There was a guy, I’m not sure if you remember him, who once referred
to his presidential rival as a “nasty woman” long ago in The Time Before. In
response film historians Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak ran a programme of
comedy shorts at the 2017 Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone featuring
women behaving nastily for comic effect. As that festival is about to run live
for the first time on two years and because female silent comedy is as funny as
it is often unrecognised, the BFI decided on a re-run with a few old favourites
thrown in.
In the ten years or so I’ve been stricken with this silent
film bug, there has been much restoration and re-evaluation of women’s role in
early film direction with Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Webber, Nell Shipman, Germaine
Dulac, Dorothy Davenport Reid and, of course, Mabel Normand amongst those now
getting their due. But many of the key players in global comedy still require
elevation in modern discourse, these women having faced the double bind of
having to battle for recognition at the time and then being overwritten by a
history that has favoured the men… we know their names and yet perhaps
the greatest of all was directed in his first film by Mabel.
Today we gathered just to watch women being funny in the
manner they were appreciated at the time: gender-neutral daftness all perfectly
illuminated by Meg Morley’s improvisational excellence and introduced by long-time
champion of the comically under-rated nasty women, Bryony Dixon.
The first two films got us warmed up…
The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901) USA
Here Lies the Remains of Bridget McKeen Who Started a
Fire with Kerosine
This brief comedy outlined the perils of using inflammatory
material to start a fire with the titular hero meeting her end after causing an
explosion.
Mary Jane’s Mishap; Or Don’t Fool with the Paraffin
(1903) UK
A couple of years later and this rather more sophisticated
British effort told the same tale. Directed by George Albert Smith this film
has Bridget/Mary Jane played by his wife Laura Bayley, a former variety
performer, who hams it up splendidly with many pleading looks right to camera,
busting the fourth wall and still connecting with the disruptive soul onlooking
natives.
She rests in pieces...
Léontine s’envole (1911) France
Our lessons in fire safety completed it was off to France
for the enigmatic gallic anarchy of the legendary Léontine, also known as “Titine”
in France and Betty” in the United States, about whom almost nothing is known.
Maggie Hennefeld’s essay on the LA Review of Books1, shows what is
known about this energetic screen presence but all this is entirely based on
her surviving celluloid with her life off screen a closed book. She made some
22 episodes of her comic film series for Pathé-Frères from 1910 to 1912 after
which she disappears apart from being spotted as an extra in a 1916 comedy.
Here she burns bright as a brat who keeps on begging her
parents for one more balloon until, inevitably, she takes off and is carried
across the sandy streets of what looks like the south of France pursued by all
and sundry attempting to pull her to earth. This includes three acrobats who
stand on each other’s shoulders to try and catch her. Everyone falls down and the
camerawork is startling, following our brave star as she gamely hangs from
balloons dangling from a crane metres above the ground.
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| Léontine after the balloons go up |
Léontine enfant terrible (1911)
I’m not surprised Léontine is so awful in this film as her
parents look like creatures from a gothic fairy tale, mother complete with
prosthetic nose. Their daughter strikes back and smashes all of their plates
and most of the house before spreading her destruction to the outside world.
She ties two workmen together so they drop their boxes, sets fireworks off and smashes
a man’s head into a pumpkin. There may be a deeper meaning to all this but
surely there’s nothing more purely amusing than watching someone break
completely with social convention and just let rip. A fanfare for the common
woman.
Léontine garde la maison (1912)
Now, there’s one thing you really don’t want to do and that’s
leave this woman in charge of the house and the baby… and the dog. Léontine
feels put upon and responds in the only way she can, dishes are washed and
smashed, kitchens are set alight and bathrooms flooded, then she goes to play
with her pal and the dog and child disappear. Advertising for her lost items
she gets dozens of children and dogs in return before being told off by mother.
At the end she cries only until she’s left alone to fight again.
What is she rebelling against? What have you got?
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| Butter wouldn't melt: Chrissie White and Alma Taylor |
Tilly’s Party (1912)
In the Tilly series, Alma Taylor and Chrissie White play
merry havoc with social norms by cheeking their way through anarchic adventures
which must have made the women in the audience feel just that bit more amused
than the men. Here the girls disrupt a gathering at their parent’s house, lead
the angry guests on a merry chase sat on the handlebars as their boyfriends
cycle away. They manage to get to their “music lesson” just in time to get away
with it all.
At the height of the suffrage debate, the women’s movement
was so ingrained in society and so many women went to the pictures… perhaps
cinema was more subtly supportive than the government may have thought?
Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)
Not only does American actress Florence Turner prove that if
the face fits anything is possible, she also demonstrates the comedic special
relationship between her home country and the old country. DDD concerns
the efforts of Ms Turner and her hubby to win a face-pulling competition. They’re
both very adept but Florence's facial flights of fancy end up getting her
arrested before she finally wins out with her extraordinarily flexible fizzog2.
Flo’, this is great content for Tic-toc, bring back pro-face-pulling,
there’s gold in gurning!
The Night Rider (1920) Texas Guinan
Not for nothing was Texas Guinan described as “the female
William S Hart” who, as the Kennington Bioscope’s Michelle Facey 3 has said,
was very much the real thing, a ranch gal from Waco, who could ride and shoot
as good as any man on her father’s farm. Guinan toured as an itinerant rodeo
performer before the stage (not the Deadwood one…) called. She featured in
vaudeville were her pep and knack for self-promotion stood her in good stead:
she once claimed to have accidentally shot herself in the side, but the show
still went on, it being just a flesh wound an’ all. She was still a chorus girl
in 1917 and as she rode a horse down the runway in the theatre, she was talent
spotted by a movie man… probably.
Texas is as charming as she is tough and here she has to
choose between two men, one of whom may be rustlin’ her cattle… as is usual, she
doesn’t stand on politeness and if any man has wronged her… there ain’t no
mercy! Not nasty, just assertive!
Meg Morley accompanied with thematic variety and satisfying
melodic invention. No two “scores” were the same and she kept pace with the
on-screen anarchy with the acuity of a seasoned jazz player, one used to
working as part of an improvisational team.
A splendid afternoon on the Southbank and we drank a toast
to the nasty but nice trailblazers who are being remembered anew.
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| Texas |
2. Early 19th century: abbreviation of physiognomy.
3. In her introduction for the Kennington Bioscope’s
screening of The Girl of the Rancho (1919), Wednesday 2nd May 2018!
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