Picture, if You Will, An Ancient Egyptian Pendant. . .

The Egyptian Mystery, a short comedy produced by Edison in 1909, uses "stop trick" effects to create a supernatural tale that teeters precariously between comedy and horror.  The film has all the elements of a Twilight Zone episode.  A society matron learns that her new pendant, an artifact unearthed in an Egyptian tomb, has strange and dangerous powers.  She orders her cook to dispose of the pendant, but the cook gives the item as a gift to the iceman.  The iceman is so grateful that he hugs the cook, who promptly disappears in his arms.  Everything that the iceman touches vanishes into thin air.  At one point, he makes a park bench dematerialize, which causes a pair of lovers seated on the bench to crash to the ground.  He touches a streetcar, which leaves the passengers sitting alone on the bare ground.  Distraught, the iceman returns home and locks himself in his bedroom.  With the damage that he has done weighing on his mind, he reaches out a trembling hand to his reflection in a mirror.  As soon as his fingers make contact with his reflection, the iceman along with the pendant vanishes in a puff of smoke.

Myths about the Hope Diamond undoubtedly had a direct influence on this story.

Cursed jewelry has continued to be part of movie folklore.  Take, for instance, the dark medallion of The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). . .

 
or the dreaded opal necklace of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009).

Ever since W. W. Jacobs wrote "The Monkey's Paw," an entire horror genre has grown up around the eerie influence of cursed objects.

An Honorable Mention: Frank Daniels

Frank Daniels, an illustrious stage actor, came out of a brief retirement to make his film debut for Vitagraph in 1915.  In his association with Vitagraph, he starred in two feature films and nearly four dozen short comedies from 1915 to 1917.  He played a variety of regular characters, including Captain Jiggs, Kernel Nutt and Mr. Jack.

The National Film Preservation Foundation posted one of Daniels' rare comedies, Captain Jinks, the Cobbler (1916), to their website.  If you would like to know more about Daniels, I recommend that you read the highly informative film notes that are provided.

Here are a few other photos of Daniels.

A Sneeze

Ben Turpin in He Looked Crooked (1917)

Laurel and Hardy in Bonnie Scotland (1935)

Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977) 

A Fat Kid and a Thin Kid

For years, I wanted to see Fireman Save My Child (1954).  The film was developed as a vehicle for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, but Costello got sick before principal photography began and Universal executives decided to continue production with other actors.  The actors that replaced Bud and Lou were fresh-faced studio contractees, Buddy Hackett and Hugh O'Brian.  O'Brian said that not much thought went into their casting.  He said that an executive essentially said, "Let's get the fattest kid and the thinnest kid."  The idea of Hackett and O'Brian acting as junior stand-ins for this iconic comedy team made this a film that I had to see.

Last month, I was excited to find a DVD of Fireman Save My Child available on eBay.  After waiting forty years to see the film, all that I needed to do to get a copy was to click on the "Add to Cart" button.  I have to report, after finally seeing the film, that it was not worth the wait.  The film is sadly dull and predictable.

 
The film, which is set in San Francisco during the 1910s, involves a rookie firefighter who has invented a fire extinguisher that he is sure with revolutionize firefighting.  Its comic business relies on every prop that you would expect to find in a firehouse.  Hackett first tangles with a fire pole, then a hose, and finally a trampoline.  The film has one original routine, which centers on a married couple played by former wrestler Henry Kulky and former beauty queen Adele Jergens.  Every time the fire truck swerves around a sharp curve outside the couple's apartment building, one of the firefighters is sent soaring into the couple's home.  The fact that these strange men keep turning up in his home increasingly upsets the hot-tempered husband, who is convinced that his pretty wife is having a multitude of affairs.

Hackett does his best to approximate Costello's attitude and mannerisms, but he fails to be as funny or sympathetic as Costello.  Hackett convinced the director, Leslie Goodwins, to let him do part of his stand-up act during a dinner party scene.  This grim monologue may have gotten laughs in a nightclub, but it is out of place with the rest of the light-hearted film.  The pudgy, marble-mouth comic abruptly stands up in the middle of dinner to tell the other guests about his childhood.  He starts out talking about his birth.  He gripes that he and the other babies were not allowed to smoke in the nursery.  Then, he describes his poor relationship with his parents, who were always trying to get him to run away from home or jaywalk into a busy street.

 
O'Brian said that the film made money for Universal and he and Hackett were asked to team up for a series of films.  Hackett's response was unequivocal.  "I work solo," he grumbled.  O'Brian, himself, told the executive that he wanted to be a serious actor.

I mentioned on Facebook that I could not find anything about this film worth writing about.  Bart Rosenberg, a Facebook friend, pointed out that the film has the distinction of featuring two future cast members of the Batman television series.  Madge Blake plays the fire commissioner's wife and Stafford Repp makes a brief appearance as a coachman.  That's about as notable as Fireman Save My Child gets.

Here are a couple of lobby cards for the film.

Hollywood Madness!

Hollywood has been less than realistic in its depiction of mental illness.  This can be seen clearly in two films, A Beautiful Mind (2001) and As Good As It Gets (1997).

A Beautiful Mind (2001) is a biopic of Nobel Award-winning mathematician John Nash.  The film opens at Princeton, where Nash is studying mathematics.  Nash is clearly withdrawn and unsocial.  He tends to avoid eye-contact with his fellow students. He often grins to himself as if he is enjoying a private joke.   Nash claims, in his defense, that people don't like him and he would do better to avoid them.  This, however, is not a notion supported within the film.  Those around Nash mostly express admiration of the math prodigy.  At first, students and teachers simply assume that he is too obsessed with his work to have interest in social interaction.   Even his most serious rival is generous in his assessment of Nash, who he simply sees as "mysterious."

Nash continues to keep to his own thoughts until he meets his new roommate, Charles.  He becomes relaxed enough with Charles, who is funny and encouraging, to divulge to him his more intimate feelings and aspirations.  The film surprises viewers when it is later exposes Charles to be imaginary.  By then, Nash has fabricated other imaginary acquaintances, including Charles' young niece Marcie and a Department of Defense agent named William Parcher.  On the basis of these delusions, Nash is diagnosed with schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia do have difficulty telling the difference between what is real and what is imagined, but they do not have the spectacular hallucinations depicted in the film.  A schizophrenic person will not see, hear and touch people who do not exist.  Their hallucinations are generally auditory, usually represented by a chorus of voices.  The voices serve no purpose other than to berate the schizophrenic.  Louis Sass, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, explained, "[I]f I were schizophrenic, I might hear John and Mary saying, 'Okay, so why is Louis doing that now?' and then Mary would say to John, 'Oh, he's just a jerk, he always does that kind of thing.' They go back and forth, but sort of a commentary, often critical, on my ongoing behavior."  This critical commentary is only slightly evident in the film.  When Nash tries to ignore Charles, Charles tells him, "It's never going to work.  It's pathetic.  I'm ashamed of you."  A schizophrenic will not see a person who isn't there, but he may see an object, let's say a tree stump, and misinterpret it as being a person.  A schizophrenic described seeing a line of cars in the street and believing it was a giant caterpillar.  But auditory hallucinations are not as dramatic as the visual hallucinations that dominate the film.  A filmmaker will sacrifice the truth for drama every time.

Like most schizophrenics, the real-life Nash did hear voices that mocked and argued with him.  At times, he thought the voices were coming from angels.  He came to believe that he was the Pope and the angels wanted him to come up with a mystical number that would prove the existence of God.  Grandiose delusions and paranoid delusions are common with the schizophrenia sufferer.  Nash's greatest delusion among many delusions was a longstanding belief that he was finding messages from extraterrestrials hidden in newspapers.  A friend and colleague asked Nash, "[H]ow could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof. . . how could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?"  Nash replied, "Because. . .the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did.  So I took them seriously." 

In his portrayal of Nash, Russell Crowe exhibits clumsiness as an early sign of the disorder.  He becomes anxious and distracted after he loses at a board game called Weiqi.  When he stands up, he clumsily knocks over the game board.  This is misleading.  Medication for schizophrenia impairs coordination as a side effect, but the illness itself is not responsible for these type of actions.  Crowe is more authentic in his failure to look directly at other people.  It is due to deficits in attention processing that schizophrenics often fail to demonstrate common eye tracking.

As the story continues, Nash grows increasingly violent and paranoid.  Frustrated by the slow progress of his work, he smashes his head through a window pane and pushes an oak desk out of a third-story window.  He reaches the climax of his violence and paranoia when he is confronted by a psychiatrist, Dr. Rosen, and becomes so aggressive that he must be restrained.  Dr. Rosen decides that he must forcibly institutionalize Nash to remove him from stressful environments.  The doctor initially medicates him with an antipsychotic, Thorazine, but after a violent episode, in which Nash slits open his wrists in search of an imaginary government implant, he subjects him to electroshock therapy five times a week for ten weeks.

Nash can no longer rationalize his delusion when he realizes that one of his imaginary friends, the little girl Marcie, never grows old.  This is pivotal in getting Nash to cooperate with treatment.  The antipsychotics enable him to ward off the delusions, but they paralyze his intellect and make him sexually impotent.  This man, who once found great meaning in his work, feels lost and depressed when he is forced to stay home and do nothing.  His wife, having lost the trust and intimacy that she once had with her husband, grows distant from him.  Nash eventually refuses to take his medication, which triggers a relapse of his psychosis.  Parcher, the imaginary Department of Defense agent, now returns with a whole team of codebreakers, who set up their headquarters in his garage.  These delusions distract Nash while he's caring for his infant son.  The infant, who is left unattended in the bathtub, nearly drowns.

In working through this crisis, Nash abandons his medication.  Nash and his wife decide to do their best to live with the peculiarities of his disease.  Nash allows the delusions to persist, but he fights off their control of him.  He later explains to a friend that he has simply become used to ignoring them.    The film was roundly criticized for simplifying schizophrenia in the same way that Rain Man (1988) simplified autism.  New York Times critic A.O. Scott criticized the film for turning Nash into nothing more than a "shy, lovable genius."  Dr. Ken Davis, chairman of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said, "[T]he notion that willpower can really overcome schizophrenia is ludicrous."  

A Beautiful Mind is similar to Silver Linings Playbook (2012), in which Bradley Cooper stops taking his medication and controls his behavior through force of will.  Silver Linings Playbook manages in its depiction of bipolar sufferer to focus on manic episodes and completely ignore depressive episodes.  It makes sense from an entertainment standpoint.  Manic episodes are so much fun that we should put a bunch of those in the film.  Depressive episodes are so terribly dreary that we should just leave those out.  But it simply isn't accurate.

The message of A Beautiful Mind is that people with schizophrenia can be productive and successful with the proper support, but that support is defined as social support rather than medical support.  This is an issue that has been debated by experts in the field.  Dr. Steve Lamberti, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester, is the one lone medical authority who defends the film.  He alleges that the schizophrenia sufferer does have some control over the illness.  He said, "While one cannot simply will the disease away, many people do learn to cope effectively with schizophrenia." Lamberti added, "An environment that is structured, predictable and supportive is helpful for most individuals with schizophrenia. . . The importance of family support has been increasingly recognized in the field of psychiatry over the past 20 years, and new forms of family education and treatment have been developed."

As Good As It Gets (1997) also emphasizes the importance of social support.  The main character, Melvin Udall, is tactless and self-obsessed.  He spends his day concentrating on his work and offers little in the way of social interaction.  He panics when another person reaches out to touch him.  He must regularly wash his hands with steaming hot water and a freshly unwrapped bar of antiseptic soap.  He checks and rechecks his door locks.  He goes to the same diner every morning, sits at the same table, and orders the same breakfast.  He sets aside the diner's utensils in favor of wrapped, disposable utensils.  He cannot walk down the street without avoiding cracks in the sidewalk.  His obsession with avoiding germs causes him to keep away from coughing children and to put on disposable plastic gloves before he touches a pay phone or opens a cab door.  In packing for a trip, he is fussy about folding and organizing his clothing.  Melvin, we learn, has been diagnosed as suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

A person afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder experiences a continuous cycle of intrusive thoughts that urge them to perform various rituals.  The person knows that these rituals are meaningless and unreasonable, but avoiding the urge to perform them incites overwhelming stress and anxiety.  These intrusive thoughts tend to consume a great deal of their time and interfere with their daily lives.  They can, if allowed, get out of control and take over a person's life.

Hollywood usually depicts people with this disorder with violent or comically affected behavior.  The latter was evident in the television series Monk, which derived inexhaustible comedy from the quirky behavior of obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk.  Like Melvin, these characters typically display grouchy dispositions.  They are sarcastic, bitter, and testy.  However, such behavior is not related to OCD, but a similarly named disorder known as Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder.  This is a personality style characterized by a harsh conscience and rigid behaviors.  These people have, based on their orderliness, parsimoniousness, and obstinacy, what Freud described as an "anal character."  Dr. Michael Jenike, a Harvard psychiatry professor, maintains, "No personality type is associated with OCD."  It is in fact the rituals, like avoiding cracks on a sidewalk, that strictly put Melvin in the OCD category.

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that several medications have been proven helpful for people: clomipramine, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, sertraline, and paroxetine.  The institute also recommends therapy in which "the patient is exposed to whatever triggers the obsessive thoughts, and then is taught techniques to avoid performing the compulsive rituals and to deal with the anxiety."  Growing evidence indicates that OCD represents abnormal functioning of brain circuitry, most likely involving a part of the brain called the striatum.

Melvin, though, is not receiving treatment.  He admits to having seen a "shrink," but the man became so frustrated and exhausted with Melvin that he stopped treating him.  Melvin emphatically refuses to take medication, at one point saying, "My doctor. . . told me that in 50 to 60 percent of the cases, a pill really helps.  I hate pills.  Very dangerous things, pills.  I'm using the word 'hate' here about pills."

Melvin befriends Carol, a waitress, and Simon, a neighbor who is recovering from injuries that he suffered in a robbery.  His fixations diminish as he focuses on these other people.  He doesn't think to avoid sidewalk cracks or recheck his door locks.  Melvin tells Carol that she makes him "want to be a better man."

The protagonists of A Beautiful Mind and As Good As It Gets are similar in many ways.  They are both work-obsessed.  They both do poorly interacting with other people.   They both find social talk exhausting.  They both find that they can be drawn out of their shell by a loving woman.  The films even include similar scenes in which the woman quietly caresses the man's cheek and kisses him.  The filmmakers set aside medical treatment to focus on personal relationships.  Film critic Darren Mooney called this a "conventional life-affirming narrative."  It is much like the overused plot in which a depressed widow or a bitter divorcee meets a wonderfully nurturing person and learns to love again.  A film cannot present satisfying drama when, ultimately, the hero is a prescription.  Filmmakers are willing to serve a story's dramatic needs by advocating personal strength and human contact as cures more effective than medication.  It doesn't matter to them if this significantly distorts reality. 

Mental health issues are complicated.  When it comes to the care and treatment of mental health patients, the efficacy of medical science to bring about results remains questionable.  No magic pill can be used to rid a person of these terrible disorders.  But medication and therapy are far more useful than Hollywood films indicate.  It is more important to know that love will not cure bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism, or OCD.


Reference Sources 

The American Experience (2002).  A Brilliant Madness.  A Yellow Jersey Films production.  Downloaded March 15, 2006, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/filmmore/pt.html.

Biondo, Brenda (1998, June 19-21).  OCD: The Doubting Disease.  USA Weekend Health.

Fuertes, Janine R.  As Good as it Gets?: An Examination of the Mechanism and Mode of Treatment of Obessive-Compulsive Disorder.  Bryn Mawr College. 

Schizan (anonymous schizophrenic) (2002, April 7).  A Beautiful Mind - A nice, brilliant, but misleading movie.  Downloaded from http://www.alterpsy.org/en/jnash.php. 

The Marcel Perez Collection

Robinet Is Jealous (1914)

My boundless love of silent film comedy made it impossible for me to resist purchasing The Marcel Perez Collection.  The collection includes ten short films starring and directed by the funny and clever Marcel Perez.

Robinet makes a tour of Italy cycling (1912)

 
The first five films were produced in Italy between 1911 and 1914.  European entertainers played a dominant role in the early history of film comedy.  Perez stands out among his vastly talented peers by combining the expressiveness and charm of Max Linder with the goofiness and aggressiveness of André Deed.

Robinet is a Real American (1914)

The best of the DVD's Italian films is Robinet is Loved Too Much By His Wife (1912).  At the start of the film, Perez expresses his growing frustration with his overly attentive wife.  His wife has, for all of her care and affection, become an annoyance to him.  The worst part of having his wife cling to him is that he is unable to enjoy his occasional dalliances with other fair ladies.  French and Italian comedies of the period were more liberal on the subject of adultery than American comedies.  A charming, likable fellow could breezily cheat on his wife and the filmmakers would not find it necessary to have the character punished for his actions.  It makes this type of film seem, by modern standards, subversive.

Robinet Is Jealous (1914)

The remaining five films were produced in the United States between 1916 and 1921.  A Bathtub Elopement (1916), which was filmed in Florida, is a curious effort by Perez.  The filmmaker, who had specialized in European boulevard farces, was trying his best to approximate the rural comedies that were popular in the United States at the time.  Any comprehensive study of special effects in film comedy should include an examination of A Busy Night (1916), which uses split-screen photography along with clever editing and staging to feature Perez in sixteen different roles.  I regard this film so highly for its technical aspects that I wrote about it at length in my last book, Eighteen Comedians of Silent Film.

The American comedies of this group are longer and better developed.  In You're Next (1919), Perez is tossed out of a boarding house due to unpaid rent.  Police arrive on the scene when they learn that Perez's furniture is blocking traffic.  The genial officers take pity on the gregarious evictee and allow him take up residence in one of their jail cells.

Perez means to bring levity to the jail by banging out a lively tune on his piano.  Men and women are released from their holding cells for a merry dance party.  The most amusing part of the scene occurs when Perez has to greet the jail's unnerving collection of robbers and murderers, including a notorious "mother-in-law strangler."  The women look even rougher than the men.  Perez swallows hard when a sturdy little gal named Baby Lobster gives him a flirtatious wink.  But, because the inmates are more interested in a breakout than a ballad, Perez's effort to create frivolity only succeeds in creating a riot.  Good fellowship has its limits.

Later, Perez meets up with a pretty young woman (Dorothy Earle) who has also been evicted from her home.  Earle, who was Perez's wife, adds a great deal of charm to the comedian's American films.  It is surprising that the actress didn't work outside of the Perez series. 

The picture quality of these restored prints is exceptional.  I have, in my study of silent comedy films, seen so much terribly degraded prints that it is a relief to enjoy prints of this high quality.

I have been interested in Perez's work for the last five years.  It was not that I sought out his films at first.  The truth is that my introduction to Perez came about by mistake.  I was conducting research on André Deed when I came upon a film on YouTube that, according to the poster's description, featured Deed as a novice aviator.  The aviator, who is as clumsy as he is cocky, tears across the Paris skyline in a fish-shaped aircraft.  The film was imaginative and it was funny.  I later learned from Cole Johnson, a major authority on silent film comedy, that the errant aviator who made me laugh as he smashed up the City of Love was in fact played by Perez.  Cole sent me other Perez comedies that he had in his collection.  I will always be grateful to Cole for his generous support of my books and his kind efforts to better educate me on the subject of silent film comedy.  I benefited greatly from the photos that he contributed to my Lloyd Hamilton biography and my Funny Parts book, but I also valued the encouragement that he provided (always with affection and good humor) and the advice that he provided (always with knowledge and attitude).  I make a point to say this because, on January 23, Cole Johnson passed away.  I could not help but think of this good man as I was watched Marcel Perez, as clumsy and cocky as ever, create mayhem in the comedies featured on this DVD.

Love gave strength to Robinet (1914 )

Other highlights from the DVD:

Robinet is Jealous features Perez being subject to a violent rubdown (much like Chaplin would later experience in his 1917 Mutual comedy The Cure).

Perez secretly pursues a suspected spy while disguised as a pile of trash in Camouflage (1918).

Perez gets a job at a film studio by imitating Chaplin in You're Next (1919).

Perez plays a beaten-down husband in Sweet Daddy (1921).  As he admires the image of a beautiful woman featured on a billboard, the image magically comes to life.  Perez remained a fantasist throughout his career. 


This is the box cover to The Marcel Perez Collection. Click here to purchase.

I also recommend this biography of Perez written by Steve Massa.  Click here to purchase.

From the press release: "DVD has 10 rare comedy shorts. . . sourced from the Library of Congress and EYE FIlmmuseum seen in new digital transfers and with new musical scores by Ben Model, who also produced the DVD.  The 100-page book has more than 50 rare photos from Perez's films."

The Bold and the Bald: The Ted Healy Story

Wise-cracking Ted Healy, whose comic performances enhanced vaudeville programs, Broadway productions and major motion pictures, was a prominent, well-respected entertainer of the 1920s and 1930s.  But even the most talented and esteemed stars can easily be forgotten by the public.  This is a good reason to extol Bill Cassara's Nobody's Stooge: Ted Healy, a well-researched new biography that places the long-neglected Healy back into the spotlight.

Healy is best known today for his association with the Three Stooges, but Stooges fans have had a hard time agreeing on the importance of his role in Stooges' history.  Healy has been called the originator of the Stooges.  He's listed that way in his Wikipedia profile.  Some prefer to use the word "creator," but this offends people as it suggests that Healy was a god-like figure who endowed the Stooges with their very life while cloistered away in a desolate mountain laboratory.  Others will only acknowledge that Healy brought the Stooges together by hiring them as his comic foils.  This group refers to Healy as the organizer of the Stooges.  Still others refer to him as the Stooges' mentor, which means that he simply worked with the Stooges and a few of his notions about comedy rubbed off on them.  Originator, organizer, mentor.  We will never know for sure how important he was to the Stooges. 

Healy likely contributed more to the Stooges' act than most Stooges fans imagine.  To start, the Stooges started out as part of a vaudeville entertainment package that was carefully conceived by Healy.  He designed the Stooges to be clownish gremlins, causing mayhem as they repeatedly disrupted his act.  Didn't they remain clownish gremlins throughout their career?  And look at Healy's work.  You'll find if you watch Healy in his MGM films that he will occasionally spout a line that later became associated with the Stooges - "Spread out!" and "I'm a victim of circumstance!"  He displayed the sort of gruff mannerisms that were later adopted by Shemp.  Moe, Larry, Shemp and Curly are known to have developed their comic personas on their own.  Moe is credited with having written much of the Stooges' early material.  But Healy no doubt contributed significantly to the shape and form of the team.  You can see from the following clips that these performers were cut from the same cloth.

 

The Stooges were fortunate in that they had a number of clever individuals who helped to bring their unique talents to the fore.  What would the Stooges have been without Columbia director Del Lord?  The Stooges truly created magic when they teamed up with Lord, who combined the Stooges' stage personas with a freewheeling style of comedy that he had perfected in his days at Sennett.

Healy had busy career in Hollywood.  He appeared in thirty feature films in four years.  The book makes it clear, though, that Healy was too unsociable and self-destructive to maintain a long-lasting career in Hollywood.  He died of acute toxic nephritis, a condition that was caused by his excessive drinking. 

Much information is provided in Cassara's exhaustively researched book.  It was intriguing to learn that one of Healy's friends was Frank Fay, another big-time stage comedian who did not know how to play well in Hollywood.  If they had stuck around, Healy or Fay could have been wise-cracking their way through The Ghost Breakers (1940) or My Favorite Blonde (1942) instead of their protégé Bob Hope.  This is not to diminish Hope's talent.  He was more likable and engaging on screen than either the abrasive Fay or the even more abrasive Healy.  But the point could be made that Hope rose out of their burnt ashes.

Cassara is to be especially commended for putting to rest false rumors that Healy was murdered by a mob enforcer for gambling debts.  The official investigation was credible and thorough.  The rest is just gossip and myth. 

This book deserves attention for offering a rediscovery of the forgotten Ted Healy.  The author provides the straight and complete story of Healy, which makes this book worth reading.

 Click here to purchase.