The gang at True Classics reminds us that today is the one hundredth anniversary of the debut of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp.
Believe it or not, I've written about Chaplin before. This is what I had to say about that magical moment:
It was while filming the otherwise forgettable Kid Auto Races at Venice that Chaplin stumbled upon an idea for what would become the most memorable character of the entire silent era.
"[O]n the way to the wardrobe," he wrote in his autobiography, "I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born."
Chaplin exaggerates—the Tramp's debut here may have been the most inauspicious of a legendary character in movie history—but he built on the idea over the course of several shorts and in later years rarely played anything else.
The turning point in Chaplin's stint at Keystone came during the filming of his eleventh short, Mabel At The Wheel. Directed by Normand herself, she and Chaplin had a terrific argument about a gag he had worked out.
"We were on location in the suburbs of Los Angeles and in one scene Mabel wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so that the villain's car would skid over it. I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can't come out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: 'We have no time! We have no time! Do what you're told.'
"That was enough. I could not take it—and from such a pretty girl. 'I'm sorry, Miss Normand. I will not do what I'm told. I don't think you are competent to tell me about what to do.'"
Normand won the argument, but Chaplin won the war. Putting his money where his mouth was—in the form of his life savings as a surety that the resulting film would be worth releasing—Chaplin made his directing debut with his very next film, Twenty Minutes Of Love (April 20, 1914). The film was a success and Chaplin rarely thereafter worked for anyone but himself. (You can see the best of his Keystone efforts, The Rounders, here.)
While at Keystone, Chaplin played the usual assortment of drunks, mashers and incompetent waiters—by then already stock film characters—but he had, especially when directing himself, a sense of rhythm that turned comedy into a dance, and a gift for finding an unexpected twist in any comedic situation, subverting expectations, delaying or denying the expected payoff and giving us something we would have never thought of instead.
Indeed, seeing Chaplin in the context of his times, it's clear to me now he was to film comedy what D.W. Griffith was to film drama, establishing the rules and raising the bar. Even when he's just doing variations on Mack Sennett's everybody-fall-down brand of comedy, the internal logic of the characters' actions creates a sense of anticipation that makes the payoff so much more satisfying than one based on pure surprise and absurdity.
"That Chaplin exploded the boundaries of film comedy with each successive phase in his career," Rick Levinson wrote in Ranking the Silent Comedians, "much like Picasso exploded the boundaries of art with each successive phase of his career, is either known too well or too often taken for granted. You have to have a sense of what film comedy was like before, during and after Chaplin's career to get an inkling of the immense impact he made on 20th century culture."
This is not just a case of pretending to see something in retrospect that no one saw at the time. Audiences immediately recognized that Chaplin was something special and during the silent era, only his future business partners, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, would rival him in terms of box office appeal.
And now here it is, not the most auspicious debut in movie history, but possibly the most significant. Better things would follow in short order.
It was the Italians who proved most willing to experiment with the long-form film. Italian filmmakers had come late to the party, with the country not producing its first fiction film until 1905. To distinguish their product from the French films that dominated the early marketplace, they focused on subjects with a distinctly Italian flavor, such as the country's recent unification, well-known historical events such as the last days of Pompeii, and notorious figures from Rome's glory days such as Nero and Messalina.
The best of these Italian epics was Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria, a landmark achievement in style and spectacle, and the first truly great long-form film. The culimination of the long-form movement in Italy, Cabiria took two years to film and boasted mammoth sets and elaborate special effects. Its epic scope influenced Griffith's Intolerance and anticipated the pomp of De Mille's later Bible and history spectacles.
"The film was made with limitless scope and ambition," Roger Ebert wrote for his Great Movies series, "with towering sets and thousands of extras, with stunts that (because they were actually performed by stuntmen) have an impact lost in these days of visual effects."
Set during the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage—a subject of great interest to Italian audiences on the eve of World War I—Cabiria is an epic on a grand scale, tracing the life of young woman from childhood to early adulthood against the backdrop of Rome's struggle to establish an empire of its own. The movie opens with the spectacular eruption of Sicily's Mt. Etna, and boasts a tracking shot of refugees trekking across the face of the erupting volcano that rivals any image previously filmed.
"For Cabiria," wrote Cole Smithey, the self-styled "smartest film critic in the world, "Pastrone pioneered the use of deep-focus filming and the since-ubiquitous 'tracking-shot'—two years before D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation would employ similar techniques."
The movie includes kidnappings, piracy, ritual sacrifices, slave revolts and even Hannibal and his elephants. It also introduced the "Maciste" character—the Herculean hero played here by Bartolomeo Pagano in a star-making performance, and later by such actors as Steve Reeves—who proved so popular in low budget sword-and-sandal films between 1914 and the 1970s.
Even though the finished film wouldn't premiere in theaters until April 1914, word of Pastrone's project leaked out of Italy and directors worldwide scrambled to make their own long-form films.
SPECIAL AWARDS Winsor McCay (Gertie The Dinosaur) (Animation); Segundo de Chomón, Eugenio Bava, Giovanni Tomatis, Augusto Battagliotti, Natale Chiusano and Carlo Franzeri (Cabiria) (Cinematography); Segundo de Chomón and Eugenio Bava (Cabiria) (Special Effects); Camillo Innocenti and Luigi Borgnono (Cabiria) (Set Design)
I took the time to expand my Silent Oscars backward in time to 1914. (No, don't bother trying to figure out what I'm talking about.)
1914 PICTURE winner:Cabiria (prod.Giovanni Pastrone) nominees:Gertie The Dinosaur (prod. Winsor McCay); Judith of Bethulia (prod. D.W. Griffith); The Perils Of Pauline (prod. Pathé Frères); Tillie's Punctured Romance (prod. Mack Sennett)
ACTOR winner: Henry B. Walthall (The Avenging Conscience: or "Thou Shalt Not Kill") nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Keystone Comedies)
ACTRESS winner: Blanche Sweet (Judith Of Bethulia) nominees: Marie Dressler (Tillie's Punctured Romance); Pearl White (The Perils Of Pauline and The Exploits Of Elaine)
DIRECTOR winner: Giovanni Pastrone (Cabiria) nominees: Cecil B. DeMille (The Squaw Man); D.W. Griffith (Judith Of Bethulia and The Avenging Conscience: or "Thou Shalt Not Kill"); Mack Sennett (Tillie's Punctured Romance)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: Bartolomeo Pagano (Cabiria) nominees: Roscoe Arbuckle (The Rounders)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Mabel Normand (Tillie's Punctured Romance) nominees: Mae Marsh (Judith Of Bethulia)
SCREENPLAY winner: Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar Apfel, from a play by Edwin Milton Royle (The Squaw Man) nominees: D.W. Griffith, Grace Pierce and Frank E. Woods, from a poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Judith Of Bethulia); Hampton Del Ruth, Craig Hutchinson and Mack Sennett, from a play by A. Baldwin Sloane and Edgar Smith (Tillie's Punctured Romance)
SPECIAL AWARDS Winsor McCay (Gertie The Dinosaur) (Animation); Segundo de Chomón, Eugenio Bava, Giovanni Tomatis, Augusto Battagliotti, Natale Chiusano and Carlo Franzeri (Cabiria) (Cinematography); Segundo de Chomón and Eugenio Bava (Cabiria) (Special Effects); Camillo Innocenti and Luigi Borgnono (Cabiria) (Set Design)
Actually, you may have heard of some of them. Mabel Normand is a good bet—she was the first great comic film actress, often credited with throwing the first pie in movie history (read about that debate here).
And I know all you silent film fanatics know who Giovanni Pastrone is—he directed one of the most influential films of the era, the epic Italian historical adventure, Cabiria, about a little girl who is rescued from the eruption of Mt. Etna only to grow up and find herself at the center of the war between Rome and Carthage. (Read more about it here.) Not only did it spawn fifty years worth of "Maciste" movies (Italian "strongman" movies released in the U.S. as Hercules movies), but it directed inspired D.W. Griffith to direct his own ancient history epic, Intolerance (which I wrote about here).
By the way, Bartolomeo Pagano, who played Maciste in Cabiria and in twenty-four more films, was working as a stevedore in Genoa when he was discovered and cast in the movie. Luckily for Pastrone, Pagano was a natural-born actor who quickly became Italy's biggest star.
As for Henry B. Walthall and Blanche Sweet, they were part of D.W. Griffith's stable of actors at Biograph Studios. Both are largely forgotten today, Walthall, I think, because he played the "Little Colonel" in The Birth of a Nation, a role that endears him to no one; Sweet ironically because she was one of the few stars of the silent era who typically "lost" herself in a part, performing the role of a chameleon so successfully, she has no single character or characteristic you can hang your mental hat on. But both were the finest dramatic actors of their day.
Cecil B. DeMille I dare say you've heard of if only because Norma Desmond has been ready now for her close-up going on sixty-one years. The Squaw Man was important in American movie history as the first feature filmed in a sleepy little hamlet named Hollywood. Its plot is one of those hardy perennials of the American movies (and psyche, too)—a man flees the corruption of so-called civilization to re-discovered himself in the wilderness. The basic idea crops up in movies as diverse as The Half-Breed (1916), Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Dances With Wolves (1991), and is the unifying myth of those armed "militias" running around in various woods all over the United States.
Me, I've always been much too fond of flush toilets to buy into the basic concept, but DeMille liked the story so much, he filmed it three times, in 1914 with Dustin Farnum, in 1918 with Elliott Dexter and in 1931 with Warner Baxter.
[To read previous parts of this essay, click the highlighted link: 1, 2, 3, 4a, 4b]
The Birth of The Feature Film Tentative Steps After the release of Edwin Porter's classic short film The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the motion picture industry evolved rapidly, but until D.W. Griffith developed a film "language" that made complex storytelling possible (read about that effort here), the change was primarily a matter of quantity, not quality.
In the United States, thousands of nickelodeons—theaters where patrons paid a nickle to watch the latest movie—sprang up nationwide, and with them came a need for something to show in them. Maybe that explains why so many of the early studio moguls—Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers—got their start in the industry not as filmmakers but as theater owners.
The interest of these theater-owners-turned-movie-makers was almost purely about profit, and art only entered into the equation as a means to increase ticket sales. Which is okay with me. I mean, why, for example, should Adolph Zukor, who immigrated to the United States with $40 in his pocket, give away what little money he had in order to entertain and enlighten theatergoers for free? He opened a theater to put food on the table and, I can assure you, nobody else was going to do it, at least not without the same motive in mind.
But the result was a flood of derivative and undistinguished hackwork, and when Porter (and his boss, Thomas Edison) flinched from the high-risk-high-reward proposition of The Great Train Robbery and retreated back into the safe, bland product they had produced before, American theaters saw little else. By 1914 directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett would arrive on the scene and along with Griffith catapult American studios to a commercial dominance they have yet to relinguish. But until that time, it was the ambition and artistry of foreign studios that largely defined cinema.
While the best and most successful of the foreign filmmakers during this era were the "entertainers"—Georges Méliès, Max Linder—a handful of filmmakers aspired to tell more complex stories. But intentions aren't the same as results, and while you'll find plenty of adaptations of Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, theater productions and the Bible, these films amounted to little more than densely-worded intertitle cards accompanied by a handful of moving pictures.
Directors needed both a technique to tell stories in a purely visual way, and more elbow room than a single reel (eight-to-twelve minutes) of film could afford. Griffith would eventually solve the first problem. The feature-length film would solve the other.
What qualifies as the first feature-length film depends on what you think of as a feature film. In 1903, French movie-makers Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca directed a series of interrelated short films covering events in the life of Christ, from the annunciation through the resurrection and ascension. At a time when individual theater owners had more control over the product shown on the screen than the studio that produced it, La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ a.k.a. The Passion Play was sometimes exhibited edited together into a single 44-minute film.
And then there was Alice Guy Blaché who covered the same subject in a single, 33-minute film, La vie du Christ, a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ. Guy is one of the more interesting figures of the early silent era—the first woman director in history, she started as a secretary at Gaumont, wrote film scenarios because she had access to a typewriter and became a director because the studio had more cameras than people who knew how to operate them. She later emigrated to the United States and founded her own studio at Fort Lee, New Jersey, at that time the hub of the American film industry. Of the 350 films she directed during her career, La vie du Christ remains one of her best known.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now defines a "feature" as a film over forty minutes in duration. By those terms, most film historians cite Australia's The Story Of The Kelly Gang as the first feature-length film. Released in 1906, The Kelly Gang clocked in at a then-astounding 70 minutes. Written and directed by Charles Tait, the film tells the story of Ned Kelly, an Irish-Australian bushranger who battled British authority and was eventually hanged for his trouble. The film was thought lost until one reel turned up in a Melbourne garbage dump; in 2006, additional footage was discovered in the UK, bringing the restored total to 17 minutes. What's left plays like an extended-length version of The Great Train Robbery—no knock, I assure you.
Europe Takes The Lead It was the Italians, though, who proved most willing to experiment with the long-form film. Italian filmmakers had come late to the party, with the country not producing its first fiction film until 1905. To distinguish their product from the French films that dominated the early marketplace, they focused on subjects with a distinctly Italian flavor, such as the country's recent unification, well-known historical events such as the last days of Pompeii, and notorious figures from Rome's glory days such as Nero and Messalina.
The first of the feature-length Italian films was an adaptation of Dante's epic poem about a man's journey through hell, 1911's L'Inferno. Over three years in the making, L'Inferno was a spectacle in the tradition of Méliès, Segundo de Chomón and Wladyslaw Starewicz, mixing imaginative costumes, set designs and special effects to create unforgettable visual images.
"[F]ilm historians have overemphasised early silent cinema's technical innovations over its imagistic brilliance," the author of Film: Ab Initio wrote recently. "For there are four or five scenes in this film which are as breathtaking as any I have encountered in cinema." (If you haven't checked out Film: Ab Initio, you really should—it's an audacious project, proposing to watch every major film from the beginning of time in chronological order—and I can tell you from my own personal experience that when you watch movies that way, you see things you would have otherwise missed.)
The film was a blockbuster, taking in more than $2 million at the box office, and encouraged the Italians to continue experimenting with the long form. Between 1911 and 1914, when they would make their single greatest contribution to the silent era, Cabiria, Italian studios released a dozen feature-length films, more than any other country during that period.
Throughout the era, directors explored new methods for telling stories on film—Lois Weber's use of split-screen, tracking and extreme close-ups in Suspense, Harold Shaw and Dorothy Shore's successful in-camera effects in The Land Beyond the Sunset, and of course D.W. Griffith's own experiments in The Musketeers of Pig Alley—and as they did, their output began to resemble what we now think of motion pictures. These innovations reached a critical mass in 1913 and seemingly overnight, directors the world over adopted these new camera and editing techniques as the industry-wide standard.
"[T]hat year," film historian David Bordwell has written, "seemed to be when filmmakers in several countries simultaneously seized upon what they had already learned of technique and pushed their knowledge to higher levels of expressivity."
Once directors had solved the matter of how to tell stories, longer, more complex movies began turning up everywhere—Russia, France, Germany, the United States. In fact, as many feature-length films hit theaters in 1913 alone as had been produced in the entire decade that proceeded it—more than fifty in all.
Among these features were films by some of the most important directors of the silent era. Victor Sjöström and Yevgeni Bauer, for example, were pioneers of Sweden and Russia cinema, respectively (I'll write more about them in the future). Both produced films that in later years would probably have been derided as "women's pictures" (or worse, "chick flicks"). Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm is a tragic look at a woman forced to give up her children after her husband's sudden death leaves her destitute. Bauer's Twilight of a Woman's Soul also focuses on a woman, but while she may be an aristocrat, her life is no happier—raped while volunteering at a homeless shelter, she is shunned by her fiance, a Russian prince.
Although neither film is the director's best—Sjöström would go on to direct The Outlaw and His Wife, The Phantom Carriage and The Wind, while Bauer would direct The Dying Swan before his untimely death in 1917—both made effective use of visual storytelling for the first time in their careers.
One of my favorite of the early silent directors, Louis Feuillade, made a big splash in France with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films (each running between fifty and ninety minutes) based on a series of novels about the eponymous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes. Feuillade alone of the great early directors anticipated the chief maladies of the coming century—violence, anxiety, paranoia, alienation—and even this century's scourge, terrorism. His film serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex directly influenced filmmakers as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Throw in the fact that Feuillade's films are extraordinarily entertaining—not just as film history but in a 21st century sense—and he winds up, along with Charlie Chaplin, as my favorite director of the first three decades of film history (1888-1918).
We'll talk more about him when I reach 1915.
The best of the feature-length films released in 1913 was probably Der Student von Prag (a.k.a. A Bargain With Satan, the first noteworthy film to emerge from the fledgling German film industry. Paul Wegener (with an assist behind the camera from Stellan Rye) directed and starred in this adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story about a university student who sells his soul to the devil to win the love of a beautiful woman. On a limited budget Wegener and Rye created one of the first convincing horror films, establishing a tradition that would later give us The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Faust and Metropolis. Rye died in the fighting during World War I, but Wegener went on to direct one of the classics of silent German cinema, Der Golem in 1920, and continued to act and direct until his death in 1948.
The most influential film of 1913, however, was one that didn't even make into the theaters until the following year. Giovanni Pastrone's epic Cabiria was a landmark achievement in style and spectacle, and the first truly great long-form film. The culimination of the long-form movement in Italy, Cabiria took two years to film and boasted mammoth sets and elaborate special effects. Its epic scope influenced Griffith's Intolerance and anticipated the pomp of De Mille's later Bible and history spectacles.
"The film was made with limitless scope and ambition," Roger Ebert wrote for his Great Movies series, "with towering sets and thousands of extras, with stunts that (because they were actually performed by stuntmen) have an impact lost in these days of visual effects."
Set during the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage—a subject of great interest to Italian audiences on the eve of World War I—Cabiria is an epic on a grand scale, tracing the life of young woman from childhood to early adulthood against the backdrop of Rome's struggle to establish an empire of its own. The movie opens with the spectacular eruption of Sicily's Mt. Etna, and boasts a tracking shot of refugees trekking across the face of the erupting volcano that rivals any image previously filmed.
"For Cabiria," wrote Cole Smithey, the self-styled "smartest film critic in the world, "Pastrone pioneered the use of deep-focus filming and the since-ubiquitous 'tracking-shot'—two years before D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation would employ similar techniques."
The movie includes kidnappings, piracy, ritual sacrifices, slave revolts and even Hannibal and his elephants. It also introduced the "Maciste" character—the Herculean hero played here by Bartolomeo Pagano in a star-making performance, and later by such actors as Steve Reeves—who proved so popular in low budget sword-and-sandal films between 1914 and the 1970s.
Even though the finished film wouldn't premiere in theaters until April 1914, word of Pastrone's project leaked out of Italy and directors worldwide scrambled to make their own long-form films.
The Americans At Last According to Turner Classic Movies' series Moguls and Movie Stars, the first American producer to see the value in feature-length films was Adolph Zukor, the self-same Adolph Zukor who started life with $40 and limitless ambition. He believed that movie-makers shouldn't limit themselves to ten-minute shorts and the working class audiences that patronized them, but should instead aim for the same quality, prestige—and paying customers—as the theater productions running on New York's Broadway.
To that end, in 1912 Zukor obtained the distribution rights to Les Amours de la Reine Élisabeth, a 45-minute film about the life of Britain's Queen Elizabeth I. Starring Sarah Bernhardt, the film's success in America allowed Zukor to found his own studio, Famous Players, and commit the company to producing six feature-length pictures a year.
Meanwhile, in 1913, Carl Laemmle a German immigrant who owned a chain of nickelodeons in Chicago, embarked on a feature-length project of his own. Seeking to cash in on the then-current scandal of forced prostitution among the newly-arrived immigrant population of New York City, Traffic In Souls was a sensation upon its release, earning $500,000 on its $25,000 investment and encouraged Laemmle to found Universal Studios.
"[A]bout twenty minutes into Traffic in Souls, [cinematographer Henry Alder] Leach does something extraordinary," writes Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy. "He anticipates action, panning the camera from William Powers standing on the shore to Flora Nason and Vera Hansey, two in a crowd of passengers on a ferry pulling into a dock. It was a planned, choreographed shot, one hat predicted the future of cinematography."
Traffic in Souls is preserved in the National Film Archive. (It was the first film to inspire a "novelization," the practice of turning a film into a book.)
That same year, vaudeville performer Jesse Lasky teamed up with struggling Broadway playwright Cecil B. DeMille to found the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Film Company. Reluctantly bankrolled by Lasky's brother-in-law, Samuel Goldwyn, Lasky and DeMille set out to make a feature-length film version of the stageplay The Squaw Man—an audacious undertaking consider that none of them had ever made a movie before.
The Squaw Man is the story of a British aristocrat who find success in the American west after being falsely accused of embezzlement. Lasky and DeMille insisted on filming on location and headed west to film it. The pair stopped initially in Flagstaff, Arizona, but DeMille envisioned open spaces rather than the mountainous, heavily-forested terrain around Flagstaff, so they journeyed on to Los Angeles where they scouted filming locations and settled on a sleepy village named Hollywood.
Legend has it that DeMille and Lasky set up shop in a barn, but legend neglects to mention that the barn already housed a complete movie studio before they got there.
Nevertheless, The Squaw Man was the first feature filmed in Hollywood. It's reception at the box office encouraged both Lasky and DeMille, with the former eventually merging with Zukor's Famous Players to found Paramount Pictures, while the latter went on to become one of the most successful producer-directors in Hollywood history.
Perhaps the most important of the early American feature films was D.W. Griffith's Judith of Bethulia. Filmed in 1913 but released a year later thanks to a contract dispute between Griffith and his employer, the Biograph Company, Judith is one of the earliest examples of what is known as "classical continuity editing" or "classical Hollywood narrative"—the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story.
Already the most influential director in the world, Griffith's development of classical continuity editing would become the industry standard by 1917 and is the single most common editing style in use by film and television directors today.
The film proved to be pivotal for Griffith, not, however, because it was a financial success. Judith was expensive and Biograph balked at financing additional feature films.
Biograph, wrote Lillian Gish later, "thought that a movie that long would hurt [the audience's] eyes."
Rather than settling for his paymasters' limited artistic vision, Griffith left and joined the Mutual Film Company. There, he directed his second feature-length film, The Avenging Conscience (1914). Not as well known as Judith of Bethulia but perhaps even better, The Avenging Conscience was based on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and is a taut psychological drama involving love, obsession, murder and finally madness. Griffith's technical expertise is on full display here, with parallel compositions used to convey parallel emotions, and an increasingly frantic cutting style that anticipates Eisenstein's use of montage a decade later.
With two feature films under his belt, Griffith was ready to tackle the biggest project of his career, The Birth of a Nation, the most lucrative and most controversial film of the entire silent era.
Finally, I'll mention Mack Sennett and the first feature-length comedy in movie history, Tillie's Punctured Romance. I've previously written at some length about Tillie here, but I would like to point out that the film's enormous box office appeal further underscored the commercial viability of the long form.
Shorts and features would continue to compete with each other on an equal footing until the 1920s when comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd began making feature films—not, ironically, because their short comedies weren't as popular as feature films, quite the opposite actually, but because theater owners paid rental fees based on the length of the film. By the time talkies arrived in theaters in the late 1920s, feature films had thoroughly eclipsed shorts, and would dominate the artistic and commercial landscape for decades to come.
[To read part one of this essay, click here. For part two, here; for part three, here; and for part four (a), click here.]
Early Silent Comedy (continued): Mack Sennett and the Keystone Comedies So far, I've written quite a bit about the Frenchmen who shaped comedy during the first decade of film, the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Max Linder. And then there were those European animators—Émile Cohl, Segundo de Chomón, Wladyslaw Starewicz—whose work was largely comedic in nature.
But what of the Americans? A variety of comedians worked in the United States between 1895 and 1914—Ben Turpin, still remembered for his crossed eyes and brush moustache; John Bunny, middle aged with jowls like a walrus, promptly forgotten with his death from kidney disease in 1915—but it was really Mack Sennett, with his slapstick pie fights and manic chases, who defined the genre for American audiences.
Sennett began his film career at Biograph Studios as one of the regular players in D.W. Griffith's troupe of actors. In the course of directing nearly 500 shorts for Biograph, it's not unusual that Griffith—the greatest director of the era—tried his hand at comedy, but while his dramas and action pictures were deft and groundbreaking, his comedies were leaden and derivative. The fact is, Griffith didn't have much of a sense of humor (he's the bore who corners you at the office party), and his early attempts at comedy, in shorts such as The Little Darling (1909), are painful to watch.
But to his credit, Griffith recognized his limitations and turned to the naturally-funny Sennett, first to write comedy scenarios and then to direct them.
In 1912, Sennett founded Keystone Studios in Los Angeles, California, and began producing comedy shorts, more than thirty in that first year alone. Soon earning the sobriquet "The King of Comedy," Sennett produced more than a thousand films in his career and introduced such comedy acts as the Keystone Kops, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, W.C. Fields and Charley Chase, award-winning actresses Marie Dressler and Gloria Swanson, and a dapper little Englishman named Charlie Chaplin.
His empire was built on barely-controlled chaos and an unshakeable faith in his comedic instincts.
"We have no scenario," he once told Chaplin, explaining his methods, "we get an idea then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy."
And indeed, the emphasis on pie fights, pratfalls and wild chase scenes make the Three Stooges look like Citizen Kane. People get hit in the face with a pie for no reason other than that they have faces and a pie is handy; they fall down for pretty much the same reason—the world's a big place and there's always somewhere new to land. It's all so random, it borders on the surreal.
"Run his movies, forward and backward," David Thomson wrote, "and you may see how little difference there is."
Rob King, in his treatise The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, traces the roots of Sennett's comic sensibilities to the class divisions of the Victorian era—theater and the opera were for the educated and wealthy, vaudeville and burlesque for the working class. Given that early filmmakers came from the immigrant and working class ranks, and had often worked in vaudeville, it should come as no surprise that early film comedy borrowed most directly from vaudeville, burlesque and the British music hall traditions. Indeed, some of these early one-reel comedies are little more than filmed records of skits performed on the local stage.
To this foundation, Sennett would eventually add bathing beauties and sentimental narratives, which King complains "substantially dissolved slapstick's significance as a site for engaging the conflicts and pressures of working-class experience," but which undeniably broadened the commercial appeal of Sennett's comedy—laughs and commerce rather than class warfare being the point.
Slapstick Stars Sennett's first star at his new studio was Mabel Normand, who began her career as a model—she was one of the "Gibson Girls"—before following Sennett from Biograph. At first cast simply for her looks—Chaplin called her the beauty among the beasts—Normand quickly displayed a flair for comedy, and within a couple of years was not only Sennett's most popular performer but a director, writer and producer as well.
Her onscreen character "Mabel" was much like Normand herself, a wild, playful, mischievous free-spirit able—for a while at least—to charm her way out of any difficulty.
"Say anything you like," she told reporters, "but don't say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, the prissy bitch."
She's often credited with throwing the first pie in movie history, in 1913's A Noise From The Deep, but as I wrote here in the essay "Buster Keaton's Pie Recipe," the matter remains an open question. What's not in doubt is that she was greatest comedienne of the silent era.
Normand and Sennett became romantically involved during this period and were engaged to marry—if he wasn't the first director to sleep with his star actress, neither was he the last—but the relationship eventually fell apart when Sennett couldn't keep his hands off another of his discoveries, actress Mae Busch.
Normand's most frequent co-star was Roscoe Arbuckle, better known by the nickname he hated, "Fatty." Legend has it that Arbuckle had abandoned his failing vaudeville career for steady work as a plumber and was rediscovered while fixing a clogged drain at Sennett's house. As the cherub-faced plumber capered up and down a flight of stairs, Sennett saw the contrast between Arbuckle's girth and his nimble footwork as a potential comedy goldmine and signed him to a contract on the spot.
Before the decade was out, Arbuckle would earn a million dollars a year, a record at the time.
Despite his rotund size, Arbuckle was amazingly agile and contrary to what you might expect, Arbuckle's films were not a series of cheap "fat jokes." Instead, he focused on physical comedy, farcical romances and occasional forays into cross-dressing. It was also said that Arbuckle could throw two pies simultaneously—in different directions.
"I've never used my weight to get a laugh," he said. "That is, used my size as the subject for humor. You never saw me stuck in a door-way or stuck in a chair. If you'll analyze my pictures you'll see that they're humorous in themselves, except, of course, that the audience remarks about the agility on account of the weight."
During his career, Arbuckle appeared in film shorts with the three greatest comics of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. This two-reel short, The Cook made with Buster Keaton in 1918, shows off Arbuckle's dexterity in front of the camera and his comic sensibilities behind it.
"Next to Chaplin," Buster Keaton said in 1964, "[Arbuckle] was considered the best comedy director in pictures."
Still, as popular as Normand and Arbuckle were, the real stars of Sennett's films were a bumbling collection of clowns in police uniforms, forever known, in association with the studio that employed them, as the Keystone Kops. It seemed that every Sennett picture ended with the Kops riding to the rescue—or more accurately, failing to ride to the rescue while raising the level of chaos to a crescendo. In fact, the high-button collars and domed helmets they wore became so associated with incompetence and buffoonery that police forces the world over redesigned their uniforms.
The Kops made their first appearance in The Bangville Police, a one-reel short produced in 1913. Starring Mabel Normand, it's typical of the style Mack Sennett fostered at Keystone Studios.
Those of you have been following this blog closely may recognize The Bangville Police as a spoof of D.W. Griffith's short thriller An Unseen Enemy, with Normand in the Lillian Gish role and the Keystone Kops subbing for Elmer Booth. Believe it or not, it's one of the more plot-heavy shorts Sennett ever produced.
"Here's something you want to bear in mind," said Arbuckle, who remained faithful to Sennett's style even after leaving his employ, "that the average mind of the motion picture audience is twelve years old. It's a twelve-year-old mind that you're entertaining." (To which Buster Keaton, his co-star at the time, replied, "Roscoe, something tells me that those who continue to make pictures for twelve-year-old minds ain't going to be with us long.")
The Little Tramp In 1914, with Keystone Studios already synonymous with great comedy in the minds of American moviegoers, Sennett made the single greatest find of his career.
Born in London in 1889 and growing up like an urchin in a Dickens novel, Charles Chaplin was touring the United States with Fred Karno and his "army" of comedians that included Stan Laurel and Chaplin's brother Sydney, when Sennett saw him on stage and signed him to a film contract.
Within a year, Chaplin was the most popular film actor in the world and the most important director of comedy, well, ever. Eventually, he would also write, produce, edit and score his own movies, and along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, would found United Artists.
As immense as Chaplin's talent was, however, very little of it showed up on screen in his debut, Making A Living (February 2, 1914). His next film, Kid Auto Races At Venice (made five days later), and the ones that immediately followed it, were no better. Many of them are available at the Internet Movie Database and you can see for yourself that Chaplin clearly had no idea how to play to the camera—mostly he smiled a lot and stood around—and Sennett was so disappointed in the results, he was going to fire the English actor until Mabel Normand convinced him otherwise.
Still, it was while filming the otherwise forgettable Kid Auto that Chaplin stumbled upon an idea for what would become the most memorable character of the entire silent era.
"[O]n the way to the wardrobe," he wrote in his autobiography, "I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born."
Chaplin exaggerates—the Tramp's debut here may have been the most inauspicious of a legendary character in movie history—but he built on the idea over the course of several shorts and in later years rarely played anything else.
The turning point in Chaplin's stint at Keystone came during the filming of his eleventh short, Mabel At The Wheel. Directed by Normand herself, she and Chaplin had a terrific argument about a gag he had worked out.
"We were on location in the suburbs of Los Angeles and in one scene Mabel wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so that the villain's car would skid over it. I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can't come out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: 'We have no time! We have no time! Do what you're told.'
"That was enough. I could not take it—and from such a pretty girl. 'I'm sorry, Miss Normand. I will not do what I'm told. I don't think you are competent to tell me about what to do.'"
Normand won the argument, but Chaplin won the war. Putting his money where his mouth was—in the form of his life savings as a surety that the resulting film would be worth releasing—Chaplin made his directing debut with his very next film, Twenty Minutes Of Love (April 20, 1914). The film was a success and Chaplin rarely thereafter worked for anyone but himself. (You can see the best of his Keystone efforts, The Rounders, here.)
While at Keystone, Chaplin played the usual assortment of drunks, mashers and incompetent waiters—by then already stock film characters—but he had, especially when directing himself, a sense of rhythm that turned comedy into a dance, and a gift for finding an unexpected twist in any comedic situation, subverting expectations, delaying or denying the expected payoff and giving us something we would have never thought of instead.
Indeed, seeing Chaplin in the context of his times, it's clear to me now he was to film comedy what D.W. Griffith was to film drama, establishing the rules and raising the bar. Even when he's just doing variations on Mack Sennett's everybody-fall-down brand of comedy, the internal logic of the characters' actions creates a sense of anticipation that makes the payoff so much more satisfying than one based on pure surprise and absurdity.
"That Chaplin exploded the boundaries of film comedy with each successive phase in his career," Rick Levinson wrote in Ranking the Silent Comedians, "much like Picasso exploded the boundaries of art with each successive phase of his career, is either known too well or too often taken for granted. You have to have a sense of what film comedy was like before, during and after Chaplin's career to get an inkling of the immense impact he made on 20th century culture."
This is not just a case of pretending to see something in retrospect that no one saw at the time. Audiences immediately recognized that Chaplin was something special and during the silent era, only his future business partners, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, would rival him in terms of box office appeal.
I've written at length about Chaplin here, here and here. We'll return to his story many times before I'm finished with the silent era.
Tillie's Punctured Romance: The First Feature-Length Film Comedy In mid-1914, Sennett began production on the most ambitious project of his career, history's first ever feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance. The project was risky—feature-length films were a relatively new phenomenon, especially in the United States, and the jury wasn't in yet on on whether an audience would sit still that long—and Tillie's cost of $50,000 was fifty times the budget for a typical comedy short.
Sennett loosely based his story—about a naive country girl seduced for her money—on a Broadway musical, Tillie's Nightmare, which had run for 77 performances in 1910. In the title role, Sennett recruited Broadway veteran Marie Dressler in what would be her film debut. She had a face like a bulldog, with a lantern jaw, bulbous nose, and heavy bags under deep-set eyes, and her pear-shaped body sagged like a field of potatoes had crawled into a burlap sack. But Buster Keaton called her "the greatest character comedienne I ever saw" and she was a star.
It didn't hurt that she had pointed Sennett out to D.W. Griffith back when the former was still a struggling young actor.
To play the part of the villain, Sennett cast Charlie Chaplin, one of the few people who could get laughs from such an unsympathetic role. Other than cameos, this was the last film Chaplin starred in that he did not also direct. For the part of Chaplin's mistress, Sennett chose Mabel Normand, then rounded out the cast with comedy veterans Mack Swain, Charles Bennett, Charley Chase and Chester Conklin. (Milton Berle later claimed to have played the part of the six-year-old newspaper boy, but no studio records exist to confirm his assertion.)
The plot, what there is of it, is largely episodic—the city cad seduces Tillie for a small wad of cash her father keeps in the house, later abandons her in the city to return to his mistress, finds Tillie again working as a waitress when he reads that her rich uncle has died and left her a fortune, then tries to juggle the affections of the two women long enough to rob Tillie once more—and if you want to know what it's like to watch a half dozen Keystone comedies in quick succession, look no further than Tillie.
The result is repetitive and often inane, but also undeniably funny in stretches thanks to the performances of its leads. Chaplin was one of the most charming actors of the silent era, and he turns what could have been a misogynistic creep into a naughty imp, driven as much by an impulse to mayhem as greed. And Dressler deftly keeps the action from drifting into the pathos of heartbreak and humiliation. She's twice Chaplin's size and she yanks him around like a toddler with a rag doll. Despite the scam he's running, it's Chaplin who receives all the punishment, and after a while, the movie mostly began to remind me of that O. Henry story where the kidnappers pay the parents to take their son back. Dressler's Tillie is unflappable and clearly having fun despite her suspicion that Chaplin is just in it for the money. She's going to squeeze every bit of living—and life—out of him before the deal is done.
Tillie premiered in November 1914 and its reception at the box office fully justified Sennett's faith in the full-length form. Surprisingly, though, Sennett didn't follow up with another feature until 1918's Mickey, which starred Mabel Normand and was produced by her and Sennett at her own film company.
Decline and Fall Sennett may have been a great director but he wasn't a great businessman. In 1915, Chaplin asked for a raise to a $1000 a week, and even though the Tramp's films were grossing a hundred times that at the box office, Sennett turned him down. It was the first of many ruinous business decisions. His one-year contract at Keystone completed, Chaplin left for Essanay where he received $1,250 a week, a $10,000 bonus and more creative control.
More talent, in search of money, artistic freedom or both, would walk out the door as the decade progressed. Sennett truly believed he could produce comedy the way Henry Ford produced automobiles, on a factory assembly line, and that the actors were as interchangeable as widgets. He was able to plug the gap for a while—he turned up Gloria Swanson and Harry Langdon—but he couldn't keep them either and eventually the loss of such talent took its toll.
"The minute you take Ford Sterling, Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler away from Sennett," Keaton said later, "you don't replace those people. I know Sennett didn't. He couldn't find them."
In 1917, Sennett sold his interest in Keystone and formed the Mack Sennett Comedies Corporation. His distribution deal with Pathé was a disaster: instead of spacing out the release of Sennett's product, Pathé tended to bunch them all together so that Sennett wound up competing with himself. Adding to his woes was genuine competition in the form of producers Hal Roach and Joseph Schenck and such acts as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton, not to mention such talents as Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle that Sennett had let slip through his grasp.
Despite winning an Oscar in 1932 for his short comedy Wresting Swordfish, Sennett went bankrupt. He made his last film in 1935. Much of his film catalog was lost when Warner Brothers destroyed the original negatives to make room in its storage facilities.
As hard as Sennett fell, though, his two biggest stars fell even harder.
Arbuckle's fate you're probably aware of. In 1921, still at the height of his fame, he and friends director Lowell Sherman and cameraman Fred Fischbach checked into a hotel in San Francisco and threw a wild party. By the time it was over, actress Virginia Rappe was dead. Evidence of what transpired was scant but accusations were plentiful, and with newspapers to be sold and careers at stake, Arbuckle wound up on trial for manslaughter.
After two hung juries, Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, a just verdict, historians now agree. The damage, however, had been done. Egged on by the Hearst newspaper chain, Arbuckle's former fans turned on him, and Hollywood, never a place to stick to unprofitable principles, quickly caved to the pressure. Arbuckle was blacklisted and never acted again.
Thanks to Buster Keaton's generosity, he did earn a modest living as a director under the pseudonym "Will Goodrich", and, ironically enough, directed Marion Davies—William Randolph Hearst's mistress—in the 1927 comedy The Red Mill.
Arbuckle died of a heart attack in 1933 at the age of forty-six.
Mabel Normand fared little better, and like Arbuckle, she too became tabloid fodder. In 1922, her name was linked to the never-solved murder of director William Desmond Taylor—she had left his home minutes before he was shot—and when the subsequent investigation made public her long-term addictions to cocaine and alcohol, the papers savaged her. In 1923, she returned to Sennett and attempted a comeback in what is now, thanks to the vagaries of film preservation, her best-known movie, The Extra Girl, but the public was no longer interested.
Normand died of tuberculosis in 1930. She was thirty-four years old.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
"[O]n the way to the wardrobe," he wrote in his autobiography, "I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born."
"We were on location in the suburbs of Los Angeles and in one scene Mabel wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so that the villain's car would skid over it. I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can't come out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: 'We have no time! We have no time! Do what you're told.'
Normand won the argument, but Chaplin won the war. Putting his money where his mouth was—in the form of his life savings as a surety that the resulting film would be worth releasing—Chaplin made his directing debut with his very next film, Twenty Minutes Of Love (April 20, 1914). The film was a success and Chaplin rarely thereafter worked for anyone but himself. (You can see the best of his Keystone efforts, The Rounders, here.)
Indeed, seeing Chaplin in the context of his times, it's clear to me now he was to film comedy what D.W. Griffith was to film drama, establishing the rules and raising the bar. Even when he's just doing variations on Mack Sennett's everybody-fall-down brand of comedy, the internal logic of the characters' actions creates a sense of anticipation that makes the payoff so much more satisfying than one based on pure surprise and absurdity.
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