Silent comedies may be a revered part of film culture but they're rarely easy to see, being sparse on video and even sparser in screening rooms. Of course, there's no shortage of Chaplin and Keaton but the numerous other comedians no matter how famous they might have been are now missing or at best packed into choppy compilations. This situation is starting to change with three releases from Kino Video in a series called Slapstick Symposium, a follow-up to their five-disc
Slapstick Encyclopedia. The new releases each focus on a particular performer--Stan Laurel, Harold Lloyd and Charley Chase--and will be welcomed by more than just historians (with one exception). The discs feature the films in often suprisingly crisp condition mastered at the correct speeds. As usual with Kino the on-screen menus should be better designed and there's little in the way of background notes but such minor issues shouldn¿t prevent anybody from seeing these.
Even if your previous experience with silent comedies is maybe only a Chaplin short or two they won't feel like an alien form for the simple reason that so much of the form, style and content fed into animated shorts. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tom & Jerry and a host of others are in some sense just silent comedians distilled and decanted into more compact and colorful shorts. There's the same one-conflict setup, the same string-of-gags structure, the same parodies of pop culture, a similar use of recurring icons (garden rakes that smack faces, smelly cheese, plugged waterhoses, falling anvils). Even much of the body language and facial expressions of silent comics survived in the blatantly physical humor of cartoons. (Not to mention that both silent comics and cartoon characters inhabit worlds where being shot produces only mild stings.)
The most popular comedian of his day is featured in
The Harold Lloyd Collection. His long-term reputation hasn't fared as well as Chaplin and Keaton, at least partly because he kept rights to his work tightly under control but also because the films haven't fit critical trends as well. The Lloyd disc collects the feature
Grandma's Boy (1922) along with seven shorts with titles such as
Are Crooks Dishonest? (1918),
His Royal Slyness (1920) and
Bumping into Broadway (1919). All show Lloyd's well-meaning, bespectacled Everyman as he copes with a variety of events or obstacles. In
Just Neighbors (1919) a peaceful friendship with the couple next door escalates to near-chaos through events involving dogs, chickens, waterhoses and wayward children.
I Do (1921) has him coping with bratty children while trying to hide bootleg liquor (!). The latter is also interesting on a formal level for the key role sound plays in the story though of course it couldn't be presented directly in a silent film. So much of the humor comes from Lloyd's reactions, often entirely reasonable that create unreasonable results. (Many more of Lloyd's films are expected to appear on DVD soon in authorized and remastered transfers.)
The Charley Chase Collection shows another popular comedian whose name isn't as familiar today, though from the evidence here it's hard to imagine the reasons. His debonair appearance was offset by a willingness to act against it such as, for instance, in
Crazy Like a Fox playing a rich boy trying to get out of an arranged marriage by pretending to be bonkers. That's one of six shorts on this disc, all directed by Oscar®-winner Leo McCarey (
The Awful Truth,
Duck Soup). In some shorts from 1926 you can see McCarey somewhat bluntly filming what almost looks like a vaudeville skit (
Mum's the Word) but then another from that same year (
Long Fliv the King) shows an entirely cinematic grasp. This last one in particular is a minor masterpiece. Through a convoluted but quickly paced series of events Chase ends up as the king of some tiny European country like you might find in an operetta where the second-in-command would rather be king himself. What might be routine gags are constantly presented in fresh ways. A duel, for instance, where the second-in-command quickly dispatches three opponents works because it's played out entirely with the camera on Chase and his valet's face. Watch for another hilarious gag with a sword that done bluntly (but let's not spoil it) would be barely amusing but is masterfully timed in such a way to mislead audience expectations. Chase's valet in this film is played by the prolific Max Davidson who has a couple of mild but still unfortunate jabs at supposed Jewish greed but otherwise nearly steals the film from Chase.
Thanks to Stan Laurel's partnership with Oliver Hardy he's stayed a familiar name over the years. But he had quite a career before that pairing and you can sample it on
The Stan Laurel Collection, a two-disc set with 17 solo shorts. This includes parodies of familiar genres (Westerns, detective stories, a Russian army "epic") as well as the usual conflict 'n struggle shorts. Some like
Roughest Africa (1923) have a fairly tossed-together feel, looking like it was created from script to editing in one day on the backlot. The same year's
Oranges and Lemons is a more familiar example of physical slapstick as Laurel negotiates citrus-processing machinery, ladders and overly enthusiastic employees. It also shows a surprising amount of playing to the audience, possibly due to Laurel's long music hall experience. In one instance, he faces "out" to the audience while doing a little dance that comes across less as breaking the fourth wall than just an eruption of childish glee that's a bit unsettling to witness in a grown man. That's as good an example as any of why the Laurel disc is the weakest of the three. Unlike the other two comics in the series, Laurel's persona hasn't aged well. Lloyd and Chase's characters relied on cleverness and resolution but Laurel's too often seem just mean-spirited when they're not just blanks. Worse, Laurel himself doesn't come across as particularly funny, either conceptually or in practice. There are decent moments in the Laurel collection but not enough to justify two discs and rarely anything as inventive or imaginative as the other two Slapstick Symposium collections.
For more information about
Slapstick Symposium collections, visit
Kino International.
by Lang Thompson
