Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
AMERICAN COMEDIES AND MACK SENNETT
America had lagged behind continental Europe in developing name comedians who could
sustain regular series of one-reel films. The first true American comic star of the type was
John Bunny ( 1863-1915), a fat, genial man who had been a successful stage actor and
producer before recognizing the potential of films, and offering himself to the Vitagraph
Company. Although today his films, generally revolving around social mix-ups and
marital spats, seem woefully unfunny, his success with audiences before the First World
War was phenomenal, and encouraged other American companies to try comedy series.
Essanay's Snakeville Comedies introduced 'Alkali Ike' ( Augustus Carney) and 'Mustang
Pete' ( William Todd). Another Essanay series introduced a future star, Wallace Beery, as
Sweedie.
The transformation and pre-eminence of American screen comedy, however, may be
dated from the formation of the Keystone Comedy Studio under Mack Sennett, in 1912.
Keystone was the comedy arm of the New York Motion Picture Company, whose other
Hollywood studios were 101 Bison, producing Thomas Ince's Westerns and historical
films, and Reliance, specializing in dramas. Sennett was Irish-Canadian, an unsuccessful
stage actor who in 1908 had been reduced to working in movies. He was fortunate to be
recruited to the Biograph Studios, where his natural curiosity led him to observe and
absorb the discoveries of Biograph's principal director D. W. Griffith. Along with
Griffith's revolutionary techniques, Sennett studied the comedies coming from France,
and by 1910 had acquired enough skill to be appointed Biograph's principal comedy
director, a post which led to his appointment to run Keystone. He brought with him to
Keystone some of his former Biograph collaborators including Fred Mace, Ford Sterling,
and the beautiful and witty Mabel Normand.
Sennett was uneducated, intelligent, and tough, with an instinctive sense of comedy.
Because he was easily bored himself, he could tell what would hold the audience's
attention and what would not. Having mastered film craft at Biograph, he passed on his
lessons. The Keystone cameramen were dextrous in following the free flight of the
clowns; and the fast Keystone editing was adapted from Griffith's innovatory methods.
Keystone stars and films derived from vaudeville, circus, comic strips, and at the same
time from the realities of early twentieth-century America. Keystone pictures depicted a
world of wide, dusty streets with one-storey clapboard houses, hardware stores and
groceries, dentists' surgeries and saloon bars. The clowns inhabited a familiar world of
kitchens and parlours, seedy hotel lobbies, bedrooms with iron cots and rickety wash-
stands, bowler hats and wild beards, feathered hats and harem skirts, ModelTs and horses-
and-buggies. Comedy at Keystone was a wild caricature of the ordinary joys and terrors
of everyday life, and the guiding rule was to keep things moving, to allow the audience no
pause for breath or critical reflection. Sennett built up a stock company of outrageous
grotesques and fearless acrobats, including Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle -- a fat man with great
comedy style and dexterity -- cross-eyed Ben Turpin, walrus-whiskered Billy Bevan and
Chester Conklin, giant Mack Swain, obese Fred Mace. Other comedians who emerged
from the Keystone Studio included the future stars Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon,
Charlie Chase, who became a notable director as Charles Parrott, Charles Murray, Slim
Summerville, Hank Mann, Edgar Kennedy, Harry McCoy, Raymond Griffith, Louise
Fazenda, Polly Moran, Minta Durfee, and Alice Davenport. At least two Keystone Kops,
Eddie Sutherland and Edward Cline, as well as two Sennett gagmen, Malcolm St Clair
and Frank Capra, later became notable comedy directors in their own right.
The Keystone comedies remain a monument of early twentieth-century popular art,
transmuting the evident surfaces of the life and times of the 1910s and 1920s into a
comedy that is basic and universal. The Keystone shorts were uncompromisingly
anarchic. In an era of determinedly materialistic values, the Sennett films celebrated
orgiastic destruction of goods and possessions, of cars and houses and china ornaments.
As in all the best comedy, authority and dignity were tumbled and ridiculed.
Sennett's greatest year was 1914, when his most famous star, Charlie Chaplin, won world
fame for himself and the studio in a few months of phenomenal discovery, innovation,
and comedy creation. When his one-year Keystone contract expired, Chaplin, recognizing
his immense commercial value, asked for a large raise on his $150 a week salary. Sennett,
short-sightedly perhaps, was unwilling to meet his demands. Chaplin was to move in turn
to the Essanay Studios and contracts with Mutual and First National which gave him the
increased independence of operation which he craved. Keystone survived the loss, but the
Chaplin year had been the studio's apogee.
Sennett's success at Keystone spurred many rival studios, some short-lived, to set up in
comedy production. His most serious rival was Hal Roach, who teamed up with a fellow
film extra, Harold Lloyd, to make a comedy series starring Lloyd as Willie Work, a pale
imitation of Chaplin's Tramp. Subsequent collaborations fared better, and the creation of
Lloyd's bespectacled 'Harold' character launched their careers to joint success. After the
parting with Lloyd, Roach was inspired to team two comedians who had been working
solo for years. Laurel and Hardy were to pass into universal mythology, the sublime
partnership of the tiny, diffident, tearful Stan with the large, pompous, unwisely over-
confident Ollie.
The style of the Roach stars over the years -- Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the troupe of child
comedians Our Gang, Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts, Charlie Chase, Will Rogers, Edgar
Kennedy, Snub Pollard -- exemplify the difference between Roach and Sennett. The
latter's films tended to frenetic action and slapstick. Roach preferred well-constructed
stories and a more restrained, realistic, and ultimately more sophisticated style of
character comedy. Harold Lloyd and Stan and Ollie are recognizably human, sharing the
foibles, feelings, and anxieties of an audience which is also engaged in the permanent
battle with the perilous uncertainties of the contemporary world.
THE HEYDAY OF SILENT COMEDY
At least until 1913 the standard length of a film was one reel; multi-reel feature films
were at first resisted in many quarters of the film trade. It was, then, a dramatic revolution
when Sennett announced the first multi-reel comedy at the end of 1914. Tillie's Punctured
Romance ( 1914) was designed to star the famous comedienne Marie Dressler in an
adaptation of one of her stage successes. Charlie Chaplin was cast as her leading man.
Despite the success of this film, it was to be several years before the feature-length
comedy was established. Chaplin made his first two-reeler, Dough and Dynamite ( 1914),
at Keystone, but not until 1918 and A Dog's Life did he embark on featurelength films.
Keaton made his first feature in 1920, Lloyd in 1921, Harry Langdon in 1925.
Harold Lloyd in For Heaven's Sake ( 1926)
Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon -- the four giants of American silent film comedy --
all emerged from the oneand two-reeler period to reach the apogee of their careers in the
1920s. Chaplin trained in the British music hall and, in the manipulation of the image at
Keystone, created in his Tramp character the most universal fictional human image in
history. Like Chaplin, Keaton was above all a highly accomplished actor, who gave each
of the characters he played-they ranged from millionaires to cowhands-its own validity.
The myth of 'The Great Stone Face' misrepresents his startlingly expressive face and still
more eloquent body. A lifetime of creating comedy and solving stage problems (he was
working professionally from the age of three) gave him an impeccable sense of comic
structure and
mise-en-scéne.
The characteristic, escalating Keaton gag enchainments
make him the equal of any director working in 1920s Hollywood.
Harold Lloyd was exceptional among the silent film comedians since his background and
training were not in vaudeville. Stage-struck from youth, he had worked in little stock
companies before landing a job as a $5-a-day extra at Universal Studios, where he met
Hal Roach. Lloyd joined Sennett after the Willie Work films and a disagreement with
Roach; but they reunited to make a new series, with Lloyd as a hayseed, Lonesome Luke.
The films proved successful enough; but in 1917 Lloyd put on a pair of horn-rim glasses
for a film called Over the Fence ( 1917), and discovered a far better character which was
to bring him lasting fame. The Harold character evolved through a series of shorts, and
was fully formed by the time of his first feature A Sailor-Made Man ( 1921). Harold was
always aspiring to be the all-American boy, the Horatio Alger hero, an enthusiastic go-
getter. The drive for social or economic betterment that always motivates the plot of a
Lloyd comedy probably represented a sincere moral beliefLloyd was in real life the
embodiment of his own success stories.
With Safety Last ( 1923) Lloyd introduced the special style of comedy of thrills with
which his name is always associated. The plot somehow called upon the innocent Harold
to take the place of a human fly; and the last third of the picture is a rising crescendo of
gags as Harold encounters ever more horrible hazards in attempting to scale the side of a
skyscraper. Lloyd's eleven silent features, including Grandma's Boy ( 1922), The
Freshman ( 1925), and the culminating The Kid Brother ( 1927) and Speedy ( 1928), were
among the biggest-earning comedies of the 1920s, even outgrossing Chaplin's films.
Harry Langdon's output was smaller and more uneven than the others; but he merits his
place in the pantheon of great clowns on the strength of three features, Tramp, Tramp,
Tramp, The Strong Man (both 1926), and Long Pants ( 1927) -- the first scripted by Frank
Capra, the others directed by him. Langdon's screen character is quiet, cute, and rather
weird. His round, white face and podgy figure, his tight-fitting clothes, and his stiff
slightly uncontrolled movements give him the look, as James Agee pointed out, of an
elderly baby. This childlike, guileless quality gives an eerie edge to his encounters with
the grown-up world of sexuality and sin.
In this enchanted age of comedy, the reputation of other comedians has been unjustly
eclipsed. Raymond Griffith emulated the sartorial elegance of Max Linder and
encountered catastrophes and peril with insouciant ingenuity; his masterpiece Hands Up!
( 1926) cast him as a Civil War spy. Marion Davies's fame as the mistress of William
Randolph Hearst has eclipsed her contemporary celebrity as a comedienne of particular
charm whose fun was seen at its best in the films in which King Vidor directed her, Show
People and The Patsy (both 1928). The Canadian-born entertainer Beatrice Lillie left her
mark in a single wonderful silent comedy, Exit Smiling ( 1927). Migrants from Europe,
the Italian Monty Banks ( Monte Bianchi) and the English Lupino Lane enjoyed
successful if brief starring careers; Banks subsequently turned director. Larry Semon, with
his distinctive white mask like a Pierrot lunaire started the 1920s as Hollywood's highest-
paid comedian, but his later features met with diminishing success, and hardly bear
revival today. W. C. Fields and Will Rogers made sporadic forays into silent films, though
their essentially verbal style of comedy was only to come into its own in the era of talking
pictures.
The extraordinary flowering of silent film comedy in Hollywood was not to any great
extent reflected anywhere else in the world -- perhaps indeed because American comedies
enjoyed such huge international distribution and popularity that there was no chance of
competing with them. In Britain, Betty Balfour, who made two feature films in her
character of Squibs, was the nearest to a star comedienne: attempts to put popular music
hall comedians on the screen lacked both skill and success. In Germany the child star of
1909, Curt Bois, grew up to be the bright star of a few comedies, the best of them The