Smile… Kennington Bioscope Silent Laughter Weekend 2022, Day One, Cinema Museum

 

Sitting in the Cinema Museum, it’s like we’ve never been away and yet… those communal laughs feel fresher, the films more visceral and the accompaniment, richer and more poignant than ever. There were tears as well as laughter and a fulsome amount of surprises… reputations restored to living memory as well as reanimated shadows on screen. A reminder also that even films you are familiar with carry additional weight when viewed on the big screen with an audience and with live accompaniment.

 

Buddy and Mary

My Best Girl (1927) with Costas Fotopoulos

Mary Pickford’s last silent film, My Best Girl, is also one of her best and, famously, features her romancing future husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers. It’s romantic comedy of the highest order, pulling at the heartstrings as one of the masters of cinema runs through her gears form slapstick to the most intensely dramatic closing sequence that, as I fully expected, brought a tear to my eye. Can you see Mary falling in love with Buddy during this film? Maybe… but it was also her day job and to see her in her mid-thirties, playing her age, is a delight.

My Best Girl’s cinematographer was Charles Rosher who deservedly received an Academy Award nomination for his cinematography, he lost it for this but won it for Sunrise and, there were moments such as the opening montage and the emotional scenes amongst the traffic when you were reminded of the earlier film.

Costas Fotopoulos provided spirited accompaniment of his own tapping into rich romantic and dramatic themes as well as tripping the comedy lightly and fantastically through the pots and pans, family rows and cultural clashes as the poor little shop girl wins the heart of the poor big rich boy. Peak Bioscope!!

Walter and the runaway tank... plus two pigs.

 

Would You Believe it? (1929) with Lillian Henley

Walter Forde’s last silent film is packed with inventive routines: a baby and a doll mix up in the toy store, serving up toy soldiers just like chips on newspaper with oil for gravy and trying to wrap balloons in brown paper for a bespectacled Rees-Mogg-esque junior toff. Forde’s an inventor, he’s not sure what of, but it seems to work until it blows his landlord’s house up. He gets a job in a toy shop and meets a rather attractive young woman Pauline (Pauline Johnson) who just happens to work for the War Office, he invites her for dinner cooked by his uppity roommate, Cuthbert (Arthur Stratton) who, in a constant battle of wills, refuses to act the role of his butler.

Walter’s invention of a remote-control tank could be a game-changer but a group of spies finds out and set’s off to stop him demonstrating the kit to the Minister for War. Their leader is modelled on a similar mastermind in Fritz Land’s Spies and sits at a huge desk, pushing buttons for everything he needs, drinks, photographs, cigarette and lighters… the first but not last time, I was reminded of Wallace and Gromit on the day’s programme.

A super spy and his target

There’s a very funny bit of business on the Underground as the baddies chase Walter up lifts and down emergency spiral staircases in scenes reminiscent of Keaton in The Cameraman and elsewhere. The gags are mostly good and Forde controls events enough to not interrupt the broader narrative.

He gets his chance to demo for the Minister but the enemy agents kidnap him and Pauline, and, as Walter pushes his pal Cuthbert too far, the real-life tank runs amok to comic effect. The filmmakers were clearly delighted to get the loan of kit and crew and it shows with crushed cars, walls and buildings to show for it.

Forde later went on to direct the legendary Arthur Askey in The Ghost Train, his sense of comic timing and seamless story advancement was to stand him in good stead in his long career behind the camera.

 

Rediscovering Roscoe with Steve Massa and Lillian Henley

The second programme was a video essay from film historian Steve Massa who gave an overview of the unfairly maligned Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle based on his recent book. Roscoe was an exceptional talent who understood cinematic comedy better than most using his expressive wit, supernatural timing and extraordinary athleticism to become one of the leading players in the 1910s. Steve discussed numerous examples of Roscoe’s comic invention, quick fire physical comedy which exhibited his grace and timing and his ability to fall headfirst and backwards in a 180-degree flop.

Roscoe enjoyed a successful run of seventeen films with Mabel Normand at Keystone and worked with Chaplin, Lloyd and his nephew, Al St John before setting up his own production company, Comique Film Corporation, with Joseph Shenk (Mr Norma Talmadge) in 1917. Steve showed a clip from the company’s first film, The Butcher Boy (1917) which also introduced a young vaudeville performer by the name of Keaton.

Of course, Roscoe’s life was turned upside down by his unjust prosecution for the death of Virginia Rappe, but even before he was completely exonerated, he carried on working with Buster in Sherlock Jr and other films. He stayed active and made a successful series of shorts in the early thirties that as Steve said, left his life on the up…

There was a full screening for His Wife’s Mistake (1916), one of Arbuckle’s best starring shorts, with Al St John. There was swinging piano accompaniment from Lillian Henley who caught the mood as always and syncopated perfectly with the pandemonium on screen.

 

Almost Lost Laughs… Charley’s Bowers and Chase plus EE Horton, Meg Morley

 

Charlie Bowers' house...

Many a Slip (1927) The Non-slip Banana

This was the inventive Charley Bowers at his most surreal, struggling to invent a non–slip banana peel at the behest of a potential rich benefactor. As with Walter Forde, Bowers is an inventor in search of a cause and he finds it when offered the seemingly impossible task of removing that staple slippiness from Slapstick’s most valuable fruit.

This being Bowers, the cause of the slippiness was not the texture of the skin but tiny bugs only viewable through one of his “Pat Pending” tele-microscopes. Cue a series of Bower’s amazing stop-motion animations along with repeated efforts to go the long way round in order to test the solution. As Matthew Rose, who runs The Lost Laugh digital magazine and website, pointed out Bowers may not have been the best comedic performer but he was an extraordinary animator and film director. Many a Slip is great fun and it’s good news that more of Bowers’ work is being found and released on home media by Lobster Films.

There’s an article on Charley from Matthew on his site here.

 

Stan is the best lawyer Charley can afford...

Now I’ll Tell One (1927) when Ollie met Stan and Charley

Before they were officially a team, Laurel and Hardy feature in a few films together including this one, which features more of the former as Charley Chase’s lawyer in an outlandish divorce case. Charley’s wife is played by Edna Marion who accuses him of all kinds of outrageous crimes against her, including having shot her dead. Quick as a flash Stan the Lawyer asks how this could be given that she is still alive, only to provide her with an unlikely explanation; “perhaps the bullet hit a bible you kept over your heart. It’s typical Chase, fast paced, comedically vindictive and stylishly silly. In addition to being a legal loose cannon, Stan also dismantles clocks and watches… and I still don’t know why. Every lawyer needs a hobby.

Horton hopes for a honeymoon?

 

Dad’s Choice (1928)

Edward Everett Horton (forgotten until recently as a silent star) made a series of highly polished two reelers at the end of the silent period before establishing himself in talkies for the next two decades. He’s another class act and plays it earnestly deadpan through this comedy of manners, as he tries to elope with his sweetheart (Sharon Lynn) whose father (Otis Harlan) certainly does not approve of the match. There’s a lovely confusion between Charlie and his girl’s mother (Josephine Crowell) who keeps on been presented with accidental winks and other signals that she’s the one he’s after.

It's very polished and Horton shows all the comic calm that made him a staple of such later classics as Top Hat, Arsenic and Old Lace and The Ghost Goes Wild. Again, there’s a set of his comedies out on Blu-ray this time from Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions - link here!

 

Meg Morley accompanied all three films in slightly different styles, responding with an effortless range of themes and tempos to suit the rhythms of the comedy on screen. A jazz player perfectly suited to the jazzed action on screen.

 

Unfortunately, I was then called away by a prior appointment at the Royal Albert Hall and so I missed the Harry Langdon in Frank Capra’s The Strong Man (1926) – his first film as director - with more Meg and then the headlining Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (1923) accompanied by John Sweeney.  One of the all-time classics of silent comedy and the Fourth Musketeer of twenties male comedians. I’ve seen the Lloyd film and will catch up with the other Harry later on… he made some great films with Capra writing including Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) with Joan Crawford, and was on a roll to rival even the Big Three… the more the merrier.

 

Good to have the laughter days back at the Bioscope and, as the Cinema Museum’s future now looks assured in Kennington, here’s to many more!

 

AND, this is why bananas are so slippy...

And why mice truly are the smartest species on Earth... Charley Bowers was there first!