100 Years Of The Tramp

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.

Not Appearing In This Film: The Silent Movie Career Of Carole Lombard—Sort Of

In honor of Carole Lombard's 103rd birthday today, Carole & Co. is hosting the "Carole-tennial+3 blogathon." This is my meager contribution.

I'll be honest with you. When I signed up to write about Carole Lombard's career in silent movies—she made 36 between 1921 and 1929—I'd hoped to pass along to you a sense of a star in the making, a talent in training, that sort of thing. I figured I'd write something about how when we think of the transition from silent films to talkies, we focus on the careers that were destroyed—John Gilbert's, for example—but that there were also actors whose careers took off once the public could hear them speak (William Powell, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper). And then I'd slot Carole Lombard into that list and go from there.

But after watching all of what little of her silent work is available, what I came away with instead was both a sense of frustration at the abysmal state of film preservation in this country and a wonder that Carole Lombard had a film career at all.

Born in Indiana as Jane Peters, Carole Lombard moved to Los Angeles with her mother at the age of eight when her parents divorced. In 1921, Alan Dwan (who would later direct Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood and John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima) spotted her playing baseball and cast her on the spot as a tomboy in A Perfect Crime. She was twelve years old.

The role seems in retrospect a presciently appropriate one—although she was one of the most beautiful actresses of her generation, Lombard was at heart a boisterous, small-town tomboy who swore like a sailor, and preferred duck shooting and fly fishing to fancy clothes and big parties.

"I can't imagine a duller fate," she once said, "than being the best dressed woman in reality. When I want to do something I don’t pause to contemplate whether I’m exquisitely gowned. I want to live, not pose!"

Lombard wouldn't appear in another film until 1924, when she signed a contract with the Fox Film Corporation where she languished in uncredited bit parts in forgettable movies. Few of these efforts survive and those that do don't tell us much of anything about Lombard's early career.

I watched her three surviving films from this period—Dick Turpin, The Plastic Age and the classic Ben-Hur—and I can tell you, she is completely invisible in all of them, playing roles that don't even rise to the level of a bit part. She was literally just a figure moving around in the deep background, less significant to the plot than a potted plant or a picture on a wall.

In fact, I must have blinked when she played these blink-and- you'll-miss-it parts, because despite my best efforts, I missed her in all of them. (Indeed, some Lombard fanatics have decided she's not even in Ben-Hur, based both on the absence of any still photos of her in the movie and her own assertion that she wasn't in it. You can't prove it by me one way or the other.)

In 1926, the eighteen year old Lombard was involved in an automobile accident that required multiple surgeries and left a permanent scar running from her nose to her left cheek. Fox canceled her contract, leaving her out of work and her career in jeopardy.

In desperation, she joined Mack Sennett's stable of "bathing beauties" that graced his low-budget comedies. Although by 1926 Sennett's career as the "King of Comedy" was in decline—he was notoriously cheap and stubbornly devoted to a style of comedy that had been out of date for a decade—he still had the unparalleled eye for talent that had led to his discovery of Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson, and many others.

In the course of making nineteen two-reel shorts for the old master, Lombard learned to play comedy, a skill that would later define her. Potential disaster had turned out to be divine providence.

Although by and large these films survive, most are squirreled away in various archives and remain unseen by the public. Of course, we here at the Monkey tracked down what we could and this is what we learned:

Lombard tended to play athletic coeds who preferred—in the words of one title card—"Romeos, Roadsters and Rollerskates" to studying, serving in such films as The Campus Vamp and Matchmaking Mama as a distinct contrast to the good girl played by Sally Eilers, who at the time seemed destined to be the much bigger star. Top-billed in these comedies was usually Daphne Pollard, a 4-foot 9-inch, pear-shaped comedienne with a 6-foot personality who got laughs playing an authority figure while staring up at her younger charges.

Lombard features most prominently in Run, Girl, Run, in which she plays a "star athlete who once ran a mile in almost nothing—and was nearly expelled for it," while Pollard plays her oddly asexual coach who stops at nothing to keep her charge away from boys. The comedy mostly turns on coded references to lesbianism—homosexuality was almost always treated as a punchline in early Hollywood—with Pollard slipping into Lombard's bed to keep an eye on her and later kissing her on the lips when she wins a track meet (and then to prove how truly exciting the win is, Pollard kisses a boy, too).

I'll point out one other brief appearance Lombard made in silent films—Mary Pickford's My Best Girl, which I wrote about at length here and here—and then finish by saying that at this stage of her career, Lombard was just one of a parade of pretty girls who passed through Hollywood, nothing special. Without the benefit of her breathless voice, the stark contrast between her refined beauty and her raw, unaffected personality was largely lost, and it was only with the coming of sound that she blossomed into a star.

Even then, it's clear from her early sound films that Hollywood didn't have a clue what to do with her. Directors liked her personally, and I think they put her in movies because they liked having her around. But when it came time to cast her, they didn't think to offer her anything other than the role of a generically beautiful woman. Granted, she was never going to play the girl next door type—unaffected isn't the same as innocent—but the fact is, while Carole Lombard was a beautiful women, she never really figured how to play one on screen. She had no sense of entitlement, none of the slack indolence or rapaciousness, that was required to play the parts she was offered.

It was Howard Hawks who first had the wit to see that a beautiful woman who didn't mind making a fool of herself on camera was a rare commodity, and during the dark, bleak days of the Great Depression, a highly-marketable one. Lombard's breakthrough didn't come until 1934 when he cast her in Twentieth Century, the first of four classic comedies (including My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred and To Be Or Not To Be) that today largely define her screen appeal.

The Silent Oscars: 1917—Part Three

(To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, click here.)

The Chaplin Mutuals
"I classify Chaplin as the greatest motion picture comedian of all time."—Buster Keaton, in a 1960 interview with Herbert Feinstein

I figure it unlikely that anything I write here will convince you to see Charlie Chaplin's Mutual Comedies—not that that will stop me from posting a couple of thousand words, of course; nothing can—so how about a testimonial from Chaplin's only real challenger for the title of greatest actor-director of the silent era (and maybe all time), Buster Keaton:

"I was in love with him, same as everybody else," he said, and on another occasion added, "[Chaplin] absolutely revolutionized the direction of pictures."

Now if that doesn't make you want to stop wasting your life on indefensible time sucks like this blog and click here to watch some of the best comedies of the silent era, nothing will. Two Three thousand words, here we come.

After his apprenticeship with Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios in 1914 (read about that here), Chaplin signed a one-year deal with Essanay Studios where he directed fourteen shorts, including such films as The Tramp and Burlesque On Carmen. By the end of that year, Chaplin was the most famous entertainer in the world, and the most influential. As I wrote in an earlier essay, "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."

After Chaplin's contract at Essanay expired, he signed with the Mutual Film Corporation to direct and star in a dozen two-reel comedies—known colloquially as "the Chaplin Mutuals"—for the then-unheard of sum of $670,000, the most any entertainer had been paid in history. "Next to the war in Europe," a Mutual publicist wrote, "Chaplin is the most expensive item in contemporaneous history." The deal with Mutual afforded Chaplin two luxuries he'd never had before as a director—time and money—and he took full advantage of the opportunity, not only re-shooting sequences that didn't match his vision, but also experimenting with the comedic form itself.

In support of this new venture, Chaplin gathered around him a team of familiar faces, recruiting a couple of friends from his days with the British music hall troupe that had also included Stan Laurel and Chaplin's brother Sydney. At 6'5" and 300 pounds, Eric Campbell was the most prominent of Chaplin's supporting players; a full foot taller and 175 pounds heavier than Chaplin, he made a good comic foil for the Tramp, and wound up playing his nemesis in eleven of the twelve Mutuals.

And wearing the ridiculously fake brush moustache known as a soup strainer was Albert Austin who performed mostly as the straight man on the receiving end of the Tramp's more destructive antics. (You can see Austin without his trademark facial hair in Mary Pickford's 1920 feature, Suds.)

As his leading lady, Chaplin brought Edna Purviance with him from Essanay. Purviance (Purr-VYE-ance) had been working as a stenographer in San Francisco when she caught Chaplin's eye, who, either as a trite come-on or because he could more easily mold the novice actress to fit his ideas of comedy, asked her if she would like to be in pictures. "I laughed at the idea," she said later, "but agreed to try it."

Although their romantic relationship was brief, Purviance continued to play Chaplin's leading lady for nine years, appearing in approximately forty films (the exact number is in dispute), more than any other actress.

Chaplin began his career at Mutual in the spring of 1916 with a couple of formula comedies, The Floorwalker and The Fireman. In the former, the Tramp wanders into a department store and wreaks havoc—knocking over displays, playing hide and seek with detectives, trashing the wares—before trading places with a look-alike store manager (future director Lloyd Bacon) who unbeknownst to the Tramp has just embezzled the payroll. In the latter, Chaplin plays the world's laziest firefighter—the kind of guy who stuffs a rag in the alarm bell to keep it from ringing—but comes to the rescue of a pretty girl (Purviance) when a fire breaks out.

Each film is a loose collection of well-polished comic set-ups and payoffs, distinguishable from Chaplin's work at Keystone and Essanay only be the quality of their gags. Nothing wrong with that—they're damn funny—but the stories are nothing more than clotheslines to hang jokes on, and the actors little more than props whose motivations change from scene to scene depending on the needs of the gag at hand.

Chaplin's third film at Mutual, The Vagabond, starts with a typical slapstick set-up—the Tramp as traveling musician busking in a bar for handouts—but quickly turns into the stuff of Victorian melodrama with the story of a wealthy middle aged woman haunted by the memory of a kidnapped child converging in a series of coincidences worthy of Charles Dickens with the story of young woman (Purviance) held captive by a band of gypsies. Into that mix, Chaplin introduced several themes that would characterize his work forever after—the separation of parent from child, artistic insecurity, noble self-sacrifice, and especially the exquisite pain of unrequited love.

The attempt to wed slapstick to the dramatic form made The Vagabond Chaplin's most ambitious film to date, but result was the most disappointing. There's nothing wrong with sentimentality per se—The Kid, for example, was one of the era's best films—and viewed objectively, from the outside looking in, the Tramp's white knight complex can be hilarious (see, e.g., The Pawnshop, where an old con's tale leaves Chaplin sobbing), but here the situation and its solution feel utterly contrived, and because we have no emotional investment in the characters, unsatisfying.

Chaplin the filmmaker only fitfully grasped that the problem with Chaplin the man's tendency to fall in love with damsels in distress is that the ones chronically in need are beyond help and the rest get better and move on, which suggests that a compulsion to rescue them is less about helping others and more about courting rejection and self-pity. When, as in The Vagabond, the filmmaker indulges the man's compulsion simply as the default mode for a situation he hasn't fully worked out, the result is not moving but mawkish, and I imagine that those who complain that Chaplin is too sentimental for their tastes are really saying he too often fails to establish an emotional connection to the characters that would justify the Tramp's (and our) tears.

Chaplin's relatively rare failure with The Vagabond underscores just how good Edna Purviance usually was at embodying the Victorian ideal of womanhood, a thankless role that required her to charm not only the Tramp but the audience as well. She began her career as little more than a pretty ornament whose job was to stand still while Chaplin danced around her, but during the Mutual years, Purviance developed a personality and comic timing of her own.

Look at her in this pair of stills from The Immigrant, standing in the rain as the Tramp indirectly proposes marriage by coaxing her into an office to buy a license. She was a lovely, quiet counterbalance to Chaplin's manic energy, who even though she serves as the object of the Tramp's affections for neurotic reasons of his own, becomes the object of our affections as well. Other than Paulette Goddard, Purviance was the only one of Chaplin's leading ladies able to transcend the limitations of the plot's requirements to become more than a cipher, and I suspect that's why Chaplin the filmmaker continued to cast her long after Chaplin the man's romantic ardor had cooled. Perhaps that's why Edna is one of the few supporting players from the silent era who continues to hold a fan base of her own.

Chaplin returned to form with his next film, One A.M., which combined elements from a pair of Max Linder "drunk comedies," First Cigar and Max Takes Tonics, to create a one-man tour de force that plays a little like a wager that a single joke—a drunk fumbling his way up a flight of stairs to bed—can work for twenty uninterrupted minutes.

Chaplin plays variations on the gag the way a jazz virtuoso plays variations on a theme, building simple movements into complex ones, anticipating some payoffs, denying others, going off in unexpected directions, finally returning to the beginning and starting something new.

As in most of his films, the camerawork is spare, the editing unobtrusive, with both focused on featuring the best available performance rather than solving technical problems such as continuity or matching edits. Like Fred Astaire, who insisted his dances be filmed in an uninterrupted take with an angle wide and long enough to show the performance from head to toe, Chaplin mostly used long shots and uninterrupted takes to show his audience that the dance-like rhythm of his intricate physical gags are not cheats conjured up in the editing room, but reflect his real abilities. Anyway, I'm no fan of fancy camerawork that exists only to prove the director wasn't napping during that day's lecture at film school (click here for David Bordwell's recent essay demonstrating how Paul Thomas Anderson directs the viewer's attention in There Will Be Blood without moving the camera at all), and though Chaplin's style remained primitive compared to his contemporaries, it was a conscious choice with a specific payoff in mind.

Chaplin finished out 1916 with four films—The Count, The Pawnshop, Behind The Screen and The Rink—that returned to familiar formulas, but the comedy was well thought out, as funny as anything he had ever done. Of the four, I'd rate The Pawnshop and especially Behind The Screen the most highly. In the former watch particularly for the Tramp's efforts to evaluate the alarm clock Albert Austin has brought into the shop to pawn—do I need to tell you how things work out for Austin and the clock?

The latter, the story of a much put-upon worker bee (Chaplin) in a studio full of lazy, incompetent bosses, was aimed squarely at Mack Sennett who was happy to spend the millions Chaplin generated for Keystone Studios while paying his star a pittance ($125 a week with a $25 bonus for each film he directed). Chaplin had mined a similar vein at Essanay with His First Job, also about the Tramp taking a job at a movie studio, but the barbs here are sharper, the comedy funnier.

Chaplin opened 1917 with one of the most beloved comedies of his career, Easy Street. Set in the slums of New York, the Tramp wanders into a Salvation Army style mission and falls instantly in love with the pianist (Edna Purviance, of course). Determined to redeem himself in her eyes, the Tramp volunteers for a job as a policeman with a beat on the notorious Easy Street (which is anything but). The Tramp's battles with the local bully—Campbell, who is a foot taller and a foot wider than Chaplin—provides the bulk of the comedy.

Like any other artist, Chaplin was at his best when he both had something to say and sublimated that message into a universal form, in this case translating his personal experience into a comedy accessible to a wide audience. The setting of Easy Street is particularly harsh, populated with drug addicts, rapists, wife beaters, and hungry children, the sort of neighborhood Chaplin himself grew up in as the son of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother, yet the finished film is pure laughs and I never feel like Chaplin is lecturing or hectoring us.

He would return to this setting in 1921 for his first feature-length film, The Kid.

Typical of the Mutual era, Chaplin followed the personal with the formulaic, this time with The Cure, another drunk act reminiscent of One A.M. except this time with a sanitarium full of rich hypochondriacs instead of furniture to trip over. Again, Chaplin takes simple jokes, such as a man caught in a revolving door, and stretches them to unbelievable lengths, repeating them, adding new elements, changing payoffs. In one scene, Chaplin—here playing a rich alcoholic rather than the Tramp—attempts to drink from the health-giving spring that is the facility's main attraction, yet always winds up filling up his hat instead. Later, though, after the stash of booze he's smuggled in to tide him over during rehab winds up in the well, he of course doesn't spill a drop.

The film's structure is loose, and the basic plot is a staple of Chaplin's comedy dating back at least to The Rounders in 1914, but with time to work through his ideas, the individual pieces are polished gems.

Chaplin's next film, The Immigrant, his eleventh at Mutual, is not the funniest, but I would argue it was the most important—maybe the single most important development in movie comedy from any source to that time.

The Immigrant is the story of the Tramp's journey from Europe to America, starting in medias res on board an overcrowded ship and ending on the streets of New York. In the twenty minutes in between, Chaplin better captured the immigrant experience than all the "serious" films before or since, and in doing so succeeded at last in wedding the slapstick form to a dramatic subject.

In a short chock full of comedy, Chaplin managed to show the hardship's immigrants faced as they tried to reach America—intolerable shipboard conditions including overcrowding, theft, execrable food, illness; the humiliation of being herded like cattle through Ellis Island; and finally, after landing in New York, the linguistic, economic and cultural hurdles, as well as nativist hostility, involved in adapting to every day life in a foreign country, demonstrated in this case through an act as simple as ordering dinner in a restaurant.

Yet Chaplin also captures the hope and promise that America at that time represented to millions worldwide. The scene of hopeful passengers crowding the deck to watch in silence as the ship sails past the Statue of Liberty is justly one of the most famous of the silent era. And the giddiness with which the Tramp courts the Girl (Purviance) is a perfect expression of the indomitable human will to survive.

The Immigrant underscores the source of the Tramp's lasting appeal—the ability to handle even the most difficult situation with aplomb, a skill his audience no doubt envied as they met their daily suffering. As I once wrote in describing the most famous scene of Chaplin's 1925 triumph, The Gold Rush, "Oh, to relish the taste of the boot you've boiled for your Thanksgiving dinner the way the Tramp did—there's Chaplin appeal reduced to a single scene."

If he wasn't already, Chaplin's Tramp was from this point forward identified with those first-generation immigrants then making up more than ten percent of America's population, as well as with those abroad who yearned to breathe free.

"The Immigrant," Chaplin said years later, "touched me more than any other film I made."

We take for granted now that film comedy can have a serious point to make, ala Dr. Strangelove or The Apartment, but that idea was still radical in an era when, as Roscoe Arbuckle explained to Buster Keaton while making their first film together, comedy was aimed at twelve year olds. The notion that comedy could offer up more than laughs, could have a point of view, could, in fact, make a point, comes largely from Chaplin.

The Immigrant is preserved in the National Film Registry.

Chaplin finished his contract at Mutual with a crowd-pleasing throwback to his earlier comedies. The Adventurer is the story of an escaped convict (Chaplin) who worms his way into the affections of a high society debutante (Purviance) only to discover that her dad is the judge who sent him up. Lowlifes wreaking havoc with the carefully-ordered lives of the aristocracy was a staple of slapstick comedy almost from the origins of film itself, and would later become the meat of such acts as the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. In that sense, The Adventurer isn't particularly original; it is funny, though, one of the best of the bunch, and with it, Chaplin left Mutual giving his employers and his audience their money's worth.

(The Adventurer proved to be Eric Campbell's last film; he was killed in an automobile accident later that year. Edna Purviance, Albert Austin and cinematographer Rollie Totheroh, however, all followed Chaplin to his next studio.)

After Mutual, Chaplin scored his first million dollar payday, signing with First National, a association of independent theater owners seeking a cut of the lucrative film distribution pie. Under the terms of the contract, Chaplin was to direct eight two-reel comedies, but the twenty minute format could not longer satisfy his artistic ambitions. Before his deal with First National was done, Chaplin had directed, among other things, his first feature length film, The Kid, as well as the four-reel war comedy, Shoulder Arms.

In 1919, Chaplin would co-found his own distribution company, United Artists, teaming up with three of the greatest names of the silent era, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith.

Despite reaching ever more dizzying heights of fame, fortune and artistic achievement, Chaplin later confessed his years at Mutual were the happiest of his life. "I was light and unencumbered," he wrote, "twenty-seven years old, with fabulous prospects and a friendly, glamorous world before me."

Years later, Chaplin's son Sydney found himself at the Silent Movie Theater in Hollywood enjoying a revival of Chaplin's Mutuals only to be out-laughed by an elderly gentleman a few rows behind him. Turning to investigate he discovered "[i]t was my father who was laughing the loudest! Tears were rolling down his cheeks from laughing so hard and he had to wipe his eyes with his handkerchief."

"Perhaps," wrote Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance, "[Chaplin] had great fondness for the Mutuals simply for the same reason that generations of audiences have as well—because of the sheer joy, comic inventiveness, and hilarity of this extraordinary series of films."

[To continue on to part four, click here.]

Behind The Screen (1916)

While I'm working through the films of 1916 in preparation for my next Silent Oscars essay, here's one of the short comedies Charlie Chaplin made that year while working at Mutual. In Behind The Screen, Chaplin plays a stagehand at a film studio, a story inspired by his experiences working for Mack Sennett.

This particular print is rather beat up, but it's available free through the courtesy of the Internet Movie Database.

The Silent Oscars: 1906-1914—Part Four (b)

[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."

While working at Keystone Studios, Arbuckle teamed up with Mabel Normand for more than forty films, comedies with titles such as Mabel's New Hero, Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day and Mabel and Fatty's Married Life. Arbuckle directed nineteen of these shorts himself while Normand helmed two.

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.

[To continue to Part Five, click here.]