Thinking, as we do often, of movie comedians who successfully transitioned from silents to talkies.
Some studios and funmakers did better than others. Mack Sennett had his problems adapting to the new medium but did employ the likes of Harry Gribbon, Vernon Dent and Andy Clyde - and a couple of years later, the brilliant W.C. Fields.
Next: comediennes in early talkies, led by the following bravura performance of Marie Dressler in Hollywood Revue Of 1929. She must have been devastatingly great on stage!
Marie & Polly Moran both made Mack Sennett comedies back in the WW1 era and actually worked as a comedy team in 1927-1931 MGM features. Here they are in the Al Christie talkie DANGEROUS FEMALES.
Another actress who got big laughs in both silents and talkies was "baggy pants comedienne" Louise Fazenda, former star of Universal Joker, Mack Sennett and Educational (Jack White) Comedies - and later a key supporting player in Warner Bros. musicals. She plays a Calamity Jane gunslinger type in the following "when men were men and sheep were nervous" scenario.
While the spotlight on silent movie comediennes who successfully transitioned to sound should definitely include Marion Davies, there are no short excerpts from her early talkies available via YouTube, Daily Motion and Internet Archive, just complete features. Alas, Mabel Normand, Wanda Wiley and Alice Howell did not make any sound movies. Have read that Fay Tincher's last film, All Wet (1930), was a Universal Pictures talkie 2-reeler starring Syd Saylor, but have never seen it.
Then there's Educational Pictures, which featured the often inspired and memorable comic Lloyd "Ham" Hamilton
The Lloyd Hamilton Talking Comedies would be his second run with E,W, Hammons' Educational, the prolific comedy films distributor, starting in 1929.
Lloyd Hamilton's sound pictures from 1929-1931 represent a comeback after a stretch in which personal problems including multiple injuries, homelessness, unfortunate presence at drunken brawls and hard partying in general got him banned from the screen for a year.
In Toot Sweet, Hamilton does a good job of bringing his unrelentingly snakebit, shabby sad sack character from silents to sound.
Don't Be Nervous, featuring Ham in a dual role, would be my favorite of the Lloyd Hamilton Talking Comedies, along with the extremely funny Prize Puppies from 1930.
Hamilton continued starring in very funny talkie 2-reelers through the early 1931 Educational releases.
Before his decades as a megastar of British movies and stage shows (Me & My Girl), Lupino Lane starred in short comedies through the teens and twenties. As was the case with Lloyd Hamilton, he adapts to sound quite well.
A favorite of the musical comedy aficionados at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog remains this very wacky number co-starring the ever-charming Lillian Roth with the ever-tumbling Lupino, as always a gifted physical comedian, from the Ernst Lubitsch feature The Love Parade.
Now it's on to the Hal Roach Studio. A bunch of the Lot Of Fun stars and stock company members, including Max Davidson, Thelma Todd and Eddie Dunn appear together in this Edgar Kennedy 2-reeler.
100 years after his heydey, Harry Langdon remains both among the funniest and most polarizing of all movie comedians.
The gang here are among the few who are not only okay with Langdon's utter oddity and consider it his m.o. as a performer, but actually find his much maligned Hal Roach talkies quite funny in a very unorthodox way.
Devoted an entire post to these films - here's one of them!
Robert McGowan created the Our Gang series and helmed the films in silents by speaking the directions to the child actors, so these first talkies, in which he absolutely could not do that, are fascinating.
They are also interesting in blending the series' silent era stars, a.k.a. Hal Roach's Rascals, with the group that would increasingly carry the first season of sound Our Gang comedies.
Can't omit Laurel & Hardy from this mix. Berth Marks is notable for establishing something of a Guinness World Record for the amount of screen time devoted to one bit. The unrelentingly claustrophobic scene in the Pullman car features rather amazing extended physical comedy by Stan & Babe.
Our favorite of this bunch of early talkie comedies by far is Charley Chase and Thelma Todd in CRAZY FEET!
Are Charley and Thelma irreverent, extremely goofy and hilarious? Yes.
Acknowledgments: Weirdo Video, Geno Cuddy, Ralph Celentano, The Library of Congress, Dave Glass and all those involved at Sprocket Vault (Kit Parker, Richard M. Roberts especially) in making the 1929 Hal Roach talkies available on Blu-ray and DVD.
This year's National Silent Movie Day is on Monday, September 29.
Indeed, the looming end of fall and unwelcome beginning of winter means National Silent Movie Day. The following promo's misinformation - my responses include what do you mean silent movie overacting? ever seen Buster Keaton or Lloyd Hamilton? have you heard of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew? WTF? - and what sounds like a bogus AI narrator leaves a great deal to be desired, but at least this video tepidly expresses enthusiasm for silent films.
So, on this truly saturnine Saturday in godawful 2025, let's jump the gun and celebrate National Silent Movie Day with cool classic comedies!
As we're suckers for comedy films at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, only always, here's yet another favorite movie comedian, the aforementioned and original Lloyd "Ham" Hamilton!
We go for Buster Keaton as enthusiastically as sci-fi aficionados go for Star Trek and Star Wars!
Charley Chase is a perennial favorite.
The recent release of Chase's 1927 silents on Blu-ray is a comedy treasure trove.
And then there's Laurel & Hardy. . .
Our favorite of all movie comedy teams!
Stan and Babe will soon be on a much awaited Blu-ray, Laurel & Hardy, Year Three: The Newly Restored 1929 Silents.
And then there's our favorite comedienne of silents and early talkies, the winsome, witty and frequently hilarious Marion Davies. She did amazing, hilarious work in silents - how William Randolph Hearst didn't comprehend that Marion was a gifted comedienne, we'll never know.
We love When Knighthood Was In Flower, Show People and The Patsy!
Of course, we also love cartoons and there were some terrific silents, well before Disney's emergence in 1925-1927.
We especially enjoy Earl Hurd's Bobby Bumps series.
Earl Hurd's animation of Bobby Bumps was way ahead of the curve in the World War I era.
As always, we're suckers for the Fleischer Studio, Out Of The Inkwell and the subsequent Inkwell Imps!
With an enthusiastic binge-watching of Fleischer cartoons and a shout-out to Mr. Chaplin in the following clip, we say Happy National Silent Movie Day two days early!
For further celebration of National Silent Movie Day, we shall check out what Fritzi Kramer at Movies Silently will be posting; she has been doing outstanding work for many years now, as has Lea Stans at Silent-ology.
Don’t know what Imogen Sara Smith is working on these days; might be upcoming books on silents, might be a deep dive into pre-Code cinema or articles for NOIR CITY magazine. She ranks high atop the list of the best of the best film historians and remains the only author to wrote about both Charley Chase and Charley Bowers.
Another terrific author and film historian, Ben Model, has an excellent new book, The Silent Film Universe.
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are enjoying this book immensely; by all means, read it to celebrate National Silent Movie Day. Excellent work, Ben!
After almost 19 years writing Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, this is post #1400.
While, admittedly and embarrassingly, I deleted at least two or three posts due to laughably egregious errors, shall proclaim this Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog entry to officially be the 14 hundredth! Yay!
How does the blogmeister feel about writing post #1400? Feel like Virginia O'Brien, the deadpan diva, in this great song from PANAMA HATTIE, which should begin with her slapping overbearing Red Skelton across his overacting kisser (and, bear in mind, we like him as Red Skeleton in the Tex Avery MGM cartoon WHO KILLED WHO).
So this blog shall celebrate post #1400 without bubbly (thanks T2 diabetes, ya rat bastard). We'll start with some supercharged improvisational proto-metal British rock from Deep Purple, live in Belgium. Yes, indeedy, Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord and Ian Paice had chops.
How will we celebrate the silver screen stuff we love, while also kicking ourselves for missing the 80th anniversary of the execution of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci on April 28. With a respectful nod to the enduring classic movie genre that broke big time during World War II, film noir.
The Burt Lancaster starring vehicle Brute Force is an inspired cross between Jimmy Cagney style caper thriller and film noir.
Nearly eight decades after noir's heydey, celluloid heroes Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame still bring the heat.
Don't recall any other noirs featuring larger-than-life Charles Laughton (except the harrowing tale of evil he directed, Night Of The Hunter), but the following classic, THE BIG CLOCK, is a chiaroscuro dilly and post 1400 worthy.
Prominent in the "silver screen stuff we love" category is silent era comedy. Here are several all-time favorites from all-time favorite silent movie comedians, starting with Buster Keaton in ONE WEEK.
Next up: vintage musical short subjects from way back when Sammy Davis, Jr. thrilled vaudeville as a ridiculously talented child entertainer and Frank Sinatra was studying the phrasing of Bing Crosby and Russ Colombo. Especially love those pre-Code musical short subjects, especially Vitaphone's Melody Masters series.
Here, in the 1932 Vitaphone musical classic, The Yacht Party, the mindblowingly limber Melissa Mason does her best terpsichorean triple-jointed impersonation of the even more mindblowingly limber and quadruple-jointed comedienne Charlotte Greenwood. All we can say is "go, Melissa, go!"
The following Vitaphone 1-reelers present absolutely amazing and talent-filled mini musicals, the glaring preponderance of 1920's and early 1930's style racial stereotype bits notwithstanding. That's The Spirit stars the comedy team of Flournoy Miller & Mantan Moreland (yes, that guy, Sidney Toler's sidekick in Charlie Chan flicks), The Washboard Serenaders, powerhouse singer/tapdancer/actress Cora La Redd and Noble Sissle's red-hot swing band.
Alas, as there was still a color line, big time, in 1932, Cora La Redd, who would have mopped up the floor with all tapdancers not named Eleanor Powell and given the Sophie Tuckers of the world a run for their money, did not subsequently get to appear, even briefly, in RKO, Paramount and MGM musicals.
Backing actress of stage and screen, vocalist and dancer Nina Mae McKinney, star of King Vidor's Hallelujah, Eubie Blake's band headlined the following 1932 Vitaphone short. The super-talented kids whose exceptional dancing brings this Vitaphone Melody Master to a rousing finish:
The Nicholas Brothers.
Another of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog's all-time favorite films is Smash Your Baggage (1932), starring Small's Paradise Entertainers. Jazz legend Roy Eldridge is in the band!
Lupe's co-star in this terrific comedy is the fast talking EPITOME of pre-Code. . . the one, the only Lee Tracy.
Also on hand: the familiar croaking voice of Eugene Palette.
Of course, the pre-Code flick we REALLY want to see is Convention City (1933).
The phrase pre-Code and the names of splendid actresses, Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak mean the gang here is watching this movie! And it features screen immortal Lyle Talbot, two decades before Plan 9 From Outer Space, as an oily rat bastard!
Of course, we also love pre-Code cartoons, even those Ub Iwerks Studio productions starring Willie Whopper!
Watching Iwerks Studio cartoons, must extend kudos, bravos and huzzahs to animators Grim Natwick, Shamus Culhane, Berny Wolf and music director Carl Stalling.
Also love the very pre-Code version of Tom & Jerry by New York's Van Beuren Studio.
Any Fleischer Talkartoon featuring Betty Boop, Koko and Bimbo is sure to be a winner.
Always liked this 1932 Screen Song featuring Betty Boop as a mermaid and using a certain Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby ditty from the Marx Brothers opus Horse Feathers.
What's the best way to finish post #1400? Warner Brothers cartoons!
Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog extends multiple hat tips to the directors of these cartoons, Bob Clampett and Frank "Tish Tash" Tashlin. Love those guys!
It's the sincere hope of the gang here that we shall be lucky enough to still be alive, kicking (even slowly) and blogging for post #1500 down the road.
For classic movie buffs and comedy geeks, especially silent era comedy geeks, the Christmas season invariably means mandatory viewing of classics by Hal Roach Studios (a.k.a. The Lot of Fun).
One of my greatest experiences watching movies was my first viewing, in an auditorium packed with cub scouts and their dads, all ROFL, of Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, starring as incredibly inept Christmas tree salesmen in BIG BUSINESS (1929).
Starring the boys and nemesis Jimmie Finlayson, BIG BUSINESS was greeted with uproarious laughter from the scouts and their dads.
Another holiday must-see from Hal Roach Studios is There Ain't No Santa Claus, starring Charley Chase and Noah Young.
Could there be more jokes about ill-fitting Santa suits and ridiculously long beards? No.
Nobody combines the outrageously silly with nuanced character-based comedy quite like Charley.
This reminds the comedy-crazed rapscallions at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog that there is a new Blu-ray release of Charley's very funny silent 2-reelers, some featuring Babe Hardy in the supporting cast.
The press release elaborates: Both Charley Chase and the Hal Roach Studios Golden Era was in the late 1920's, and 1927 was the year Charley Chase was the Lot of Fun's Number One star.
His films from that period, directed by his brother James Parrott and supervised by Leo McCarey, were not only some of his best but were also some of the greatest comedies from the silent era. Most of these classic shorts have never been seen since their original release, and this set combines materials from film archives and private collections from around the world to bring these shorts together for the first time, all with wonderful accompaniment from Dr. Andrew Simpson, commentary tracks by noted Hal Roach Historian Richard M. Roberts, and restoration by the experts at CineMuseum LLC.
Fifteen great comedy shorts like MANY SCRAPPY RETURNS, WHAT WOMEN DID FOR ME, THE WAY OF ALL PANTS, and US, show Charley Chase as a comedy talent at the top of his game, with interesting co-stars like Lupe Velez, Jean Arthur and Eugene Pallette, as well as Hal Roach regulars like Anita Garvin, Charley Hall, Noah Young, and even Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Special Features include three bonus short subjects and an extensive photo gallery. This set is a must-have for all fans of Charley Chase, Silent Comedy, and the work of the Lot of Fun, from one of the most fun years the Lot ever had.
Preceding this selection of Charley's 20 minute comedy masterpieces on Blu-ray: Laurel & Hardy's incredibly funny silent slapstick fests of 1927-1928.
The latest Flicker Alley release, the 1928 L&H gems, packs quite the classic comedy punch.
This is our last post for 2024. We wish all a Merry Christmas- Happy Hanukkah - Cool Kwanzaa - Felicitous Festivus (retroactively) and shall return on January 3, 2025 with a post about silent screen comedy goddess Marion Davies.
When asked the question who is your favorite comedian and who makes you laugh the hardest the answer, in a tie with Laurel & Hardy, is Charley Chase (1893-1940).
Along with L&H and Our Gang, he starred in very funny short subjects series produced in the 1920's and 1930's by Hal Roach Studios.
Charley, A.K.A. Charles Parrott, was the brother of director/comedian James Parrott and worked steadily in front of and behind the camera, beginning in 1913-1914, at Christie Comedies, Mack Sennett's Keystone, King Bee, Fox and Hal Roach Studios.
Charley was a brilliant comedian who could sing, dance, act, write and direct.
Charley Chase began directing with Sennett in 1915 and largely stayed behind the camera, piloting Snub Pollard's absurdist 2-reelers and contributing (with Robert MacGowan and Tom McNamara) to originating the Our Gang series, until beginning starring in 1-reelers for Hal Roach in 1924.
Charley is best known today for his role as the obnoxious, loudmouthed conventioneer in the 1933 Laurel & Hardy feature SONS OF THE DESERT.
In what unfortunately, with his untimely passing in 1940, ended up being a short career, Chase starred in numerous short subjects, while also directing other comics, from The Three Stooges to Smith & Dale to Lloyd Hamilton to the Hal Roach Studios "female L&H" team of Thelma Todd & Zasu Pitts. He directed comedy short subjects through his late career stint in 1937-1940 at the Columbia Shorts Department.
Chase's silents and early talkies produced by Hal Roach Studios crack me up!
The silent comedies Charley starred in, co-directed and wrote with Leo McCarey in the mid-1920's are certainly among the funniest ever made.
These are the classic comedy films that, no matter how many times I have seen them, get me ROFL!
Chase made a smooth transition to talkies and brought his musical talents and songs to the hilarious 2-reelers.
One of my favorites bits is the "asparagus" routine in YOUNG IRONSIDES (1932), featuring a recalcitrant green vegetable and, as Charley's co-star, the winsome Muriel Evans.
Collectors of classic movies, way back in the pre-VHS, Beta, DVD and Blu-ray days, much enjoyed the 16mm prints of Charley Chase comedies (silents and talkies) available through Blackhawk Films.
Ran 'em over and over and over. The following Chase classic, THE HASTY MARRIAGE (1931), co-stars Laurel & Hardy nemesis Jimmie Finlayson and the Gracie Allen-ish comedienne Gay Seabrook.
Charley Chase's patented comedy of embarrassment - a.k.a. "whatever the worst thing I fear can happen to me is about to happen - and worse than imagined" - translates quite well to talkies.
We thank Blackhawk Films for making these classic 2-reel comedies available on 16mm back in the 1960's and 1970's.
Charley played four roles in the appropriately titled 1934 short subject FOUR PARTS.
Every year on October 20, I make sure to thank Charley for the laughs and watch a few of his films.
I also tip the battered Max Linder top hat to the guy who designed many posters promoting Chase's Hal Roach comedies, the great Al Hirschfeld.
