and think little of it. It’s an upper-lip decoration that refuses to draw attention to itself.

So with Griffith, although he makes sure he gets your attention.

Here he is in two sequences from HANDS UP!

Broad stuff — the Warners cartoon style avant la lettre. But Griffith keeps his own contribution simple. Other scenes in the movie play in a slower and more subtle register altogether. There are two entire features on YouTube, HANDS UP! and PATHS TO PARADISE. Well, I say entire — all prints of PTP are missing the final reel, but it’s still a very satisfying film.

It’s taken me forty years of film viewing to stumble on Griffith, with a little help from Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns. Based on this, I’d be inclined to call him the most shamefully neglected performer in Hollywood history.

The Sunday Intertitle: Tickling the Ostrich

I know. Absolute filth. I’m shocked, you’re shocked. Not the kind of thing one expects in a Keystone comedy.

The movie is THE SURF GIRL, another attempt to shoehorn gratuitous bathing beauties into a slapstick two-reeler. The nominal star is Raymond “Ray” Griffith, a figure I’m quite interested in — he’s unusual in being of normal build and with a normal-sized human moustache, distinguishing him from the run-of-the-mill Keystone freaks and grotesques. Somebody like that would need to have some genuine comic chops to compensate for his lack of visual zaniness, and he does. Of course, in the chaotic flurry of a Sennett short, he doesn’t get many chances to shine, but he seizes them.

Uncredited director Harry Edwards, a prolific Canadian, was a specialist in this kind of thing, chalking up 157 shorts by the IMDb’s count. The titles are the usual array of puns and catchphrases, some of them now rendered surreally incomprehensibly by the passage of time and evolution of language. They may make you punchy if you read too many: THE SEA SQUAWK, THE LION AND THE SOUSE, FATHER WAS NEUTRAL, UNIVERSAL IKE GETS A GOAT, LADIES MUST EAT. TRAMP, TRAMP, TRAMP (that’s one title, not a film and its two remakes) starring Harry Langdon, is his most famous work. And indeed he keeps the action semi-coherent here, even though the plot seems to introduce a new supernumerary comic every thirty seconds. Edwards knows when to get the most out of a close-up, and when to hold a long shot so we can enjoy the sight of lots of frantic characters running in and out of doorways. The simple knockabout aspires here to the heights of farce.

What’s most enjoyable is the sight of long-ago Amurricans at play, in some seaside paradise of days gone by. Strolling punters can rodeo-ride wild birds in the zoological garden, get boozed up in a bar, then stagger next door to drown in the swimming baths, and there’s also a shooting gallery which duplicates a whole skid row street, and the paying customers can hurl wooden balls at effigies of what appears to be Abraham Lincoln and some of his homies.

Here’s where Raymond Griffith scores his best moment. Fleeing from an angry man in a long beard, he disguises himself, perhaps foolishly, as one of these moving targets, and finds himself transported via clockwork mechanism through a gauntlet of ball-hurling yahoos. His only hope of avoiding detection is to maintain the imposture that he’s a lifeless automaton. Here, most actors would adopt a glassy stare, face forward, in mimicry of the mannequins around him, but Griffith is a more resourceful player: hilariously, he turns his face up and to the side, as if in aloof distraction, aspiring to the attitude rather than the appearance of a storefront dummy — a frozen image of aristocratic indifference, with just a soupcon of blind terror trickling underneath.

More study of this fine thespian is now urgently required.