Sunday with Charley Bowers

This Sunday, we're jet-lagged yet undaunted - and thinking of many things, especially the bad news about untimely passing of classic film enthusiast, archivist, presenter-curator-showman, historian and teacher Dennis Nyback two weeks ago. Literally just heard about this as I was waiting at the gate in Terminal 5 at JFK and going through my e-mails on the laptop in the hour before boarding.

The intrepid gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog has nothing but respect and admiration for how the even more intrepid Dennis quite literally took inventive, entertaining programs of classic movies in glorious 35mm and 16mm all over the world.

We pay tribute to Dennis, a friend of both this blog and the KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival as well as a super nice guy, with a post full of imaginative and cinematic stop-motion goodness, courtesy of the one, the only Charley Bowers (June 6, 1887 – November 26, 1946).

So, this Sunday, October 16, 2022, we respectfully tip our vintage Max Linder top hats to champion of classic movies Dennis Nyback and champion of animation Charley Bowers.



Charley Bowers is among the most idiosyncratic and relentlessly inventive figures from the history of cinema and animation.



This writer first became aware of Charley Bowers when Louise Beaudet of the Cinémathèque québécoise (and, later, the Cinémathèque Francaise) brought a devastatingly wonderful retrospective to the United States. It was screened at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, among other venues, in 1984 - and I was there!



The considerable exploits as an animator, cartoonist, journalist, silent movie comedian, stop-motion innovator and children's book author accomplished by Charley Bowers make many of us classic movie and animation buffs wish we could time-travel and land some interviews with him way back when. As Mr. Bowers passed in 1946, such historians as Michael Barrier, Milt Gray, Mark Kausler, John Canemaker, Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald did not get to interview him.



It would be an understatement to note that the Charley Bowers Blu-ray is a must for any film buff's collection.

The producer of this set, Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films, has been an enthusiastic champion of Bowers' stop-motion animation.



Leonard Maltin penned a rave review of the Bowers Blu-ray on his website.



Bowers' unique approach combines the silent 2-reeler format and sight gag comedy conventions we associate especially with Buster Keaton with way-out animation. As the wacky Vitagraph comedy shorts starring early 1920's "king of prop comedy," the equally cartoony Larry Semon, found an audience decades after their original theatrical release on Italian television as Ridolini, the films of Charley Bowers enjoyed new fame and acclaim in France, starring the comedian-animator as Bricolo.



In some Bowers Comedies, he plays a tall tale teller who can top all the other tall tale tellers with his outrageous stories.



In other Bowers Comedies, he plays an eccentric inventor to the hilt.







Within that eccentric inventor persona, Bowers merges Buster Keaton's understated style with elements of the equally unconventional silent movie comedian Harry Langdon.







Although Bowers' starring 2-reeler series with FBO and Educational Pictures had ended in 1928, he did make a successful transition into talkies and continue producing the most original (and way-out) stop-motion animation showcases.



The last stop-motion pieces by Bowers were produced in the late 1930's and early 1940's.



One, WILD OYSTERS, appeared as part of the otherwise undistinguished Animated Antics series released by Paramount Pictcures in 1940-1941. Am hard pressed to think of another cartoon that features crustaceans not only as main characters, but as bad guys!



For more on the films of Charley Bowers, check out John Canemaker's splendid superb tribute (posted on his blog two months ago) and Imogen Sara Smith's outstanding article in the entertaining and scholarly Bright Lights Film Journal.