The Grin of the Dark (22 page)

I don't know how long I've been watching Orville Hart's films.
When I attempt to take a break, Guillermo stares at me as though
I'm an intruder. I point at the projector that holds the next film and
show him my palms to signify that he should wait, and then I step
outside. Apart from the stars strewn across the sky in patterns I don't
recognise, the night seems blacker than ever. It and the bite in the air
provide little relief from the insistent spectacle of Tubby's grin and
the sounds of the projectionist's appreciation and the labouring of the
generator. Nor does standing in the open help me to decide whether
my interpretation of the films is a genuine insight or just the product
of jet lag, since my brain feels as though it's still in transit. I'm gazing
at the cacti arrested in various postures that seem close to meaningful
on the lit stage of the ground outside the doorway when Guillermo
starts to laugh.

Am I the joke? In a way, because I turn to see that he's projecting
the next film. I would have noticed sooner if the films weren't wholly
silent, lacking even a music and effects track. 'No,' I shout, but he's
too intent on the film to respond. Could I ask Willie to intervene?
Presumably she speaks his language. As far as I can see the house is
entirely dark, and I don't want to waken her. I dash to the screening
room, to find I've seen the film in
Those Golden Years of Fun
.

I wish I'd been in time to read the title, even though I'm certain of
it – and then I realise how I can. I hurry to the projector. My head
feels as if it's reeling like the spool of film by the time I manage to
decipher the words on the label. They are indeed
Tubby's Terrible
Triplets
. I stagger back to my seat and close my eyes until I stop
feeling like a passenger on an aeroplane that's fighting turbulence,
and then I grin at all the Tubbies in the toyshop. Smilemime was
mistaken or lying about the film, just as he is about me.

I'm right about it in another way. When the toyshop manager
wakes up in the asylum, having dreamed that his bedroom has been
invaded by his tormentor times three, the trio of attendants all have
Tubby's face. Each of them widens his grin at the audience before
they converge on the manager and the film ends. I believe I would
prefer my theory of the intention behind Tubby's films to be wide of
the mark.

It surely can't apply to all of them, however much the glinting of
his gleeful eyes seems to suggest that it does. Perhaps I'm simply
watching too many of his films without a break. In
Tubby's Trick
Tricycle
he rides the machine up walls and across ceilings, leaving
rooms and entire buildings lying on their sides or upside down.
Nobody could imitate that, and I hope they wouldn't mimic his
behaviour in
Tubby Tattle-Tale
, in which he causes wilder and wilder
fights by telling the absolute truth about people, although each intertitle
trails off before we learn what secrets he betrays. In
Tubby's
Table Talk
he reduces an elegant dinner party to chaos with his
conversation, which the intertitles render so nonsensically that it
bewilders me too. In
Tubby's Telephonic Travails
he communicates
nothing but laughter with the instrument to anyone who contacts him
– a bank official, a debt collector, a lawyer – until they're helplessly
infecting all their colleagues.
Tubby Takes the Train
casts him as a
Western bandit who holds up the passengers to make them perform
circus stunts and variety acts, an apparently harmless crime until the
driver starts juggling with coal and the unmanned train goes off the
rails into a desert.
Tubby Tries It On
turns him loose in a costume
shop, and every time he sets out for a fancy-dress ball he's mistaken
for the role he's playing. By the end of the film he has left a mayoral
banquet in disarray, and a police awards ceremony, not to mention
an entire courtroom where he acted the judge.

Silent comedy often poked fun at the pompous, but is there more of
an anarchic point to his choice of targets? I scribble this as yet another
observation to be pondered. If it weren't for my notes I might feel that
the films have merged into a single image of Tubby's luminous face
grinning horse-like at me as a prelude to transforming a tennis
tournament into a battle with rackets, or judging a pie competition by
how spectacular a mess they make when flung at his fellow panellists,
or letting his two little nephews – miniature replicas of him – leave a
theatre in ruins with their antics at a talent contest, where they jump
higher and higher on each other's shoulders before using the chandeliers
as trapezes... I'm increasingly bothered by the notion that there's
some aspect of the films I've overlooked, but the harder I strain to
identify it, the more my eyes flicker and my brain throbs. Eventually I
see his first two films. In
The Best Medicine
he has a minor role as a
travelling quack who dispenses a tonic that causes uncontrollable
merriment, while in
Just for a Laugh
the character takes centre stage,
though with a different name, and sells hysteria to an entire small
town. Both films show him consulting the kind of unintelligible book
that makes an appearance somewhere in all his two-reelers. Now the
only one I've yet to watch is
Tubby Tells the Truth
. But the next film
on the screen is an Orville Hart sound feature,
Fool for a Day
.

I'm not surprised it failed to restore Charley Chase to stardom. He
starts out as dapper as ever, the image he revived with a guest
appearance in
Sons of the Desert
, but doubts over his impending
marriage cause him to take refuge in a travelling circus. He's a good
deal less at ease as a trainee clown, and keeps giving the audience
abashed glances that are contradicted by his painted grin. On the night
he turns every act into a mass of pratfalls, but although he's finally
chased away by the maddened ringmaster, the show is a roaring
success. In an epilogue the circus returns to town and Charley takes his
wife and children to see it. The ringmaster recognises him, and the last
shot has Charley fleeing for the horizon, pursued by the deranged
ringmaster and the rest of the performers, animals as well.

I wouldn't class the film as screwball. Smilemime was wrong
again. On the other hand,
Gimme Da Brain
is certainly the most
violent Stooges film I've seen, and the finale in which the trio juggle
with the monster's brain and shy it at one another until Colin Clive
as Frankenstein takes it like a pie in the face is hardly likely to have
pleased the British censor. Hart's film with James Finlayson and
Oliver Hardy,
The Course-We-Can Brothers
, seems innocuous
enough until I nod off halfway through. I regain consciousness at the
start of the credits of
You're Darn Tuten
, in which Laurel and Hardy
play Egyptologists. Hart is credited with the intertitles, and surely it's
my inability to stay awake that robs them of sense. I pinch my thigh
hard so as to concentrate on
Crazy Capaldi
, the director's first fulllength
film.

This is certainly the original uncensored version, before it was cut
for a reissue. The grinning gangster's murders are played as black
comedy, but I find it hard to enjoy on that level, though Guillermo
audibly does. He's especially amused by the protracted dance
performed by the silhouette of a machine-gun victim as the wall on
which it's cast fills with holes. Capaldi's death in the electric chair is
also mimed at length by a jittery shadow, and the projectionist thinks
this hilarious too. I'm relieved the experience is over, but I'm still
scribbling notes about it when yet another film begins. It's
Ticklin'
Feather
, Orville Hart's unreleased swan song.

It opens with the Cherokee protagonist riding a donkey into the
Western town of Bedlam. Once he's past the brawls and gunplay that
fill the main street, he finds he has to lodge in the stable with the
animal. He meets every situation with a grin that looks both resigned
and secretive. Do I dream that he says 'Me meek. Inherit earth'? I
waken to see him overcoming gunmen by chortling as he walks up to
them and disarming them with the feather he wears in his headband.
Perhaps the film was shelved because it was too silly to release, but I
wonder how any filmmaker could have been irrational enough to
think it would help his career. 'Me bring you peace,' the hero says,
unless that's only in my sleep. When I next look he's the sheriff, but
that's not the end. The film loses its grip on my attention, and I dream
it has turned into a hardcore orgy, until I see that the woman grinning
with orgasmic pleasure as she's mounted by a man while she manipulates
two others is up there on the screen.

The air feels insubstantially but relentlessly invaded by the rhythm
of the action. It's the throbbing of the generator, but I could imagine
that the sensation is emerging from the image. I don't need to watch
Willie's films, even if this one may be a homage to something older;
did she choose the performers for their dated appearance? The only
film I want to see now is
Tubby Tells the Truth
.

As I leave the auditorium Guillermo takes his time about
withdrawing his hand from inside his baggy trousers. I pretend not to
notice as I turn to the shelves, only to falter. The gap left by the film
that's running is halfway along the lowest shelf of Orville Hart's work.
I'm dizzy again by the time I succeed in reading the label on the reel.
The title is
She Screws to Conquer
, in outdated type on yellowing
paper. It's an Orville Hart film.

It's clear from the titles that all of his films on the bottom shelf
belong to the same genre. I doubt they deserve more than a mention
in my book. I can see nothing to distinguish
She Screws to Conquer
from the mass of hardcore films, except perhaps for the participants'
grins, which look close to fixed. I'm overdue for a break. I
open the door and emerge into the desert, and almost fall back into
the shed.

The sun is above the house. It's brighter than white – so fierce that
the sky is seared colourless. I squeeze my eyes shut and clap a hand
over them, and hear a door open ahead of me. 'Finished at last?'
Willie says.

I slit my eyes at her bleached image in the kitchen doorway.
Today's shorts are even terser, and otherwise she's wearing just a
singlet. 'Unless you've got
Tubby Tells the Truth
,' I say.

'I was thinking, but I'm sure I don't.' She blinks at the amplified
groans in the shed. 'Is that me?'

'You,' I say without much sense.

'Not in the movie. I stay out of sight. Is it one of mine?'

'No, it's one of your grandfather's. I take it that's how he ended
his career.'

'Those were his last movies, yes. Don't you think they're worth
watching?'

I shut the door behind me to protect the films from the heat.
Though the door muffles the girl's voice, I have the idea that the air
is still vibrating around me, so imperceptibly that I can't be sure. As
I make for the house the glare of the sun feels like a spotlight in an
interrogation room. 'I think I've seen enough,' I say. 'Maybe I'm not
qualified to judge.'

Willie looks more unimpressed than I find appropriate. 'How
about you?' I ask as I sidle past her. 'Were you influenced by them?'

'By the way he moves the camera, sure, and the editing. And I try
to bring in humour like he did.'

I'm abashed to have observed none of this. Before I can ask her to
be more specific she says 'Need a drink?'

'I could certainly see off a coffee.'

She fills a large mug from a percolator and hands it to me,
followed by a jug of cream from the refrigerator. 'So was it worth
coming so far?'

I'm distracted by the cartoon frieze of fellatio and cunnilingus that
encircles the mug. Until I regain control of my thoughts her question
seems as uninterpretable as the intertitles in her grandfather's silent
films. 'I'm sure it was,' I tell her.

'You don't take notes.'

'I do,' I say and lurch to my feet. 'I've left them.'

'It's okay, he's bringing them.' She opens the door to the heat and
the projectionist, who has loaded the tray with my plate and plastic
bottle and the clipboard. 'Gracias, Guillermo.'

'Yes, thank you,' I say before discovering that he has spilled drips,
presumably from the bottle, on my notes. Scattered words are swollen
and distorted, but at least they're comprehensible. I blot them with a
blank page while he converses with Willie in Spanish. As he plods
giggling out of the room she sits opposite me. 'Gee, you're some
messy writer,' she says. 'Can I see what you wrote?'

'Let me send it to you when it's in better shape.'

'Tell me what you thought at least.'

'I wonder if his sense of humour was too much for the public or
the studios back then.' Sensing her dissatisfaction, I feel bound to add
'The world could be catching up with him and Tubby too.'

'You can tell anyone that's interested in reissuing them where the
movies are.'

'I will. So how long did he carry on making films?'

'He made the stag movies during the war, and then he tried to set
up a radio station. It was supposed to just broadcast comedy, but it
ended up too weird for the sponsors. Not stuff you'd want to hear
late at night, my grandmother Hart used to say. He'd invested everything
he owned in it, even his house. The way she told it, it wasn't the
loss that killed him so much as not being able to reach the public any
more. Mind you, they were divorced by then.'

'He didn't invest the films you've got, or did he?'

'Nobody wanted them. He gave them to her, because she was in
quite a few of them. Leonora Bunting.'

She played Capaldi's moll and Chase's wife in
Fool for a Day
, and
a saloon-keeper with a shotgun in
Ticklin' Feather
. She must have
been at least a decade younger than her husband. Are three films quite
a few? I haven't decided whether to ask if she appeared in his later
work – surely it's an irrational notion – when Willie says 'He couldn't
have known she'd get religion.'