The best closer for Memorial Day Weekend after all those service comedies starring Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis, etc. is Bugs Bunny. Spoiler alert and best line from the following Chuck Jones cartoon: "so they're inducting rabbits".
These cartoons cheer the crew up here as we wish we could have trekked out to Ohio for big screen fun at this weekend's Columbus Moving Picture Show film festival and also bid farewell to The Late Show, one of our favorite TV programs going back to the 1990's David Letterman years.
As the gang here in the Hudson Valley wishes we could take a Star Trek teleportation device - used or new - directly to the San Francisco Bay Area to enjoy the annual Charlie Chaplin Days event presented by the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum this weekend, we doff our Max Linder top hat to a lesser known but marvelous silent movie comedian, the great Poodles Hanneford (1891-1967).
We'll start with the following presentation by the Chapman Museum (pride of Glens Falls, NY) on the bareback ridin' movie comedian.
Edwin "Poodles" Hanneford, king of the circus bareback riders, entertained audiences for 4+ decades; his last onscreen appearance was in Charles Walters' 1962 film Billy Rose's Jumbo. Grizzled baby boomers may recognize Poodles as one of the circus performers from the 1935 Shirley Temple - Joel McCrea flick Our Little Girl.
The bio posted by the Chapman Museum adds: Originally from Ireland, Poodles was described by Life Magazine as “the world’s greatest equestrian clown.” He began working for Ringling Brothers in 1917, and appeared in films and on many popular U.S. television shows. He lived on Ridge Road and Kattskill Bay.
Wikipedia adds, "Praised by Buster Keaton as "the only trained acrobat I ever saw who could take a fall and make it look funny," Poodles is considered among the greatest trick riders in history. He was the first to perform a somersault from one running horse to another. He held a Guinness Book of World Records record for performing a running jump onto a horse and stepping off 26 times in a row."
Notably, in the following excerpt from Ain't It The Truth (1928), Poodles is wearing a Buster Keaton style porkpie hat.
Poodles did somersaults, handsprings and other acrobatics thought to be impossible (on or off of a horse) and even worked with slapstick king Roscoe Arbuckle when the big fella was directing 2-reelers as "William Goodrich." Here's Poodles with frequent Buster Keaton co-star "Big Joe" Roberts.
His astonishing skills as a bareback rider are the core of several classic comedy shorts Hanneford starred in, such as Circus Daze.
In the opinion of the silent comedy fans here, the very best 2-reelers produced by the Weiss Brothers/Artclass Productions are those starring Poodles Hanneford. With apologies to the frequently hilarious Ben Turpin and Snub Pollard, the Poodles Hanneford comedies are the reason we recommend VCI Entertainment's Weiss-O-Rama 2-DVD set.
And, yes, it's true - Poodles Hanneford, acrobat, rider and comedian supreme, met Charlie Chaplin back in 1917. Happily, the beat goes on in 2026 with Tommy Chapay Hanneford, the latest generation of the Royal Hanneford Circus tradition.
In closing, and with another Max Linder top hat tip to physical comic and bareback rider supreme Poodles Hanneford, by all means, San Francisco Bay Area residents, do head over to the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum and the Edison Theatre at 37417 Niles Boulevard in Fremont this weekend for the 2026 version of Charlie Chaplin Days.
Obscure or lesser known movie comedians, anyone? Here's one of our favorites: Harry Sweet (1901-1933).
Harry Sweet was an uber-goofball slapstick artiste and writer-director-star in the 1920s and early 1930's.
Harry Sweet, gifted physical comedian and acrobat, starred in zany short subjects for Mack Sennett, Joe Rock, Century Comedies and most memorably RKO Radio Pictures.
Here he is with comedy queen (and prototype for cartoondom's Olive Oyl) Gale Henry in WHAT, NO SPINACH?
Why are we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog wild about Harry? Because his starring vehicles, especially the early 1930's talkies, are wacky beyond belief! His uninhibited style is akin to comics from many decades later, from Jerry Lewis to the Pythons to Rik Mayall to Chris Farley to Melissa McCarthy.
Readers will note quite a few familiar faces from Hal Roach Studios and the Columbia Shorts Department in the supporting cast of the following opus from Sweet's starring series for RKO.
Am taken aback by how few Harry Sweet starring vehicles, both silents and talkies, have been posted on YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, Internet Archive, even given that he passed over 90 years ago. While he didn't, as Harold Lloyd did, headline a gazillion films, those Harry Sweet starring vehicles the gang here have seen (most via prolific YouTube poster Joseph Blough and San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker and vintage comedy expert Lory-Michael Ringuette) are riotously funny.
Sweet was most adept in the pratfalling art of physical comedy.
Invariably, Ed Kennedy 2-reelers written and directed by Harry Sweet are a hoot!
Shortly after writing and directing the hilarious Next Door Neighbors, Harry launched the "Mr. Average Man" series starring slow-burnin' Edgar Kennedy in 1931.
For more info, read the following Harry Sweet bio from the long gone but insanely informative Hollywood Oblivion website.
Meanwhile, we hope more long lost films Harry Sweet directed and/or starred in will miraculously turn up, as a Fox short subject starring wiseguys Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough did.
Classic movie aficionados lucky enough to both be within a close distance of San Francisco and have some dough-re-me on hand to spend will get quite the treat when the San Francisco Silent Film Festival hits the Castro Theatre from May 6-10.
Returning to the big screen from 100+ years ago ready to rock the house - silent movies at their operatic best, accompanied quite literally by a symphony orchestra. San Francisco's 29th Silent Film Festival will return to the hallowed "movie palace" aisles of the Castro Theatre after presenting at the Orinda Theatre in 2025.
This Wednesday evening the San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns in high style with Erich von Stroheim's wonderfully indulgent epic QUEEN KELLY (1929), starring Gloria Swanson at her unapologetically over-the-top best, with musical accompaniment by composer Eli Denson conducting the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra.
Among the international lineup of cool classic movies at the 29th San Francisco Silent Film Festival: King Vidor's innovative THE CROWD
The last film of F.W. Murnau, his collaboration with documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, TABU: A STORY OF THE SOUTH SEAS
Also on the 29th SFSFF bill: William Wyler's western BLAZING DAYS, Abram Room's time capsule tale of life in 1927 Russia BED AND SOFA, the 1926 "Lubitsch touch" charmer and Roaring Twenties piece SO THIS IS PARIS
And. . . William de Mille's MISS LULU BETT, the British sci-fi flick HIGH TREASON, Carl Dreyer's 1922 film LOVE ONE ANOTHER and two "city symphony" pieces from Nice and Paris, Á PROPOS DE NICE (co-directed by Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman) and RIEN QUE LES HEURES, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti.
Matinee idol star power will be provided by the aforementioned Gloria Swanson, director/actor Harry Piel, a pre-Josef Von Sternberg Marlene Dietrich, megawatt It Girl Clara Bow in HULA, an early appearance by the great Myrna Loy and THE CAVEMAN, a witty farce featuring the tragic albeit wonderful comic character actress Marie Prevost.
Our pals Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy will headline the Saturday morning show.
Animation, this blog's favorite cinematic genre, will be represented by the Japanese Paper Film Project. The Bucknell University-based initiative worked with Japanese museums, film archives, and individual collectors to digitize and preserve more than 200 films, in this program early animated works made on paper, not celluloid.
Chicago film preservationist Kyle Westphal adds, “the project has successfully recovered the world of lost paper print movies made expressly to be exhibited on home projectors manufactured by Osaka’s Katei Toki and Tokyo’s REFCY and Tsukiboshi firms from 1932 to 1938. With the Japanese animation industry facing hard times, these firms bypassed theaters and took their wares directly to consumers."
The free AMAZING TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES program will be back to highlight film preservationists and the great work of film archives around the world. Presenting: Kyle Westphal of the Chicago Film Society, the
Danish Film Institute’s Thomas Christensen, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf's Andreas Thein and Carlo Chatrian of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin.
Spectacular silent movies in big screen glory are never (in 1926 or 2026) actually silent, so the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentations feature a wide array of terrific accompanists, including the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Duo Yumeno, Stephen Horne, Mas Koga, Guenter Buchwald, Frank Bockius and Wayne Barker.
The official San Francisco Silent Film Festival press release adds:
Germany’s Weimar period was one of the most vibrant and influential moments in cinema history. Stretching from the end of WWI until the Nazi takeover, Weimar films were at the forefront of stylistic and technical innovations and created narratives that underpin film genres like horror, film noir, and sci-fi to this day.
Our friends at WeimarCinema.org write, “[Weimar] is also shorthand for all things modern, not only in its promotion of gender equality and sexual emancipation, but also in its spirit of experimentation in the arts.
Weimar is still associated with urban modernity and the ever-present dangers of a backlash. Whatever the final verdict, Weimar's tumultuous 14-year period is one of the richest and most consequential in modern history."
We are excited to present four very different, very rare, Weimar titles at this year’s festival, all in beautiful new restorations, all with live musical accompaniment!
Deutsches Filminstitut’s restoration of SENSATION IM WINTERGARTEN demonstrates Max Green’s gorgeous camerawork featuring Berlin’s fabulous Wintergarten (it didn’t survive WWII) and other Berlin locations. This rousing melodrama about a world-famous trapeze artist stars Austrian actor Paul Richter who played Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen.
Proof that film restoration can be as exciting, with as much down-to-the-wire pacing as modern film production, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf just found additional material to add to their superb restoration of HIS GREATEST BLUFF and archivist Andreas Thein is working round the clock to prepare the film for its closeup at the festival.
We’re pleased to introduce San Francisco audiences to a major star of the Weimar period who is virtually unknown today, actor/director Harry Piel. Piel’s action films were huge box office draws—this one involves priceless jewels, slick-haired crooks, and Piel in dual roles as twin brothers! And a star turn by Marlene Dietrich in one of her earliest screen appearances.
Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer, known for his silent-era masterpieces The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr among others, travelled to Germany to make LOVE ONE ANOTHER in 1922. Based on a best-selling Danish novel, the film is set during the Russian revolution of 1905, a time of massive anti-Jewish violence. We are grateful to the Danish Film Institute for restoring this rarity and returning Dreyer’s moving depiction of anti-Semitism’s sinister harms to the world.
BOOKKEEPER KREMKE is the story of vainglorious payroll clerk (Hermann Vallentin) who loses his job to automation in a Germany plagued by inflation and unemployment. Ukrainian-born Anna Sten has her German film debut as his daughter Lene. This was director Marie Harder’s only narrative film, and it is a vivid portrait of its time. Harder, who was a Social Democrat went to Mexico after the Nazis banned the party and died in a plane crash near Popocatépetl in 1936. Thanks to the Deutsche Kinemathek for this dazzling restoration.
Imogen Sara Smith writes in our program book, “Watching films from the late Weimar era is both poignant and suspenseful, like watching people skate on thin ice in the last rays of sun before an approaching storm front.” There are parallels to our own time.
