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, then in his second run with the prolific comedy films distributor, 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.
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 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.
“Willie Howard was the best of all the revue comics, bar none.” George Jessel “Willie Howard was a great artist. He was a fine comedian, an accomplished dramatic actor, an excellent singer, and a versatile mimic.” Fred Allen
There are reasons why Educational's final years in comedy and musical short subjects compel film historians to hide behind fedoras, shades, trenchcoats and insist "I know nothing - ask me about Francois Truffaut instead!"
Some Educational shorts are just plain bad. Others have their moments, but remain undeniably cheap and cheesy.
Almost all have sound quality recalling the ignominious "microphone in the plant" era of the late 1920's.
One Educational Pictures comedy star who did not create the fear, loathing and dread surrounding 1930's short subjects described as The Spice Of The Program: dialect comedian Willie Howard (1886-1949).
Willie was part of a team with brother Eugene on stage, radio and sometimes movies. Willie & Eugene Howard were considered the best Yiddish dialect comedy act in the business and frequently performed in The Passing Show.
Here, straight from The Roaring Twenties, are The Howard Brothers (the ones who don't say NYUK NYUK NYUK) in Between The Acts At The Opera, one of the pioneering early talkies (pre- The Jazz Singer) and vaudeville time capsules from the Vitaphone Varieties series.
Fast forward to 1937. Willie Howard, now a solo comic, is one of Educational's 2-reeler headliners. His characterization is a goofy and somewhat frenetic Parisian, sometimes a French teacher (Professor Pierre Ginsburg), other times a con artist, always on the take and on the make.
While ethnic humor frequently leaves your blogmeister as ice-cold as Buffalo Bills fans at a December home game, the comic timing, mannerisms, linguistic prowess and sheer verve of Willie Howard obliterates any "I'm too hip to laugh at this" response.
One curious fact about Willie's screen persona: how similar the zany Frenchman is to the Russian dialect characterization ("Nikolai Nikolaevich") adopted by a very young Danny Kaye in his first films, which happen to be Educational comedy shorts.
By the time the 1937-1938 season of Educational Pictures comedies and musicals were shot, the studio was on the way out. In a Hail Mary move, Earle W. Hammons cut a deal with struggling Grand National Pictures, a distributor with high hopes to expand into feature film production. Both folded in short order.
Of the Educational Pictures series, only Terrytoons, produced by the Paul Terry Studio in New Rochelle, retained its status among the 20th Century Fox short subject offerings and lived to see another day.
And with that, an important chapter in the history of screen comedy closed, punctuated emphatically by the 1937 vault fire that destroyed an incalculable chunk of film history: countless original negatives, ranging from dozens of Educational and Fox 2-reel comedy shorts to the lost F.W. Murnau feature 4 Devils.
"A strange twilight zone of down-on-their-luck silent era names like Buster Keaton and moonlighting Broadway celebrities like Bert Lahr and Joe Cook." Aaron Neathery, The Third Banana blog, December 18, 2005 "When they catch Public Enemy #1 John Dillinger, they'll make him watch it twice." Bob Hope, describing his Educational Pictures short subject, Going Spanish.
January 1933 was a dreadful time for America. Bank "holidays" began happening with alarming frequency. Powerful companies were in ruins.
How did this happen? Well, the story is lengthy and convoluted, but when one gets right down to it, Mack Sennett, Al Christie and Earle Hammons agreed that their only shot at surviving in a staggering, Depression-slammed motion picture business was to become feature film producers. All got involved in a business deal that went spectacularly kablooey: the Sono-Art-World-Wide-KBS Productions-Tiffany Studios merger in 1932 (soon to be covered at length in Richard M. Roberts' forthcoming book on film comedy).
Americans were overwhelmingly out of work and couldn't afford to buy tickets for anything, so movie houses closed across the U.S.A. The once mighty Fox Theater chain: gone. Paramount and RKO: in Chapter 11. Warner Brothers/First National - teetering on the verge of collapse. Hal Roach Studio - still operating, but on a substantially reduced production schedule. Educational: its exchanges liquidated.
Worse yet, Sennett chose, as stars of a feature length comedy, the minstrelsy radio and vaudeville comedy team of Moran & Mack (A.K.A. The Two Black Crows), popular in their day, especially on recordings, but not necessarily an act that appealed to audiences in the major metropolitan areas, even way back in 1932.
Now if one's heart's desire is to elicit aghast, stunned reactions in a 21st century audience, something akin to the response to "Springtime For Hitler" in Mel Brook's The Producers, run the Educational Pictures stinkers starring Moran & Mack. The Mack Sennett-Educational 2-reeler The Two Black Crows In Africa could still, more than 80 years after its original theatrical release, win the "Absolute Worst Attempt At A Comedy Ever Made" booby prize. Even to latter-day historians, diehard classic film geeks, fans of pre-1935 movies and experts on ethnic humor, the essential appeal of Moran & Mack - unlike silent-era Sennett comedy stars Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, Al St. John, Alice Howell, Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon, Louise Fazenda, Billy Bevan and others - still seems utterly incomprehensible.
Prolific silent comedy producer and Educational Pictures mainstay Al Christie did not retire as Sennett did. Al continued on as a producer of Educational's comedies and musical shorts in Astoria, New York and would until the last "Spice Of The Program" shorts were released in 1938.
As all of the production switched to the East Coast, the focus became Broadway stars and New York-based vaudeville acts. The new stars of Educational comedy shorts included ever-brash Bob Hope, Bert Lahr in his pre-Cowardly Lion appearances, and the ultra-zany Ritz Brothers.
Here are Harry, Al and Jimmy Ritz in their 1934 film debut, Hotel Anchovy - and pardon the dupey 18th generation print.
Also joining the Educational Pictures lineup at this time: one of the all-time greats of motion pictures, Buster Keaton.
In 1934, fresh off the humiliation that was working for the opulent, yet tone deaf, humor-challenged and comedy deficient Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Buster began starring in a series of two-reelers for Poverty Row producer Educational Pictures.
While the Educationals are as low budget as can be, unlike the MGM talkies, they showcase Buster's acrobatic skills, ingenuity and limitless talent.
Keaton's comedy chops are not just intact, but frequently sublime under the most hurried of shooting schedules and threadbare budgets.
Although the temptation is to compare these shorts to Buster's jaw-droppingly amazing films from the 1920's, in the oddest way, his ability to consistently make something wonderful within the microscopic budgets in these Educational shorts is as inspirational as his big screen epics from the 1920's.
Fortunately, all the Keaton Educationals exist and are available on DVD.
The headliners who soon joined Buster Keaton on the roster for the last three seasons of Educational Pictures comedy shorts included a wide range of vaudeville and radio acts, as well as a cartoonist!
These included the comedy team of Tim and Irene Ryan (yes, the same Irene who later starred on TV in The Beverly Hillbillies), comic artist Jefferson Mechamer, singer Neila Goodele, dancers Buster West and Tom Patricola, droll Paramount short subject star Tom Howard (soon to move on to success in radio with his quiz show sendup It Pays To Be Ignorant), Broadway dialect comic Willie Howard and character actor Ernest Truex.
Other than Keaton's series, the most sought after mid-1930's films of the Educational studio feature the original, zany and iconoclastic comedian/juggler Joe Cook (note: he made precious few film appearances, the best known one being in Frank Capra's 1930 feature Rain Or Shine).
The aforementioned roster of talent was responsible for some surprisingly enjoyable and sprightly 2-reel comedies and mini-musicals at a time when the Hal Roach Studio was phasing out short subjects, RKO had promoted shorts department mainstays Mark Sandrich and George Stevens to feature films and Columbia Pictures' Short Subject Department, under producer Jules White, became synonymous with slapstick.
And through it all, Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio, still a few years away from creating their flagship character Mighty Mouse (a.k.a. Super Mouse) cranked out cartoons - LOTS of cartoons - in New Rochelle.
The real surprises here are the sound films. Langdon, a theater veteran before heading to Hollywood, had a fine voice and had no problem adapting to sound." Phil Hall, Film Threat.
In the midst of a movie industry and U.S. economy that was in full crash-and-burn, comedies with the "Spice Of The Program" logo kept somehow getting produced. Onscreen Educational was cranking 'em out, even if offscreen, the studio's fortunes were plummeting in full Great Depression free fall.
Although many silent movie stars had their difficulties making the transition to sound, Lloyd Hamilton, once his 1927-1928 suspension for working in films ended, did quite well.
Hamilton continued starring in very funny talkie 2-reelers through the early 1931 Educational releases.
One big thing that happened at Educational in 1932 was the comings and goings of various luminaries from silent film comedy.
After the studio he headed for 15 years went kaput, Al Christie produced 2-reelers at Educational's Astoria facilities and would until the last "Spice Of The Program" short subjects were produced in 1938.
Mack Sennett left for Paramount, where he would produce his last popular short subjects series, starring Bing Crosby and W.C. Fields.
Hal Roach hired Del Lord, who had been directing the Andy Clyde comedy shorts for Educational, to helm the Taxi Boys series, which were very much in the Sennett style. Some of them (What Price Taxi, Thundering Taxis) starred silent comedy mainstays Billy Bevan and Clyde Cook in talkie versions of such car-crashing 1920's 2-reelers as Super-Huper Dyne Lizzies and Lizzies Of The Field. Del's stay at Roach would be short and he soon moved on to Columbia's comedy shorts department.
Another mainstay of Educational and Sennett comedies, ever-grizzled Andy Clyde, would soon join The Three Stooges, Harry Langdon and director/writer Del Lord as "top draft choices" of Jules White's comedy short factory.
Andy stayed with Columbia for 20 years before finding further success in television as an ubiquitous "old geezer" character actor in The Real McCoys and other shows.
Paul Terry's studio in New Rochelle continued cranking out cartoons - TONS of them - for Educational release.
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who kept Educational's comedy shorts program alive by directing (and sometimes writing) scads of them using the nom de plume William Goodrich, got the opportunity to star again in his own series at Vitaphone.
Wrapping up a brilliant screen comedy career, Lloyd Hamilton left Educational to star in 2-reelers for director Harry Edwards at Universal in 1931 and then made a few films with Mack Sennett at Paramount. Hamilton's last film, Wedding Belles, was produced in 1934 for poverty row Cavalcade Films.
Ham's replacement at Educational: another original, creative and idiosyncratic silent comedy great, Harry Langdon.
Not sharing the disparaging opinion of many historians about Mr. Langdon's sound films, I personally find Harry's 1932-1933 series for Educational, if not quite on the lofty level of his 1920's feature films (Tramp Tramp Tramp, The Strong Man, Three's A Crowd), still consistently funny, inventive and charming, with fine work from Harry and perennial foil Vernon Dent throughout.
The other star that emerged at Educational in 1932-1933 was Shirley Temple. Here she is, co-starring in the very enjoyable Andy Clyde comedy Dora's Dunkin' Donuts.
On the negative side, Shirley was also featured in Jack Hays Productions' frequently jaw-droppingly bad Baby Burlesks series. In her 1988 autobiography, the actress describes the Baby Burlesks as "a cynical exploitation of our childish innocence" - and also called the films "the best things I ever did".
While Shirley is, as usual, likeable, charming and a skilled actress beyond her years, the idea of presenting spoofs of grownup motion picture genres with an otherwise staggeringly untalented juvenile cast (in diapers, no less) backfires - boy, does it backfire. She's great - and everyone else just stumbles around and gawks at the camera. As seen in the following Baby Burlesks sendup of What Price Glory, the films get laughs more as a "train wreck" embarrassment than from actual humor.
Sometimes, as in Polly Tix In Washington, the Baby Burlesk comedies achieve a certain quality that used to be termed "high camp". Others are just creepy. The worst ones, such as Kid N' Africa, are so incredibly bad as to make the ultra low-budget Mickey McGuire series starring Joe Yule (A.K.A. Mickey Rooney) look like Gone With The Wind.
Educational, figuring Shirley wasn't quite cute enough, produced Poppin' The Cork, a 30 minute musical short celebrating what would be the repeal of the Volstead Act, starring the adorable Milton Berle!
Richard M. Roberts also penned a comprehensive history of Educational Pictures for Classic Images magazine, including a blow-by-blow of the cataclysmic Sono-Art-World-Wide-KBS Productions-Tiffany Studios merger that bankrupted all participants (Mack Sennett, Earle Hammons, Al Christie).
Lloyd Hamilton and Mermaid Comedies producer/director/writer Jack White
One wonders just how Earle W. Hammons' Educational Pictures transitioned from riding high in the 1920's by distributing Otto Messmer's internationally popular Felix The Cat cartoons, classic silent comedies (many directed by the incredibly, mind-numbingly prolific Norman Taurog) starring Lloyd Hamilton, Al St. John, Lupino Lane, Larry Semon and Charley Bowers to a largely different roster and alarmingly low budget films in the 1930's.
Let's start with what happened to the studio's headliners. In 1923-1924, the principal star of Educational's Mermaid Comedies, silent comedy's favorite sourpuss, Lloyd Hamilton, attempted to branch out from his popular and acclaimed series of short subjects by starring in two feature length films.
One, A Self-Made Failure, directed by the ubiquitous William Beaudine, is a lost film. His Darker Self, originally titled Black And White, was designed by D.W. Griffith as a vehicle for stage star Al Jolson. When Jolson abruptly quit the project, Griffith asked Hamilton to replace him in the starring blackface role.
This was a bad career move, very bad idea and by all accounts - and if what footage exists is any indication - an even worse film.
After Hamilton returned to comedy shorts in 1926 and starred in such classics as Move Along, he was banned from making films for the entire 1928-1929 season. How? Hamilton and character actor Johnny Sinclair happened to be present when a certain barroom brawl took place in which pugilist Eddie Diggins was killed. Hamilton wasn't responsible for the stabbing death of Diggins, but his presence at the drunken donnybrook was enough to get him a one year ban from films.
The suspension was neither good for Educational nor the gifted yet booze-soaked comedian. At one point, Hamilton ended up homeless. The ban meant that an excellent opportunity to hit the ground running in a smooth transition to talkies was lost - and Hamilton's voice fitted his world-weary yet shabby genteel characterization to a T.
Before re-inventing himself with panache as prolific western sidekick Fuzzy Q. Jones, Al continued to star in Mermaid Comedies, some directed by Stephen Roberts (later known for the ultra-racy pre-Code melodrama The Story Of Temple Drake) and moved into talkies without a hitch in Educational's Cameo Comedies series, many helmed by Roscoe "William Goodrich" Arbuckle. Even in the most threadbare of low budget 1-reelers, Al, ever the pro's pro, gets laughs.
Only equaled by St. John and Buster Keaton as an acrobatic and gymnastic comedian-athlete, Lane, also a pro's pro, starred in his last U.S. comedy short subjects, including a few early talkies, in 1929.
After plum supporting roles in the musicals The Love Parade and Bride Of The Regiment, this brilliant physical comic appeared in one of the all-time bombs, Golden Dawn.
This early talkie musical was a golden turkey of golden turkeys, in spite of some very funny and spirited performances by Lane, Marion "Peanuts" Byron and Lee Moran.
Following the release of this 1930 stinker, Lane did what any reasonable actor would do, flee the U.S. and return to the United Kingdom!
There, he would become an enormous star of the stage and enjoy renewed prestige as one of England's premier show business icons! Lupino Lane became the mainstay of the musical comedy smash Me And My Girl.
Larry Semon, the uncrowned king of prop comedy and elaborate sight gags, early 1920's style and key predecessor of "Three Stooges" style slapstick? Died in 1928. Although Semon's career had taken quite a bad turn since his heydey as the very popular star of lightning-paced, sight gag-filled Vitagraph shorts, his success in latter 1920's character roles (especially in Josef von Sternberg's gangster flick, Underworld) pointed towards a comeback. Unfortunately for Larry, a young man (39) at the time of his passing - and film history - that second act in sound films as a director, character actor, storyboard artist, animator, scenarist or gagman didn't happen.
The great stop-motion animator and reluctant 2-reeler star Charley Bowers?
Alas, the Bowers Comedies series, delighting the Dadaist/Surrealist movement in Paris while dumbfounding small-town movie audiences worldwide, officially ended in 1928 - and not without leaving some amazing imagery behind.
Bowers continued to sporadically function as an independent producer with such remarkable stop-motion films as the following early talkie, It's A Bird.
Bowers subsequently joined the story department of the Walter Lantz studio and produced occasional strikingly imaginative and bizarre stop-motion cartoons, but did not appear on-camera again.
So, as the 1920's ended, most of the Educational Pictures comedy stars had moved on - and the essential alliances also changed.
At the beginning of the decade, Hammons cut a deal to distribute the Al Christie Studio's "Torchy" series starring Johnny Hines around the same time he contracted with Jack White. Christie, who had supplied tons of comedy films to Educational Film Exchange, signed a three-year deal with Paramount starting with the 1926-1927 season.
Educational responded to the loss of the Al Christie Studio and its prolific short subjects production units by contracting with Mack Sennett.
Sennett's Fun Factory continued cranking out 2-reelers, first for Educational release, then later for Paramount. The best known Sennett talkies feature Andy Clyde and W.C. Fields. Other "Mack Sennett Star Comedies" include the last appearances of a rather haggard and spent looking Lloyd Hamilton, as well as comedienne Marjorie Beebe (who Lucille Ball must have been aware of).
Even cartoons were affected; Felix The Cat was lost to Jacques Kopstein and Copley Pictures - and Paul Terry's Terrytoons were lined up as the replacement.
We'll get into what the heck happened to Educational when the movie business made the painful transition between silents and talkies and the 1930's progressed in Part Three.
