“The Mack Sennett Keystone comedies were the culmination of
15 years of comic primitivism—the characterless jest and the excitement of
motion raised to the nth power” (Mast 43). Before Sennett, American film comedy
had been confined to the music hall sketch; he gave it the freedom of
destructive absurdity. While still
at Biograph, the future King of Comedy moved Griffith’s static, inert,
indoor-bound camera outside, where it enjoyed both visual freedom and the
freedom to move. And move it did, at mad speed, nearing supersonic velocity,
stopping only when the figures onscreen smashed through one wall too many, fell
down manholes or wells too deep, or were simply overcome with exhaustion The
filmmaker added tremendous energy and breathtaking pace, the incongruous and
the non sequitur, and a taste for burlesquing people, social custom, and the
conventions of other films.
Hal Roach was always second to Sennett; the latter
established the formula while the former merely adopted it. While Roach began
imitatively, copying Sennett’s chases, falls, custard-pie throwing, and
generalized chaos, he gradually began thinking more in terms of character than
non sequitur, carefully structured gags instead of speed, logical plotting
rather than constant, cumulative romping. Roach’s films benefited from more
structure, less improvisation, creating what Gerald Mast calls a perfect
stairway to insanity (185). To use the same metaphor, Sennett did not ever take
the stairs up; he took the elevator, punched the floor button—or, if feeling
especially inventive, whacked it with a hammer—got stuck a couple of times
between levels, sometimes plummeted, coming close to the bottom of the elevator
shaft, and, finally, shot through the roof.
Sennett’s films fell into one of three categories: parodies
of other genres; ridicules of noble values, intellectual pretentions, and lofty
sentiments; or, most notably, visual knockabout, “which he lifted, by
insistence and inventiveness, to the level of poetic fantasy” (Durgnat 68). The
Keystone period, between 1912 and 1915, was the most important Sennett era,
often taken as representative of his work as a whole. Sennett’s lot provided a highly
creative atmosphere for gag writers, directors, and actors during these years.
The shorts made at Keystone blazed with free, furious improvisational energy, which
was always more important than fancy scripts, sets, costumes, or title cards.
Many of the films were shot off the cuff, generally in actual locations. A Dash Through the Clouds, made in
Sennett’s first year at Keystone, is as interested in the visual appeal of
Mabel Normand flying in a plane to save her sweetheart, who has gotten into
trouble in the Mexican quarter, than it is with the plot itself. The camera at
times seems to aspire to nothing more than capturing the moment and portraying
the sheer excitement of movement, especially as it tilts and pans to follow the
plane.
Kid Auto
Races at Venice, made in 1913, depicts little more
than what the title suggests. But through its very simplicity, it allows the
camera to play an important role, becoming a little film about cinema itself.
Sennett’s crew pretends to shoot documentary footage at the races while
Chaplin, in his first effective screen performance, already in Tramp attire,
pretends he doesn’t know what they’re doing, repeatedly standing in front of
the lens and blocking the camera’s view even as an increasingly enraged Henry Lehrman
boots him out of the frame.
But Sennett had also learned how to tell a story; he learned
from the best—literally—as an actor, and later writer, for Griffith. In Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life
(1913), he puts to great comedic use some of the cinematic techniques that his
master would become so famous for. When “the Girl,” played again by Mabel
Normand, gets captured by a band of grossly overacted villains led by Ford
Sterling, the crosscutting between the train tracks where she is tied, the
inexorably approaching locomotive, and the speeding car carrying her saviors is
masterfully executed. This parody shows just how close the suspenseful,
exciting last-minute rescue is to the comic chase. All it takes is a scrambling
of the editing rhythms, a distortion of the protagonist’s difficulties, a
slight alteration or exaggeration of the characters’ personalities, and an
expansion of time ad absurdum, and tense melodrama dissolves into laughter.
As skillful as Sennett was at burlesquing other genres, he
was and is infinitely more renowned for his knockabout of the kops and kustard
variety. A Mud Bath (1914) features
perhaps the first pie in the face ever to be committed to film. The victim,
Normand, is pursued throughout the film by Sterling’s “persistent suitor,” so
arduously that she must run away to get married to the man she loves. In the
heat of the moment, characters get soaked, socked, stuck in the mud, and shot
at, all during a continuous, frenzied chase which will call for the services of
the “Water Police,” an early iteration of the Keystone Kops. Disaster,
disorder, and disintegration are the norm, at a pace that comes as a shock and
an insult to human and physical laws, gravitational as well as geometrical. Sennett’s
ballistic nightmare of a crazy world reaches its climax perhaps in A Desperate Scoundrel (1915), an endless
series of jests, farces, gags, falls, chases, and coincidences surrounding a
small fortune that is stolen, lost, or found at least every minute or so.
Roach would often reach as much pandemonium as Sennett, but,
unlike Sennett, he’d do it in the most logical, psychologically clear way,
building tension and momentum and increasing the pace and frenzy only
gradually. Even the most absurdist and destructive moments are anchored in the
characters’ logical actions and reactions. The closest Roach came to Sennett’s
brand of comedy was in the films starring Snub Pollard, Roach’s version of a
Billy Bevan or Chester Conklin. Pollard, with his upside-down Kaiser Wilhelm
moustache and eyes that move, close, open, squint and widen seemingly
independent of one another, mistakenly disposes of all of a family’s
possessions in Sold at Auction
(1923). When the owner, James Finlayson , returns, every last item must be
recovered, including a grand piano—currently on a runaway downhill slide—and a
pair of false teeth bought by a pilot. Pollard chases the piano down and rides
it straight into its rightful owners’ home—never mind that half their house
gets torn down in the process—and the false teeth generate a search of
spectacular proportions, which demands stealing a plane, demolishing a barn,
acquiring both a pig and a chicken on the wing of the flying plane, falling
into an oil derrick and getting swung by a rope in a great arc directly into
the plane he is pursuing, then falling from that
plane straight through the roof of
Finlayson’s house.
With Sold at Auction, Roach effectively and violently entered
Sennett territory, but there are signs of a slightly different mind at work.
The actions in the film all have a logical base: Pollard was given the key to
the wrong house before commencing the auction, and now he is persuaded by the
owners of the house (at gunpoint) to right his mistake. When random objects are
thrown—and given the material, it is to be expected that they will be—the
violence is brought about by a carefully laid-out plan: Pollard, having sold
some of Finlayson’s possessions to the next door neighbor, starts playing the
trumpet outside his window, in anticipation of the objects that will be hurled his
way; they are dutifully caught—most of them, at least—and replaced in the house
they came from.
Madness was the norm in both Sennett’s and Roach’s films. In
Sennett’s comedies, however, “no one ever held still long enough to say so….
all present leapt to the attack on the instant, giving the film a single
dimension” (Kerr 110). Sennett’s gags and tricks have no logical explanation.
They are neither a protest against nor a celebration of speed and
mechanization, but an unassuming acceptance of them as conditions of life,
energetically turned into festive disorders of chaos. Beds race down highways,
planes burst through buildings, cars carry or throw out inhabitants seemingly
at random, with each turn around a corner or swerve between convergent streetcars
and expresses, all for no reason whatsoever. “Once we stop to let anybody
analyze us, we’re sunk,” Sennett said (qtd. in Kerr 64). Surprise, the shock of
speed and motion, is a key element of most Sennett films. Roach took a
different approach.
Instead of trying to conceal the mechanics of the joke and
avoid any anticipation by moving so quickly from one gag to the next, Roach “bided
[his] time in sheepish close-ups until we’d been given an opportunity not only
to catch up with the joke but to get well, well ahead of it” (Kerr 334). He
relied on lengthier gags that were more carefully constructed and more smoothly
polished. His comedic sequences often came with a beginning, middle, and end. This admirable control of intensity, rhythm,
and structure, which became almost a science on the Roach lot by the
mid-twenties, culminated in the films of Laurel and Hardy, the most famous
comedians—after Harold Lloyd—to work for Roach, and “the most artful
practitioners of the Roach structure of accumulation” (Mast 190).
Although the two comedians did not change any of Sennett’s
gags or invent anything new, they completely inverted the dynamic: “Like two
children caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they confessed. They
confessed to the joke” (Kerr 330). Instead of trying to fool audiences with the
same fall down a manhole they had seen a thousand times before, they showed
them the manhole, explained the fall most carefully, and slowly carried out the
entire affair as “a ritual through which the well-informed [viewers] were
courteously conducted, a ceremonious tour of well-marked territory” (Kerr 330).
Although Roach does from time to time adopt the Sennett spirit of surprise, he
never leaves it at that. In Putting Pants
on Philip (1927), the first teaming of Laurel and Hardy in the formula they
would be remembered for, Stanley suddenly disappears from the frame as the pair
walk down the street in a medium shot. Pulling back the camera to a long shot,
Roach reveals a manhole with the unlucky feet sticking out. The joke comes as a
jack-in-the-box, a Sennett surprise. A few shots later in the short film,
however, Laurel and Hardy walk down the street in a long shot, and the manhole
that will, this time, make Hardy its victim, is plainly visible.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy took the essential Roach
premise—a clear, one-dimensional, petty psychological trait magnified to
all-encompassing proportions. “Tall oaks from little acorns grow,” the motto on
the comedic team’s furniture-moving van proclaims in The Music Box (1932); their films provided proof for the statement
again and again, as the most catastrophic events develop from little slips,
innocent mistakes, and childlike forgetfulness. The starting point of any
Laurel and Hardy film is that they are basically overgrown children, incapable
of sensible, competent adult activity. Unlike Harry Langdon, with whom they
share this trait, however, they assume they are the exact opposite of
incompetent children, and the films consistently puncture their illusions and
pretensions of maturity.
Throughout their prolific career, Laurel and Hardy have
repeatedly and continually demonstrated that they are simply terrible at
everything, playing terrible carpenters (in The
Finishing Touch), terrible salesmen (Big
Business), terrible drivers (Two Tars),
terrible furniture movers (The Music Box),
terrible musicians (You’re Darn Tootin’
and Below Zero), terrible escaped
convicts (Pardon Us), terrible
process servers (Bacon Grabbers),
terrible soldiers (Beau Hunks),
terrible husbands (Sons of the Desert)
and, the pinnacle of incompetence and self-conscious literalness, terrible children as well (Brats). Because Ollie is more sure of himself, he gets slammed
harder with insufficiency, its psychological implications as well as the ensuing
physical results; he can take it. Stan makes less ado about his adult
abilities, simply breaking down and weeping, that most childish of childish
responses to dissatisfaction.
Sennett’s eye for pure looniness extended to everything and
everyone within the frame. “The Keystone world had very little to do with
reality, except as a distorted and sped-up reflection of it” (Mast 49). The
unnatural world he created is a completely closed, hermetically sealed universe
which functions according to its own laws, separate from reality, a world in
which injury and death are unknown, in which bullets, knives, bricks,
collisions, and falls are funny because they can neither hurt nor kill. Roach,
however, filled in the background of his world, generally with ordinary
individuals who were either caught up in the chaos or saw absolutely nothing
extraordinary in the unusual things going on about them; “their passivity made
the world insane on the double” (Kerr 110). But, at the same time, perhaps
unpredictably or even unintentionally, it made the world more human, adding a
layer, however twisted, of psychological truth to the insanity.
Pies in Roach films were not carelessly thrown; the act of
throwing a pie required the utmost logic and preparation. Furthermore, Roach would
never use one pie or a few isolated pies, as Sennett did, “but take one pie and
build the oneness to infinity” (Mast 185). In The Battle of the Century (1927), this idea is taken quite
literally. Laurel, “the Human Mop,” has just lost another boxing match, and
Hardy, his manager, has decided to take out an accident insurance for his
friend. In an effort to hasten an accident, he places a banana peel on the
street in front of Laurel. When, unavoidably, someone else slips and falls,
Laurel innocently presents Hardy with the peeled fruit in front of the victim.
As comedic necessity would have it, the wronged passer-by is a pie-vendor, who
now enacts his revenge on Hardy in a most Sennettesque fashion. As Hardy
retaliates, he misses his target, hitting another passer-by, now a forced
participant in the battle.
Before long, the entire street devolves into a pie fight. In
You’re Darn Tootin’ (1928), Laurel
and Hardy play struggling musicians. Hardy, infuriated by his friend’s
inability to get a song right, lands a punch on Laurel’s midsection. Still
holding his gut, Laurel enacts his revenge by kicking Hardy in the shin. They
take occasional breaks from the blows to rip each other’s ties, shirts, jackets
or vests apart, and even to stomp on each other’s hats. The two catch an
innocent passer-by in their crosshairs. Within a minute there are seven
participants in the fight, within two there are over twenty, and by the end of
the sequence the sidewalk is overrun with ragged-trousered, hopping, ducking,
punching, kicking, and stooping hysteria.
Laurel and Hardy and the other members of Roach’s repertoire
had an uncontested ability to infect the seemingly normal characters inhabiting
their world with their childish destructiveness. Even the most respectable
people in Laurel and Hardy films—homeowners, landlords, professors, European
princes, policemen, nurses, and dentists alike—can be turned into a mess of
pie-slingers, shin-kickers, and pants-pullers. Stan and Ollie bring out the
worst in everybody. But what makes their specific brand of chaos so different
from Sennett’s is the attitude these characters display when hurling pies,
brinks, and sticks , ripping each other’s clothes, cars, or houses. They do it methodically,
experimentally, calmly, and, often, without actual malice, thinking carefully
and deliberately before coming up with the next atrocity, which is to be
carried out in the most detached manner possible. The heat of passion and the
frenzied haste of Sennett’s best movies give way to a certain kind of rational insanity in the childlike
equation of revenge and justice. The absurdist “tit for tat” sequences create a
psychological paradox. Each character takes it in turn, allowing his opponent
to tear his clothes, destroy his car, ruin his shop or home—in short, to do his
worst—before retaliating. The comedy consists of the pauses between the gags
more than the gags themselves.
In Big Business
(1929), surely one of the most destructive of Roach films, Laurel and Hardy
play Christmas tree salesmen. After a failed attempt to secure a buyer, Laurel
manages to get the tree stuck in the front door. The increasingly irate home
owner, played by Finlayson again, opens the door, again and again, so Laurel
can retrieve his tree and then his coat. Not willing to give up just yet, Stan
comes up with an idea for “big business,” returning to the same house to ask if
he could take an order for next year. Finlayson emerges with a pair of garden
shears and does his worst to the poor tree. Enraged, Hardy appropriates the
shears to snip the few fronds of hair still present on Finlayson’s glossy head.
After the shears get repurposed to Hardy’s shirt and tie, the characters start
coming up with more and more inventive methods of retaliation.
By the end of the two reels, Laurel and Hardy have made a
shambles of Finlayson’s home, and he has reduced their curbside automobile to
shards of tin. Neither party made the least effort to protect what was his own.
Stan and Ollie hurl porch lamps through the house’s windows, uproot or cut down
the varied vegetation of the lawn, and pitch vases from one another to be
batted with a shovel; Finlayson watches patiently, only after they have
finished marching to their car, with Laurel and Hardy not far behind, to yank
out headlights and throw them through the windshield, tear a door off, or strip
away the fender. The film follows a stately, almost formal, ritualistic
procession from car to house and back again. A small neighborhood crowd gathers
to watch the proceedings, like spectators at a tennis match, following the ball
from one side of the court to the next, deeply interested; a policeman drives
by and stops, emits a mildly disapproving scowl, and starts taking notes. Roach
cuts from Laurel and Hardy to Finlayson to the crowd or the cop and back again.
No one intervenes. As if participants in a ceremony, the characters behave,
between assaults on inanimate objects, with the utmost circumspection.
Another key difference between Sennett and Roach is in their
treatment of characters. “Sennett put puppets into a puppet world” (Mast 50).
The filmmaker’s characters are not mortal, human beings of flesh, blood, and
personality, but mechanical toys designed specifically to bear the kind of
physical torture they’re constantly subjected to in the Keystone world. Absence
of characterization is essential; depersonalization is the key to comic shock.
We don’t fear for the health and safety—or, indeed, for the lives—of the
characters because we think of them not as people, but as machines; they might
break, but they can be fixed or replaced. “Pavlov’s dogs are masterminds
compared to those nippy little knockabout monsters, dashing about the screen
with the rapidity of jumping fleas” (Durgnat 71).
The tremendous talent of the Sennett lot included both performers picked up in his days at Biograph
(such as Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, Fred Mace, Del Henderson, and Henry
Lehrman) and newcomers, some of which will go on to become the greatest of all
silent clowns. The filmmaker had an incredible eye for talent, but, unlike on
the Roach lot, actors failed to develop distinct and idiosyncratic personas and
personalities. Sennett’s films did not allow the pauses necessary for
individual identification. “The clowns were, in effect, masked blurs racing
from entrance to exit, knocking over indoor tables and outdoor pedestrians
along the way. The masks came with the moustaches” (Kerr 70). Mabel Normand and
Gloria Swanson were largely interchangeable, as were Bevan and Conklin,
Sterling and the other bearded o mustachioed villains, and the small army of
Kops played by a procession of actors.
Sennett turned human bodies into projectiles and packages
whose fates become matters of weight, momentum, trajectory, and inertia, often
guided by sharp, staccato movements. Figures dashed, smashed, crashed, and
splashed. They ran after things they wanted, away from things they wanted to
avoid, over mountains, dangerous ledges, fields, and beaches, or rode in cars,
boats, on animals or bikes. “And they kept running until they smashed into
something that stopped them, fell into something that soaked them, or simply
fainted from exhaustion” (Mast 50). The acting is overdone and excessive, a
ridiculous burlesque of human attitudes and emotions, further removing the
figures on screen. How could we possibly take the villainous Sterling
seriously—or care about his demise— in Barney
Oldfield when he has spent the entirety of the film twirling his
substantial moustache and chomping down on cigars so hard you’d think he was
having a seizure?
Objects become as
important as characters. If living beings were turned into inanimate objects,
than inanimate objects were turned into living beings. Boats, trains, cars,
bikes, planes, bricks, rocks, guns, sticks, and, of course, custard pies have
more personality than the actors onscreen, and they are consistently frantic,
destructive, and violent. Long shots diminished the importance of players, but
also increased the effect of these objects, and of the various, visually
pleasing effects of shapes in motion. Roach used closeups frequently,
especially on his actors’ faces to convey feelings and thoughts. His performers
were comic people rather than depersonalized machines. We recognize the
characters on the screen and care if they hurt—still not too deeply, though;
how else could we laugh so hard? But when the camera lens passes from Hardy’s
delightfully florid sashays into holocaust to Laurel’s furrowed brow, which
only bespeaks the undying hope that “the worse will not be worse than last
time,” we instantly feel sorry for Stan (Kerr 328).
Later in Sennett’s career, the rough and tumble were
replaced by more complex, complicated, and coherent stories, and much of the
particular charm, excitement, spontaneity and freshness was lost. The nonsense
and pandemonium of the Keystone period was elevated—or reduced, depending on
how you look at it—to seemingly straight stories peppered with irreverent gags.
Parodies like Teddy at the Throttle
(1916)—compared to, say, Barney
Oldfield’s Race for a Life, made only three years prior—are more dependent
on production values, complicated plots, and use of special effects. The Mabel
and Fatty series, particularly the agrarian comedy Mabel and Fatty’s Simple Life (1915) present a more domesticated,
polished couple than Sennett’s earlier works.
Isolated sequences, however, come close to true comedic
genius, reapplying the same equation of motion, frenzy, and the exponential
multiplication of absurdity that governed the work at Keystone. One scene from Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life displays
incredible inventiveness and insistence: Fatty, having fallen down a well, is
momentarily retrieved as a couple of men lift him up by a rope. When Mabel
grabs the rope, the men let go, and she is instantly lifted to the branches of
a nearby tree. As Fatty is pulled up from the well again, Mabel falls in, and
now he gets stuck in the tree. The sequence rhythmically repeats the switch so
that every member of the small cast gest a chance to explore not only the
height of the branches but also the wet depths of the well.
Tillie’sPunctured Romance (1914), Sennett’s first feature film
and the most ambitious Keystone project, is a prime example of a “peppered”
film, a potentially serious melodrama that becomes a pretext for a series of
gags. The gags are often not enough to sustain what is basically a dramatic
story with all the drama undercut for two reels, let alone a feature-length
film. Many of Sennett’s later shorts and all of his features explore familial
intrigues and social-climbing agendas, resulting in a double-crossed filled
confusion between husbands, wives, children, lovers, and robbers. The filmmaker
paid little attention to emotion, motivation, and psychology; characters
behaved the way they did only to serve a simple formula. The emotions that are portrayed become strictly literary
conventions, merely ideas of love, jealousy, lust, anger, greed, or
vengefulness, and not realistic feelings based on psychology or motivation.
While the best comedies of both Sennett and Roach dealt in
massive amounts of madness and often arrived at just as much destruction, their
methods were fundamentally different. Sennett coupled simple and violent human
attitudes with a dazzling, dizzying delirium of mechanical and physical
knockabout, in a world of rude, random, and utterly amoral behavior. Although
Roach had no notion of abandoning the original Sennett impulse, he did have
some interesting variations to play on it. He developed a slower pace and a
more personalized view of comedic madness, picking motivation and decision out
of the chaos. While Sennett gave us puppets and machines in an unreal,
unnatural world, Roach gave us people in a world that vaguely resembles our
own, a world of reason and logic, however much warped. The deliberateness and
gradual buildup of the destruction created a perfect snowball effect in Roach
comedies, whereas Sennett had given us an avalanche and a snowstorm all rolled
into one. In short, he didn’t always know, as Jean Cocteau put it, just how far
to go too far.
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