Jenni Hiltunen has directed a number of shorts featuring crude and eccentric behavior. “Blink” is easily the least vulgar of these, but also the most surreal.
Tag Archives: Black and White
CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE, PART TWO
The first in a two-part series on “Chaplin at Keystone” (read the first part here).
Charlie Chaplin‘s first solo directorial effort, Caught in the Rain, is an inauspicious one. It starts off as another comedy in the “day at the park” subgenre. Alice Davenport flirts with Charlie after her husband, Mack Swain, walks off on an errand. Compromising positions follow, of course, taken straight from Keystone founder Mack Sennett ‘s gag assembly line. Sennett himself directed the next six Chaplin shorts.
A Busy Day features Charlie in drag, trying to disrupt a parade in a shameless rip-off of his previous Kid Auto Races At Venice. A Fatal Mallet also stars Sennett (a rare appearance, and for good reason—his acting is more uneven than his directing) fighting with Charlie over girly girl Mabel. They are both dull Sennett products exhibiting little craftsmanship or art.
The Knockout is a half hour long, an epic for Keystone. It is basically a Fatty Arbuckle boxing vehicle with Charlie coming between prize fighter Fatty and Edgar Kennedy. Chaplin’s ballet-like brand of slapstick (barely) salvages the film, and The Knockout again makes it abundantly clear why Chaplin quickly outshone his peers.
Mabel’s Busy Day is an eccentric step up. Mabel is the much put upon, unkempt hot dog vendor at a race track. Charlie, as a dandy, arrives amidst much shenanigans, including dance-like slapstick with some Keystone Kops. Charlie spies the patrons abusing poor Mabel. He comforts her and, when her back is turned, he steals her hardware to go into business for himself, with predictably disastrous results. Chaplin here is without sympathy, even if he ends up as abused as the girl he himself abused and, realizing what she has been put through, finds enough pity for her to accompany her through the iris out. Again, the odd chemistry between Charlie and Mabel inexplicably works, although Chaplin would find more apt female counterparts later in his career.
“Laughing Gas” (1914, unrestored)
Chaplin co-wrote Mabel’s Married Life with Norman and, although Sennett officially directed, it is moving towards the style film historians will later term “Chaplinesque”; it is easily the best of the Sennett-directed Chaplin Keystones. Charlie and Mabel are a married couple out on a Sunday promenade in the park. Charlie grudgingly shares his banana with the Mrs. He momentarily steps into an inn, which gives Mack Swain ample opportunity to stop and flirt with Mabel. The Continue reading CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE, PART TWO
CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE, PART ONE
The first in a two-part series.
Watching Charlie Chaplin‘s work for Keystone Studios is a bit like watching the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it may take a bit of adjustment for modern viewers. Like Walt Disney’s rodent, Chaplin’s Tramp persona was slowly polished into a screen character that audiences loved and rooted for. Populist tastes had much to do with this, but, in the process of refining the character for the masses, some of the Tramps’ rough edges were burned away. Revisiting the earliest incarnations of either character leads to a disconcerting discovery: the earliest versions were roughly etched and somewhat underdeveloped, but less predictable; they possessed not altogether sympathetic personality traits that contemporary audiences may find uncomfortable, especially when compared to their later refinements.
Earlier this year, Flicker Alley released the restored Keystone Chaplin shorts. That restoration was long overdue. For years, public domain labels had churned out DVD prints that were so execrable as to be virtually unwatchable.
In 1914, his first year at Keystone, the Tramp is in his infancy, and his later self is only occasionally glimpsed. Making A Living (1914) is notable mainly as Chaplin’s screen debut. The Tramp is not yet born; rather, Chaplin appears as a swindling, Don Juan-like English dandy who foreshadows few characteristics of the famous persona. This mess of a film was directed by the Austrian native Henry “Suicide” Lehrman (so nicknamed by stuntmen because Lehrman, unconcerned about the danger of stunts, was risky to work for). Lehrman later dated actress Virginia Rappe. At the time of her death in the infamous Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Lehrman testified against Arbuckle at the trial and capitalized on the publicity. In the Chaplin at Keystone collection Lehrman appears as a reporter in Making a Living and as a film director in Chaplin’s second released film Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. (which he also directed).
Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. is the film in which audiences first saw Chaplin as the Tramp. This vast improvement over Chaplin’s debut was entirely improvised, shot in less than an hour. The Tramp shows up at an auto race and, spying a film crew, becomes obsessed with being the center of the camera’s attention. The race crowd is at first curious and then entertained by the Continue reading CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE, PART ONE
SATURDAY SHORT: FREE FALL (1964)
Academy Award nominated director, Arthur Lipsett, gained attention through his merging of capricious audio and video clips. Shortly after receiving near carte blanche from the National Film Board of Canada, Lipsette lost his privileges for making shorts that were too weird.
ERICH VON STROHEIM’S THE MERRY WIDOW (1925)
With this 2011 Warner Archive Release, most of Erich von Stroheim’s “personally directed” films have been released with the inexplicable, frustrating exclusion of his legendary, mutilated Greed (1924). Only von Stroheim could have taken Franz Lehar’s 1905 giddy operetta “The Merry Widow” and turned it into a silent fetishistic melodrama. The Merry Widow stars Mae Murray and John Gilbert. Murray’s screen persona alternated between virgin and vamp . Here, she is the virgin who becomes the much sought after prize. Despite having unique on-screen charisma, Murray, one of early cinema’s true divas, was among those who could not make the transition to sound, and her off-screen life was not afforded a happy ending. She married a real-life Prince who forced her to leave MGM, then divorced her, and took custody of their children. Years later, Murray, homeless, was arrested for sleeping on park bench in NYC. She died, forgotten and in poverty, in a nursing home in 1965. Gilbert’s decline into alcoholism is, of course, far better documented.
Quite surprisingly, The Merry Widow was a critical and box office success for von Stroheim. The film was so successful that it was remade in 1934 by Ernst Lubitsch (as a musical, replete with the Lubitsch touch, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald) and in a best-forgotten 1952 version starring Lana Turner. Despite a studio mandated, ill-fitting happy ending, von Stroheim’s silent version is, predictably, the most bizarre. The director added much to the story, stamping it with his idiosyncratic touch and causing the film to go considerably over schedule and over budget. The previous Continue reading ERICH VON STROHEIM’S THE MERRY WIDOW (1925)