The Big Baby

The optical trick of surrounding an adult actor with oversized furniture and props to make him look like a small child was employed by Roscoe Arbuckle years before it was employed by either Harry Langdon (Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, 1926) or Laurel and Hardy (Brats, 1930).  The effect was used for the prologue of Brewster's Millions (1921), an adaptation of a popular farce novel by George Barr McCutcheon.  The following description of the scene was included in a Film Daily review dated February 6, 1921: "Roscoe Arbuckle is not only a riot as young Brewster, but he makes a bid for the first prize in versatility when he appears as a one year old.  The introduction is immense, for 'Fatty' is shown in a high chair.  He wears a baby bonnet and is shown playing with two pieces of lump sugar which he clumsily handles (infant-like), when suddenly he surprises the audience and delights himself with rolling them, which despite his youth indicates an inborn knowledge of the African game." 

The stills from this lost film leave no doubt that the filmmakers went a long way with set design and costuming to make Arbuckle look convincing as an infant. 

However, the question becomes why the comedian would play a shrewd game of dice with sugar cubes when this less than childlike activity posed a risk of shattering the illusion.  What makes Brats so enchanting is the fact that Laurel and Hardy fully commit to their roles as children.   

Funny Old Props and Costumes

 Too few props from old comedy films are known to exist today.  I cannot say that a comedy film has produced anything as legendary as Sam Spade's Maltese Falcon or Dorothy Gale's Ruby Slippers, but I nonetheless wish more of those funny old props were still around today.

The Nineteenth Century Gentleman's Hobbyhorse that Buster Keaton had reproduced for Our Hospitality (1923) is presently housed at the National Museum of American History in Washington D. C.
 

It interested me to learn recently that this model of bicycle, which was also known as a Pedestrian Curricle or a Dandy-horse, had been popularized in England in 1818 and it was already outdated by the 1830s, which is when the film takes place.  But it doesn't really matter.  I very much share the opinion of the author of the Alpena Tweed and Bike Club website.  He wrote, "Though many people have pointed out that the Dandy-horse would have been rather old fashioned in the 1830s, . . . the thing that amazed me was how much fun Keaton made it look!"  Yes, indeed, Keaton did make it look like a fun little toy.

Not long ago, Debbie Reynolds consigned to the Profiles in History auction house a number of items from her vast movie memorabilia collection.  These items included a 1918 Ford Model T purportedly used in a film by Laurel & Hardy.  Brian Chanes, a Profiles in History representative, could not say for sure that this was an authentic article.  He explained, “[Y]ou’re not going to find a VIN number or a document proving that the car was used by Laurel & Hardy.  There’s no paper trail leading back to the Hal Roach Studios.”  Still, the buyers who attended the auction must have been convinced that it was for real because, in the end, it sold for $35,000.  Another of Laurel and Hardy's Model T Fords is on exhibit at the Hollywood Cars of the Stars Motor Museum in Miami.  The crushed car from Hog Wild (1930) is on display at The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

Profiles in History sold many of Reynolds' items at an auction held in June of 2011.  Laurel & Hardy's suits from Jitterbugs (1943) sold for $16,000.

 
A top hat and wig that Harpo Marx wore in the 1930s sold for $55,350.

 A bowler that Charlie Chaplin wore in several films sold for $135,300.

Laurel and Hardy costumes from the 1954 film The Bull Fighters sold for $7,768 at Sotheby's in December, 2002.

Joe DeRita's widow sold this mallet, which Moe Howard had used as a prop in a number of Three Stooges films.  

This wolf mask was used in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

This is the scene.

The monster's boots from Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein has also become a collectible.

    
On November 25, TCM acted as the curator of an auction event titled "What Dreams Are Made Of: A Century of Movie Magic at Auction."  Several costumes from comedy features were presented at the auction.  This includes the following:

Robert Woolsey costume from Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934)

W.C. Fields' jacket from The Bank Dick (1940)

Chico Marx's tailcoat from Horse Feathers (1932)

Harold Lloyd blazer from For Heaven's Sake (1926)

This original script from Buster Keaton's Spite Marriage (1929) sold for $1,187.

   
One interesting item that turned up at the auction was W. C. Fields' joke file.

Personally, I would most love to own Oliver Hardy's ukulele from Sons of the Desert (1933).  To me, that ukulele is truly the stuff that dreams are made of.

Our Gang Does the Classics

 
I watched a few Our Gang comedies the other day and I could not help but notice the gang using  a number of stock routines.  These routines are no doubt familiar to fans of classic comedy.

Farina employs a Rube Goldberg-style machine to make breakfast in Little Daddy (1931).

Chubby tries on a variety of hats in Bargain Day (1931).

Wheezer, Stymie and Shirley Jean perform the "Watt Street?" routine in Bargain Day (1931).

In A Tough Winter (1930), Stepin Fetchit's inept efforts at plumbing repair causes plumbing lines and gas lines to get mixed up.

 
In Love Business (1931), Jackie's mother (May Wallace) unknowingly spills a box of mothballs into a pot of soup.  Miss Crabtree, a guest for dinner, tries to politely eat the horrid tasting mothball soup, but she has finally had enough and pushes away her plate.  She forces an awkward grin and offers a perfect backhanded compliment, "It's a little too rich for me."

This is off topic, but I have to say that Dorothy DeBorba did the greatest doubletakes.

A Couple of Laughs from Weber and Fields

Weber and Fields were, without a doubt, the forefathers of Abbott and Costello.  I cannot help but think of Abbott and Costello whenever I read one of Weber and Fields' typical dialogue exchanges.

Fields - It will be the best thing I ever put your money in.

Weber - Well, I will say one thing for you.  Whenever you have pushed my money in you have done it good.  It never came back.  Sometimes I have a suspicion when you are around that my money don’t belong to me.


Fields - What you need is physical torture to reduce yourself — you're too fat. 

Weber - I don't believe in it.  I bought one of those exercisers, put it in my room, and would you believe me, I gained six pounds in a week.

Fields - You didn't use it right.

Weber - Do you have to use it?


A similar joke turned up in a recent episode of Kirstie.

That's the problem with exercise equipment.  It's not enough to have it in your home - you have to actually use it!

Spotlight on The Butler's Tale (2013)

It's nice to see a modern filmmaker make use of classic gags.  This is one of my favorite classic gags.

Here that gag was used recently by René Riva in his short film The Butler's Tale.

You can see the complete film for lots more funny business and an appearance by Jean Darling of Our Gang at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Z_sFwSBb0.

"Some of the best lines in our act are being used by Moss and Frye"

It is great reading Variety's old Artists' Forum.  This was a outlet for vaudeville performers to gripe about bad reviews and wish damnation upon those performers who had stolen parts of their act.  These are the letters from one random 1919 installment that I happened to come across.

Chicago, April 21.

Editor Variety:

Please pardon calling to your attention an error on page 13 of your last issue of Variety, referring to the "Overseas Revue." The article quotes from Percy Hammond of the Chicago Tribune and reads, "The Overseas Revue is rough, ready, unpretentious and inelegant, and it starts something that it cannot finish," etc.  I have Mr. Hammond's article before me as I preserved it on account of the beautiful way in which he expressed his regard for the artists who helped enliven the wounded heroes in Europe.  It is quite lengthy and the paragraph referring to the attraction in question reads, "The Overseas Revue is rough, ready, unpretentious and inelegant, and it starts nothing that it cannot finish," etc. The error changes Mr. Hammond's pretty compliment into severe criticism.

Lew Kelly


Detroit, April 17.

Editor Variety:

In Variety April 11 was a letter from Coy and Washburn claiming we had appropriated the idea of their act. Coy and Washburn saw our act, "The Black Ace," yesterday, April 16. Being regulars, they came back and said they were sorry for the accusation.

From reliable sources, we learned that some of the best lines in our act are being used by Moss and Frye, also LeMarie and Hayes.

Jack McIntrye
Peck and McIntyre.


New York, April 21.

Editor Variety:

Having been released just recently from the army, I find that McCree and Ledman are doing the opening of my act in Atlantic City.  I am speaking of the entrance in a baby carriage. I am the originator of this bit and seek protection.

The above act of which I am writing about is at present playing the Ackerman & Harris circuit.

Gailand Howard,
Stevens & Howard.


New York, April 23.

Editor Variety:

I am writing to protest against the Gardiner Trio who are, at present, appearing in "Take It From Me." They are doing, in its entirety, a skating dance which is my creation and which I have been doing for the past fifteen years.  I did it the first time in this country at the Colonial, New York City, in 1915.  Then with Gaby Deslys in "Stop, Look and Listen," also at the Ziegfeld "Midnight Frolic," New York Hippodrome and at Rector's in the first Andre Sherry Revue, where the Gardiners worked simultaneously in the downstairs revue; we dancing in the Ballroom.

We next went to Chicago with the Andre Sherry Revue, the Gardiners also being in the same show, working with us eight weeks, which gave the Gardiner Trio a chance and ample time to copy my dance in its entirety, even to my mannerisms.

I protest against such piracy of my material.  I can prove that, besides my dance, other parts of the Gardiner act have been lifted from others, even to the costumes they are using in a certain number.

I have written a letter of protest to the N. V. A. of which I am a member and I hope that they will help me to protect my material.

Albert Gloria,
The Glorias.

Sadly, all of the acts referenced in these letters have long been forgotten.  Gailand Howard may have gotten big laughs in Atlantic City by rolling onto the stage in a baby carriage, but he did not play a memorable role in the history of theatre entertainment.

Comedy Potpourri: Supplementary Film Clips and Other Content

It never fails.  I post an article that I believe exhaustively explores a subject, but then I comes across additional information that I wish I could have included in the article.  It is frustrating.  Take, for example, an article that I recently wrote about routines in which a character gets stuck onto something or stuck into something.  Only a week after I posted the article, I found two other routines that fall squarely into this category.

 Gilligan's Island ("Gilligan's Personal Magnetism," 1967)

Rhoda ("The Date in the Iron Mask," 1978)

I was amiss not mentioning this scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) in my handcuff routine article.

 

I wish that this next clip had come my way before I wrote my firing squad article.  The comedian is Bobby Dunn.  The film is Villa of the Movies (1917).  You will also get to see an early example of a comedian riding a missile through the air.

This less than funny version of the hat mix-up routine is from the 1972 television film Evil Roy Slade (1972).

Those people who produce reality videos like to sometimes introduce traditional routines into everyday existence.  This is the human chair routine turned into a Halloween prank.

 
Last month, I posted a soup routine performed by Laurel & Hardy.  The following clip shows Jerry Lewis applying his unique talents to the same routine in Cinderfella (1960).

I have always said that a thin line exists between comedy films and horror films.  Sitcom viewers have laughed many times when a character got locked in a meat freezer, but that same premise can easily be used to elicit fright.  This becomes evident when Alexandra Daddario gets locked in a meat freezer in Bereavement (2010).  Warning: The scene includes a brief display of nudity.

I have found several new images online in the last couple of months.  I particularly like these illustrations of Billy Reeves.

Reeves plays a drunken man tangling with a leopard skin rug in The Club Man (1915).

 
I wrote in an earlier article that The Club Man was a forerunner of Charlie Chaplin's One A.M. (1916).

I found three more animated gif files of Buster Keaton.  This includes the graphic that opens this article.  I would like to give credit to the people who created these files but I cannot find appropriate attributions.  One credit indicated that the file was created by Willie McKay, which is the name of Keaton's character in Our Hospitality.

This is a very curious discovery.  Dhamaal (2007) is a Bollywood remake of the 1963 American comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  A group of goofs is still after a buried cache of money, except now the money is rupees instead of dollars.  The English translation of film's title is, simply, Fun.

 
In this clip from the 2011 series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins discusses the ending of Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (2000).

This is similar to the ending of a classic American comedy film.  Do you know the film that I mean?  Here is a clue.

 
Okay, here is the original scene, which is from Laurel & Hardy's Block-Heads (1938).

I got to see the 1972 Dad's Army episode "Time on My Hands," which featured a tribute to Harold Lloyd's famous clock scene from Safety Last! (1923).

This is a great scene from the 1922 Hal Roach comedy Loose Change.  In the past, comedians escaped pursuers by pretending to be a mannequin or a statue.  This time, an unsavory gang of bank robbers avoids being detected by the bank president by pretending to be figures in an American history mural.

Speaking of the mannequin routine, a fast-paced variation of that routine is performed by Snub Pollard in this scene from Fifteen Minutes (1921).

 
What makes that scene unique, even more so than its pacing, is the fact that Pollard feels the need to wear a mannequin face to complete his disguise.  I cannot think of a single other time that a comedian had to go that far to make himself look like a mannequin.  It was usually sufficient for the comedian to remain perfectly still as he posed between a pair of mannequins outside of a clothing store.  I have to say that I find a mannequin mask to be creepy.     

Police corruption scandals made the police unpopular in Northern England at the turn of the Twentieth Century.  A film company located in Northern England, the Lancashire-based Mitchell & Kenyon, capitalized on this sentiment with a series of comedies that made fun of the police.  The most popular installment of this series was Diving Lucy (1903), which is featured in this clip from the BBC documentary The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon.

These films came several years before Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops.  The premise of Diving Lucy was expanded in later films, including Manual of a Perfect Gentleman (1908) and Funnicus is Tired of Life (1913).     

I will end this article today with two images of the irrepressible Larry Semon.