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| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 6 2012, 09:47 AM (2,473 Views) | |
| CliffClaven | Nov 19 2012, 05:06 PM Post #16 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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It's fun to compare "Don't Shove" to Chaplin's "The Rink": Where Chaplin got laughs out of his virtuosity on skates (assisted by a wire at least once, I suspect), Lloyd is funny by being awful yet determined. When I inflicted it on friends and family -- it was one of the very few Lloyds on 8mm -- the big laugh came when Lloyd maneuvers the heavy into jostling a huge, bad-tempered brute. You think you see what's coming, but instead the brute bursts into tears and Lloyd allows himself a WTF look at the camera. If you're a Bebe Daniels fan, look her up at Greenbriar Picture Shows. While she dropped off the radar completely in America, she and husband Ben Lyon were big in England for decades. |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Nov 19 2012, 08:40 PM Post #17 |
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Mouth Breather
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Anybody interested in Larry Semon might want to watch Underworld in the Josef Von Sternberg box. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 9 2012, 08:43 AM Post #18 |
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Sunday Slapstick #8 He Wouldn’t Stay Down (Keystone, 1915) Dir. Charles Parrott Charley Chase’s pal, Ford Sterling, has just taken out a life insurance policy, so Charley decides to drown him and marry his rich widow. Nice premise for a comedy. Charlie is made up with greying hair, and looks a lot like he would in the late 1930s at Columbia in this routine one-reeler. Fatty & Mabel’s Simple Life (Keystone, 1915) Dir. Roscoe Arbuckle Fatty & Mabel live on neighboring farms; hers is about to be repossessed unless goes along with her father and marries the landlord’s snotty son. Instead, she elopes with Fatty, with everyone giving chase on bicycles, automobile, and foot. Another unpleasant Fatty Arbuckle film, saved somewhat by a chase sequence at the end, because, let’s face it, Keystone chase sequences are typically a joy to watch and an iconic part of our silent movie experience. That scowl of Fatty’s during most of this and other films is just horrible; I really, really don’t like him. The plots of Keystone films typically sound like melodramas, but they’re played for broad farce. I guess that’s the humor in them, eh? Pay Your Dues (Rolin, 1919) Dir. Hal Roach & Vincent Bryan A goofy fraternal lodge, the Order of the Simps, is having an initiation with blindfolded, terrified pledges. One of them runs off, and the Simps give chase, but accidentally pick up Harold Lloyd, who was blindfolded and stumbling across the lawn because he’d been playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey at a garden party. (Now, see, THIS sounds like a comedy plot!) They subject him to a number of frantic but harmless pranks, including making him think he’s walking on the edge of a tall building, good practice for Harold considering what he’s got coming up in his future. A nice, humorous short. Lizzies of the Field (Sennett, 1924) Dir. Del Lord Now THIS is the kind of sophisticated comedy I go for. There’s a 250 mile car race with a $25,000 grand prize, and two rival garages are competing for the prize. What follows is a full reel of mayhem, as silly, goofy cars careen around Southern California, menacing every animal, vegetable, and mineral in sight or below the earth. No laugh too cheap, and some very inventive stuff, such as the two garages fighting for a customer by pulling the front and rear bumpers while the car stretches all the way across the street, or Billy Bevan’s car losing a tire so he hops on the emergency bicycle, pedals past all the speeding cars on the track, and retrieves it. Andy Clyde is in this one, too. Del Lord went on to direct many Three Stooges shorts. I am adding this to our future FNF lineup, that’s how much I liked it. Lotsa laughs. All Night Long (Sennett, 1924) Dir. Harry Edwards Harry Langdon falls asleep in a theatre and wakes up in the middle of the night when the place is being burglarized. He recognizes the burglar, Vernon Dent, as his sergeant from the Great War, and they reminisce on how Harry stole his girlfriend and other wartime exploits. Very funny, likeable short. The Langdon character really clicks here, a very appealing, childlike guy. Yet there is a lot of slapstick and some good gags, including Harry on “guard duty” atop a pole that’s being shot full of holes like a vertical stick of swiss cheese. Natalie Kingston is the girl. I liked this short very much, and not just for historical curiosity: it’s very funny. Watching these films, I very much see why Lloyd and Langdon were so popular in their day. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Dec 9 2012, 02:32 PM Post #19 |
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Mouth Breather
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We ran Lizzies of the Field last spring at the Chico festival, along with Chaplin in Behind the Screen, Keaton in Cops, and one of my fave Laurel and Hardy silents, Wrong Again (the one with the horse on the piano). Lizzies got the most laughs and applause. Kids and fogies alike loved it. The biggest surprise to me was tha Keaton got the least laughter. Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Dec 9 2012, 02:49 PM.
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| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| CliffClaven | Dec 9 2012, 03:13 PM Post #20 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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Interesting note in "Lizzies": The bad guy's racing partner seems to be a black man, yet there are no racial jokes, stereotypes or references at all -- He's just there, assisting in light villainy and being as capable as anyone ever is in a slapstick comedy. Langdon went back to WWI for "Soldier Boy" and the opening sequence of "The Strong Man." A lot of comics managed to find laughs in trench warefare, but Langdon always seemed particularly incongruous on the battlefield. He seems to survive by not fully comprehending what a war is. |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 9 2012, 03:25 PM Post #21 |
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Cliff, you nailed it: he never seem to understand what ANYTHING is. The guy who does the commentary on the Langdon film goes on and on about how Frank Capra stole credit for forming the Langdon character, who was "in full form" in this film, prior to Capra joining the unit. IMDB says that Capra wrote the story for it, uncredited. So I dunno what the actual truth is, but I'll bet you guys do. All I know is I like the character and his movies have been funny. Maybe I'm prejudiced, but when I watch the Keystone films circa 1915, I think of an audience consisting of a bunch of non-English-speaking immigrants with Chico Marx hats and huge mustaches, just bellowing with laughter at these things. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 16 2012, 11:51 AM Post #22 |
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Sunday Slapstick #9 Married to Order (Reelcraft, 1920) Dir. Charles Parrott Well, well, well... look what we have HERE. 1918, and Chaplin impersonator Billy West takes ill, and is unable to work for weeks. King Bee studio gag man/director Charley Chase has all that experience in front of the camera over at Keystone, and is pressed into service to make THIS film while the studio waits for West to recover. The result is silly but a lot closer to the Charley Chase that we'd know from the Hal Roach films. Charley and lovely Rosemary Theby are in love, but her dad, Oliver Hardy, is having none of it; he considers Charley a "mollycoddle" and a "cream puff". When Rosie's identical twin brother comes to town, the lovers decide to have HER masquerade as HIM so that she can sneak out of the house; Papa decides to play a trick on Charley, though, and have the BROTHER masquerade as the SISTER and pretend to marry Charley, only unbeknownst to him he's actually having the DAUGHTER who's pretending to be the SON pretend to be the DAUGHTER. Like I said, silly stuff. Particularly when you consider that Rosemary and her "Dad", Oliver Hardy, were born only 3 months apart in 1892. Fun short to watch for Chase fans. Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (Keystone, 1915) Dir. Roscoe Arbuckle "Say, Roscoe, grab a camera and head down to San Diego and give me a reel or two, won't you?" - Mack Sennett, undoubtedly. Fatty and Mabel go to the Expo, interfere with a parade, and get separated. He flirts with some other guy's wife, and then watches fat, ugly hula dancers. She comes looking for him and finds him and hits him. The end. Next film, please. Bumping into Broadway (Rolin, 1919) Dir. Hal Roach Two Broadways, one of swells in fancy clothes and one of broke playwright Harold Lloyd and broke dancer Bebe Daniels. When she's fired ("You dance as if your feet were enemies," director Snub Pollard tells her) she has to take up with one of the rich guys, who takes her to a swanky gambling den. Following her, Harold accidentally wins a small fortune, but the cops raid the joint and the rest of the film is, surprisingly, non-stop slapstick, Buster Keaton style, with an army of cops chasing a guy who'll jump through anything and over anybody to escape. Pretty good movie, but Lloyd wasn't quite there yet. Still, it's nice to see a "normal" person doing slapstick, and not the gross caricatures I see in most of these films. Heavy Love (Joe Rock, 1926) Dir. Scott Pembroke One of the purposes of going through all these silent movie sets was to find gems I can share with people, and last week I found one, Lizzies of the Field, and this week, I found THIS one - an unsung comedy that evoked the single biggest belly (you should pardon the expression) laughs of all the films I've seen so far. The Ton of Fun was a trio of really, really fat guys - Fatty Alexander, Fat Karr, and Kewpie Ross - who were very much in the Three Stooges vein, at least in THIS film. They're inept, they wreck everything in sight, they hurt each other, and - unlike the Stooges, at least to me - they're hilarious. Inept carpenters, they stumble across a woman who wants a house built on a hillside. "We're expert carpenters! Ask the last three bosses who fired us!" (if that's not a Moe & Curly routine, it should've been.) They build a house that rivals Buster Keaton's in One Week, only much bigger and with a plethora of death-traps all over it, including stairs that collapse into a sliding board whenever you get into the middle of them. How they pull off these physical feats, I don't know; in one scene, one of the guys is maneuvering a wheelbarrow across a rickety makeshift bridge to the second floor of the house, maybe 18 or 20 feet off the ground. The bridge collapses, the guy falls, and the wheelbarrow lands on him. How did this not kill him? Or at least seriously maim him? Beats me. This movie was hilarious. I think I have one other Ton of Fun film, and I hope to see others. Feet of Mud (Sennett, 1924) Dir. Harry Edwards In another odd film that appears to be two 2-reelers stuck together (in fact, Vernon Dent has two different roles in it!), Harry Langdon is the odd man out on the college football team. When somebody breaks about 325 bones, the coach sends him in (telling him, "Go out and cover yourself with glory!") and he accidentally scores the winning touchdown. That wins him the heart of the campus sweetie, but her papa won't hear of their marriage until Harry makes good. He gets him a job on Wall Street - sweeping it up. Harry fouls things up, naturally, and - fleeing from a cop - ends up in Chinatown, starting a tong war. I continue to find the Langdon character to be funny and appealing and I enjoy his films. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 23 2012, 01:35 PM Post #23 |
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Sunday Slapstick #10 At First Sight (Roach, 1924) Dir. J.A. Howe Charles Parrott (later to be Charley Chase) in his first appearance as a character named Jimmy Jump, a clumsy guy who means well but steps in a lot of buckets. Think Inspector Clouseau or Chevy Chase (no relation). In this short, there isn't really much of a plot, but "Jimmy" sets his hat on fire in one sequence - while he's wearing it. What plot there is concerns Jimmy's romancing of a lovely young housemaid, who pretends to be the rich matron of the house to impress him, but he's actually only intending to be rich to impress her. This sort of thing would be much more memorable when Charley had more room to develop his stories. This film was made in a period when the Roach studios were in a flux - Harold Lloyd had left, and Roach was contractually obligated to Pathe for a certain number of 1- and 2-reelers and features, so he was moving 'Snub' Pollard, Glenn Tryon, Stan Laurel, and now Charley in and out, trying to hit on a winning combination of stars to compliment his successful Our Gang series. He'd soon give up and just create the "Hal Roach All-Stars", which turned out to be NO stars until Laurel & Hardy distinguished themselves. Fatty's New Role (Keystone, 1915) Dir. Roscoe Arbuckle Stop the presses! We actually having something here, a Fatty Arbuckle short that... well, that's tolerable to me. The title is apropos! Maybe I like Fatty better as a hobo than as a drunk rich guy, or maybe it's just that last week's short was so awful this one looked great, or maybe he really has turned the corner and I'm going to start liking his films now. We'll see, huh? Fatty gets thrown out of a bar because he won't buy a nickel beer, he just wants the free sandwich; somebody's been blowing up bars in town, so some of the patrons decide to play a trick on the owner by sending him an anonymous note, and he then becomes convinced that his place is going to get blown up. There follows a lot of gags with things that look like bombs or make a lot of noise. This is NOT a bad short. Hallelujah. From Hand to Mouth (Rolin, 1919) Dir. Alf Goulding What is it with silent comics being chased down the middle of the street by an army of cops? This time, it's Harold Lloyd, who is trying to help a beautiful young woman that's being fleeced by her crooked lawyer. Harold is not only on HER side, but he's taken a job with the crooks who intend to steal the girl's papers so that she can't prove her inheritance. Silly stuff, with a lot of lowbrow gags. Peggy Cartwright, the first Our Gang leading lady, plays a street urchin. An okay short, mainly for the lovely Mildred Davis. Uppercuts (Christie, 1926) Dir. Walter Graham Jack Duffy was in his 30s, but stuck on a long grey beard and took out his teeth and played an old man in a lot of movies, including Buster Keaton's Neighbors. This is a routine story about a guy elected president of an anti-prizefighting league who gets involved in managing his butler in a prizefight. A clever gag during the fight - we see 6 or 8 fists hit the butler in unison - and a couple of nice moments, but rather routine in all. Duffy's a better supporting character. The Sea Squawk (Sennett, 1925) Dir. Harry Edwards Harry Langdon is onboard the cheapest-looking ocean liner set you can imagine, where his bunkmate has just stolen a rare gem and hidden it when the cabin is searched by forcing Harry to eat it. He then wants it back, so Harry dresses in drag to avoid him, but gets swept up in the ship's dance. Harry's films aren't all that funny (there's a good gag, though, with Harry pulling the "string" off a woman's back, only to discover that it's her girdle stay - and the girdle then flies off and knocks a man down. See, it's the SOPHISTICATED stuff I go for) but I continue to find Harry appealing, with that blank face that somehow manages to register some semblance of comprehension at what's going on around him, even if he's not certain how or why he should be reacting to it. I continue to really like Langdon (and Lloyd). |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 30 2012, 11:47 AM Post #24 |
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Sunday Slapstick #11 One of the Family (Roach, 1924) Dir. Scott Pembroke Jimmy Jump is the chauffeur to a rich couple; she flirts with him to make her husband jealous, which results in Jimmy being threatened with extreme bodily damage by the husband. Jimmy’s rescued by the lovely maid, Blanche Mehaffey, who takes him home to meet her family, a group of roughnecks. A dinner party ensues, with Jimmy trying to emulate their awful manners so as not to insult them, while they try to put on airs to impress HIM. It’s fascinating to me that the Jimmy Jump character is so close to what Charley Chase would become in his best films, but once again we see him let down by the 1-reel running time not giving him the opportunity to set up a decent story. The best Hal Roach films always take their time getting’ where they’re goin’ and build up to the hilarity. Mabel & Fatty’s Married Life (Keystone, 1915) Dir. Roscoe Arbuckle One morning in the park, Mabel & Fatty get into an altercation with a hurdy-gurdy man over his aggressive monkey. The musician vows revenge. Fatty goes to work with his partner, a Hebrew, but forgets his briefcase and goes back for it. His wife mistakes him for a burglar and shoots him in the rear end. Fatty leaves, and Mabel discovers there’s a REAL intruder in the house, so she calls the Keystone Kops they show up to discover the hurdy-gurdy man lurking around, but he turns out to only be looking for his monkey, the real intruder. Fatty returns, sans Hebrew, and kisses her for the fadeout. I can’t believe this hasn’t been remade by Peter Jackson as 245 minute, $300 million epic. Big laugh: the Kops are sleeping on a big bench, and the desk sergeant can’t wake them up, so he fires a gun in the air, making them all jump and break the bench. Now THAT’S funny. His Royal Slyness (Rolin, 1920) Dir. Hal Roach A minor classic. The Prince of Thermosa, in America to go to college but instead makin’ time with a local floozy, has been ordered home to wed the Princess of Razzamatazz. Luckily, he meets his exact double, Harold Lloyd, a door-to-door book salesman, and sends him in his place (“Wouldn’t you like a steady job as a Prince?”). Harold likes the job, picks up phone numbers from all the chambermaids, and sells books whenever crowds gather in his honor. Alas, the floozy has thrown out the real Prince, who comes to town to regain his throne; Snub Pollard, a neighboring Prince, wants a chance at the Princess; and the Princess herself has donned peasant garb to run away. Oh, and the peasants are revolting. Everything works here, a funny and clever film. I was expecting trick photography for the look-alike princes, but no: the REAL prince is portrayed by Harold’s look-alike brother, Gaylord. Lots of clever gags, romance, and fun. A real winner, later remade with Charley Chase. Beauty and the Bump (Skylark/Bray, 1927) Dir. Craig Hutchinson Fun 2-reeler shot at Venice Beach; a young man (Perry Murdock) romances a young woman (Nina Cavalier) but in impressing her ticks off a bystander, Robert Page, who chases him through the park. That doesn’t sound like much, but there are some wonderful stunts here, mainly aboard flying rides that feature Murdock climbing or swinging from one to another. He later dresses in drag to escape Page, and gets involved in a bathing beauty contest. The girl believes in phrenology, and drags her hero to an expert, who pronounces him bumpless with “the head of a jellyfish”, so Murdock then spends a few minutes trying very hard to get himself some major bumps on the head. I liked the anything for a laugh attitude and the cast of this film, which is not a great one but entertaining, despite its lack of any name players. Boobs in the Wood (Sennett, 1925) Dir. Harry Edwards Another wonderful film. Harry Langdon’s a gentle lumberjack who has fallen in love (or something like it) with cranky boss Vernon Dent’s girlfriend, and she with him. The two of them leave the camp, and she gets a job as a waitress and he as a dishwasher for a homicidal cook. When a short-tempered customer takes a dislike to Harry, the girlfriend convinces the guy that Harry’s actually a vicious killer. Every stupid move Harry makes after that accidentally makes it look like he’s the toughest guy in the Great Northwest, until Dent shows up and knows the truth. It’s the way Harry reacts (or doesn’t) that makes this stuff so funny. A tree falls right in front of him? He stands there and looks at it for a couple of beats, finally comprehends that the darn thing almost fell on him, and THEN jumps ten steps backward. Another big laugh: he takes his first ever sip of alcohol, which literally knocks him on his ass. So for his second drink, he goes ahead and does the ass-knocking bit first, to save time, and THEN drinks. Funny, funny short. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| CliffClaven | Dec 30 2012, 10:25 PM Post #25 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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Actually, Chase's Long Fliv the King isn't a remake but one more riff on the whole genre of royal romances/adventures (Prisoner of Zenda, Merry Widow, Student Prince, etc.). This was a field well-worked by Hollywood, both for drama and for comedy. Yes, both center on American heroes winning a princess in a country called Thermosa. But Lloyd's film is cheerfully all over the map, with its chorus girl ladies in waiting and out-of-nowhere revolution (despite a twins setup that specifically tweaks Zenda). Chase's film starts out straight: A princess needs a husband in a hurry and marries Charley, who's facing execution. Shortly thereafter Charley is proven innocent and released. The comedy proper begins as he recruits Max Davidson to help him get to his new bride and kingdom. Then it's more intent on playing with the cliches of the genre: The king on the balcony addressing the peasants (sans pants); fighting a duel; and a palace coup. The plot is comparatively focused, ending with Charley, Max and the princess blithely waving goodbye from a ship instead of sticking around to defeat the villains (whom you think would be happy, but they're PO'd at being stood up). Harry Langdon's Soldier Boy seems to be about Harry wandering Europe as the last Doughboy, unaware the war is long over (sound familiar?). After a while he's dragged into a musical comedy royal court, forced to double for the king. Stan Laurel, in his early movie parody days, offered Rupert of Hee-Haw (Rupert of Hentzau was the literary sequel to Zenda and was eventually filmed itself). Doug Fairbanks' early comedy Reaching for the Moon has American clock-puncher Doug abruptly proclaimed a king; it mocks the heroic tales he'd take just a little more seriously in a few years (the princess is no prize, for starters). Even Larry Semon's silent Wizard of Oz ended up sacrificing nearly all the fantasy elements to give us farcical castle intrigues. He adapted the wrong book. With sound came some Lubitsch musicals that tweaked royal romances a bit more elegantly: The Smiling Lieutenant, The Love Parade and a fun version of The Merry Widow. Ronald Coleman's Prisoner of Zenda remains the gold standard for Ruritaniana played just straight enough -- did anybody else even try after that? |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 30 2012, 10:51 PM Post #26 |
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Well, when I watched this film today, it about half reminded me of Fliv, and when I watched Fliv, it reminded me of a film I'd seen before THAT (can't recall just what it was right now), so I guess I shouldn't have said "remake" but certainly "reimagined" by some of the same creative folks. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| CliffClaven | Dec 31 2012, 10:19 AM Post #27 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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Still say it's less one comedy borrowing from another than both comedies (and many more besides) parodying the same dramas. And Ruritanian romances (taking their name from the fictional kingdom in Zenda) were thick as flies back in the day. Look at all the Western comedies serving up a main street gunfight and/or a saloon brawl. They're not so much borrowing from each other (aside from individual gags here and there) as they're mocking the abundance of movies and TV shows that did those bits in earnest. We're less likely to assume those comedies are remaking each other since we still have a steady diet of the source material they're satirizing. Anyway, that's just me getting in some year-end bloviating. |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 31 2012, 10:21 AM Post #28 |
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Say, where were the sets from, anyway? I have doubts Roach built all the impressive sets for a 2-reeler. I guess if could check my history of the Hal Roach studio books, huh? |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Jan 6 2013, 01:03 PM Post #29 |
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Sunday Slapstick #12 Just a Minute (Roach, 1924) Dir. James Parrott Funny Charley Chase 1-reeler... Jimmy Jump is a car salesman on his way to the Justice of the Peace with his bride-to-be when he runs into his boss, who insists that he take a political bigwig on a test drive, assuring him that the guy's a pushover and the sale will be easy and quick. Well, the guy is Noah Young, villain from many, many Roach films (I have seen him in three films in the last two days!) and he's a creep; after his ride, he insists that they do it again with his wife, and after THAT ride, he insists that he pile his five kids into the car and go up in the mountains, at which point she proceeds to unwrap all the picnic supplies. His rotten kids wreck the car, he doesn't buy it, Charley gets fired, and Charley's fiance marries somebody else. Ouch. (The title comes from a running gag; Charley keeps taking the test drive past the corner on which his intended awaits, assuring her each time, "I'll be back in just a minute!") A good little 1-reeler. Fatty's Reckless Fling (Keystone 1915) Dir. Roscoe Arbuckle Another painful Fatty short; I am hoping that by 1919-1921, Arbuckle would be turning out shorts I'm going to enjoy. Proving that fat, drunk and stupid IS no way to go through life (Dean Wormer was right!), Fatty comes home all three and gets involved in a poker game in a room down the hall; he loses his clothes, and then ends up in the wrong apartment, with lovely Minta Durfee, wife of jealous Edgar Kennedy. There's a clever bit with one of those beds that slides into the wall, an apt hiding place. The enjoyment of this film comes out of that prop and the supporting players. Haunted Spooks (Rolin, 1920) Dir. Alf Goulding, Hal Roach A gem. Mildred Davis stands to inherit the family's ancestral plantation - but only if she's married and she and her husband live there. Her lawyer promises to find her a husband, and along comes Harold Lloyd, jilted in romance and intent on suicide. After attempts to shoot himself and drown himself and throw himself in front of a train fail, he's playing in traffic, and along comes the lawyer. So he and Mildred are wed and are off to the plantation, where the servants (including little Sunshine Sammy Morrison) are terrified and Mildred's uncle is trying to scare her out of the house. Not only is the film weird but clever and funny, but MY GOODNESS what a backstory. Harold (age 26) and Mildred (19) would fall in love and marry a few years later; not all was happy on the set, however. In the midst of filming, in August, 1919, Harold had his famous accident, when a bomb being held for a publicity photo exploded, nearly blinding him, scarring his face, and blowing off part of his hand. Filming couldn't resume until January, 1920, and you can see the prosthetic hand in several scenes in the middle and end of the picture - if you're looking for it. They did a good job, and Harold's career continued its upward path. Although Harold hanging from the clock is his most famous image, I also have always loved he sequence in which he ties a giant rock to himself and jumps off a bridge - into water scarcely deep enough to dampen his socks. Funny, funny stuff. Reckless Rosie (Christie, 1929) Dir. Neal Burns My goodness! Frances Lee is an underwear model given a sheer li'l thing to take with her to the fashion show. Rival designers steal it and submit it as their own; Frances gets it back, but is chased by a cop because the showgirl outfit she's wearing is so skimpy. Other stuff happens, but this short exists solely to give dirty old men like us the opportunity to ogle a lot of girls in a lot of skimpy outfits. As such, I appreciated it very much. His Marriage Wow (Sennett, 1925) Dir. Harry Edwards The hit of the Silent Film Festival I hosted this past summer; Harry Langdon goes to the wrong church on his wedding day, and when he finally gets a chance to wed, his friend Prof. McGlumm (as creepy a guy as you'll find outside of a monster movie, beautifully portrayed by Vernon Dent in a role that's hilarious and practically steals the film) that the bride is planning to marry him and then murder him for his insurance. After that, everything that happens convinces Harry that McGlumm is right. Wonderful film, Langdon's best so far. Terrific sequence in which Harry asks a cop for directions to the church, runs off-screen left, and then almost immediately shows up two blocks in the background running back toward the cop. The sequence when Langdon's wedding ring becomes stuck in a stranger's car tire is also very funny. A terrific 2-reeler. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Jan 6 2013, 05:08 PM Post #30 |
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Mouth Breather
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This is swell stuff. Youse guys is da greatest. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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11:36 AM Jul 11