Monthly Archives: March 2011

Sitting in the archives at this very moment are hundreds, if not thousands, of one- and two-reel silent comedies. At one time, these slapsticks were presumed the only silents worth excavating—the lone unembarrassing artifacts of a primitive, prepubescent era. The comedies found their praises sung by every film expert from James Agee to Jim Broughton. No less than the head of UCLA’s film school declared the “Obsolescence of the Silent Film” and dared his readers to “[t]ry to see, if you can, any silent film—except a comedy with Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, Raymond Griffith or Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon or Laurel and Hardy—and you will wonder why people thought it at all bearable, let alone great.”

The scales have shifted since—not least through our perpetual acquaintance with these films on 16mm and 8mm. (Dig through any film collector’s basement and it won’t be long till you find a dupe or two or three of Easy Street or Cops.) It’s the discoveries—the once “presumed lost” titles from studios not usually known for comedies—that really strain. Run two or three of them back-to-back and let the derangement begin. (May I suggest His Baby Doll and The Camera Cure, both Triangles from 1917?) Try to remember where one ends and the next begins. Slap another title on the head and you can barely tell the difference. It all feels vaguely second-hand, if not plagiarized, but from what?

Take two steps back, and patterns emerge. You can’t follow the plot, but you notice how overstuffed everything is. Silent comedies propose an infinite supply of bodies, always another available to jam into a cramped room or fling at the end of a line. There are always more than necessary for a gag to come off, buzzing with a negative, supposedly manic, energy in the background. The more the funnier. One cannot help but stumble away with the conclusion that human life and labor are cheap.

Even in the major productions, the essential and awesome interchangeability of parts and persons, especially women, is evident. What does Merna Kennedy have that Marion Mack does not? Fact is, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd rarely cast actresses who provided any serious competition as personalities. These days, I find myself admiring the production values in their features much more readily than the underlying dynamics and routines.

The gratifying exception is, not coincidentally, a Lloyd talkie—Movie Crazy (1932), surely his best talkie and probably his best film overall. Watching Lloyd—nearly forty and, what’s more, always a businessman first and a comedian second—play a fan magazine-addled yokel inspires incredulous mirth all on its own. His on-screen partner, Constance Cummings, is something else—a real and ambitious actress who ably develops her own characterizations independent of his foibles. She’s quicker than he is, constantly and consciously evaluating her allegiances, scheming and then finding herself dangerously unprepared for the spoils. It’s a fully-formed personality and a performance that actively repudiates the perfunctory history of her predecessors.

Cummings even negotiates something of a dual role—up-and-coming actress Mary Sears (sufficiently up to afford a colored maid and coming enough to have a modest mansion) and her on-set alter ego, a ridiculous imitation of a Mexican love interest. (Part of the pleasure of Cummings’s performance comes from her self-awareness and punk insouciance as regards this ethnic theater.) That Lloyd’s Harold Hall cannot recognize the two women as one suggests some indigenous melting pot calamity, as well as, incidentally, a kind of That Obscure Object of Desire in reverse.

Indeed, a Buñuelian air hangs over the whole picture, from the remarkably blank non-performances of Lloyd’s parents (veteran character players De Witt Jennings and Lucy Beaumont, dead-eyed and serious, devoid of any mugging) to the repetition of certain elements (doves, broken glass) which forfeit their efficiency as gags until they loom as Surrealist totems. Palm trees line every alleyway in Harold’s sunny Hollywood and screen tests speed themselves up to mock the innocent.

Clyde Bruckman plays the credited director, though he was purportedly too drunk to helm the show most days, with Lloyd taking over his duties. (Nevertheless, a pesky auteurist question: how can the man who signed The General, Movie Crazy, and The Man on the Flying Trapeze be regarded as a footnote to his own career?) Either way, Movie Crazy is intermittently, impressively (accidentally?) fluid. There are five or six very elaborate tracking shots here that burrow their way straight ahead with conspicuous and casual professionalism. They’re like nothing else in Lloyd’s work—or Bruckman’s.

As in Lloyd’s previous effort, Feet First, a loose reworking of Safety Last that illustrated how sound and its naturalism automatically confers on any situation qualities of starkness and violence that silence muted, Movie Crazy abounds in harsh, flat sound effects: the crumbling of a straw hat, the screeching of a revolving coat rack. There may be more sound than talk. This is a crudity that is resilient and resplendent. (KW)

The Northwest Chicago Film Society Will Screen Movie Crazy on Wednesday, March 23rd at the Portage Theater. Please see our current calendar for more information.

Made for Lippert Pictures, a low rent production company specializing in B-Westerns and crime films for their even lower rent theater chain stretching across America’s Bible Belt, Sam Fuller’s first picture as a director carries all the darkness and doubt of films like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Anthony Mann’s grubby string of 1950s Western Noirs, or Heaven’s Gate with Park Row and Pre-Code poetics (yeah, we know, 1948 ain’t pre-code by any stretch, but watching this next to I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, Fuller’s 1948 feature sure feels like it). And if I Shot Jesse James can be considered the first revisionist western – an argument that makes more and more sense when one considers what a dramatic shift in sentiment it is to something like John Ford’s My Darling Clementine – than the Cine-Fist (as Godard would come to call Fuller) catapulted the genre out of its (perhaps) misdirected southern demographic like nothing else in the history of B-pictures.

The constraints of a low budget and a mere ten day shoot have something to do with it, but a great deal of credit should probably be extended to Lippert Productions for the claustrophobia and brutal tension than makes I Shot Jesse James so brilliantly unstable. In the late ’40s and early ’50s Lippert was producing grimy, naturalistic pictures like Little Big Horn (also starring John Ireland – Manny Farber called it the best film of 1951) and Three Desperate Men, and always the heroes were questionable, tragic figures. What Fuller added to this niche of stock footage-filled low budget filmmaking was poetry. Fuller’s pitch to Lippert, as he says in his autobiography (essential reading for anyone interested in pretty much any facet of American history or the smoking of cigars) was simply “It’s a murder movie, goddammit!” but there’s much more going on here.

Fuller’s west is far more claustrophobic than John Ford’s. In place of Henry Fonda leaning back in his chair next to the expanse of My Darling Clementine’s Arizona landscape is a very intense study of faces. Both Dave Kehr and Manny Farber would note that the more films Fuller made, the more he moved towards making films almost entirely out of close-ups. But here “close-ups” mean a great deal more than the physical space they take up on screen, and in fact there’s rarely a shot that doesn’t have someone’s torso in it. The way people look at each other in I Shot Jesse James (the expression on Ireland’s face when he shoots his best friend in the back, the way Barbara Britton looks at Ireland when she knows she doesn’t love him anymore because of it, the way Ireland looks at a kid who tried to kill him to because “the guy who shoots the man who shot Jesse James would be the best shot in the west”) makes the viewer conscious of every quality of their faces right down to their eyelash hairs. The way they look at each other and the way they appear individually on screen creates a balance between a very private world and a very naked, exposed one. Bob Ford’s life is humiliating, but he’s got a tough mug.

Following its run south of the Mason-Dixon Line and premiere in Los Angeles (Lippert also had a small movie palace in Fresno, where the whole outfit began), I Shot Jesse James should have been pegged for the B-movie graveyard (home of countless re-titles, re-issues, and re-distributions). But the economic and artistic success (which was and is considerable) of this murder movie is as a balancing act: it was a film whose success as a pulpy B-Western for the more conservative (presumably) mostly rural demographic of movie going Bible Belt carried over to the more liberal East and West Coasts as an art film (Godard said it had “an oppressive intensity the cinema had not seen since Dreyer’s Joan of Arc.”), and at the same time represented a shift in the language with which westerns were made, marking a transition between the traditional romantic westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks, and the revisionist westerns of Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah, and Anthony Mann. (JA)

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will run I SHOT JESSE JAMES on Wednesday, March 16th at the Portage Theater