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.
Continuing happily in the silent film comedy world after spotlighting great movie comediennes for September 10th's post, today we tip a top hat worn by Ford Sterling to Ben Turpin, the wall-eyed star of Essanay, Vogue, Weiss Brothers/Artclass and Mack Sennett comedies, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on September 19, 1869.
While there are lots of comedians and comediennes in silent films and early talkies who get this writer ROFL, one who sends this classic movie fan there easily, only every time. . . is the one, the only, the hilarious comic and acrobat Ben Turpin, the guy who reputedly had his crossed eyes insured with Lloyd's Of London to make sure that they would NOT uncross!
First and foremost, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are big fans of both Ben and Steve Rydzewski's book For Art's Sake: The Biography And Filmography Of Ben Turpin. This book is the last word of the wonderful goofball comic's life and times, from vaudeville to his last film, Laurel & Hardy's feature Saps At Sea (1940).
What cracks me up about Ben is the same thing that gets me laughing out loud about Snub Pollard: that mixture of a bemused and nonplussed persona with unabashed over-the-top slapstick.
Today's corncucopia of comedy clips spotlights Ben Turpin, the janitor and jack-of-all-trades at the Essanay Studios in Chicago who became the first star of American comedy films in 1907. He plays quite the roustabout rake in Mr. Flip (1909) and deservedly receives a pie in the face for his behavior.
Contemporaneous with the European comics Andre "Foolshead" Deed, Max Linder and Marcel Perez, Ben preceded Vitagraph's John Bunny, as well as Keystone's Mack Sennett, Ford Sterling and Fred Mace as a U.S. movie comedy headliner.
The following compendium of clips featuring Ben Turpin look to this writer like a segment from The Golden Age Of Comedy, one of the Robert Youngson feature-length compilations of excerpts from Mack Sennett and Hal Roach comedies.
When Charlie Chaplin left Keystone and signed with Essanay as a "free agent," Ben teamed up with Charlie for two films, with delightful results.
It's fantastic to see these two great movie comedians together!
Ben is among the excellent comedy players in Essanay's successful Snakeville series, starring Augustus "Alkali Ike" Carney, Victor Potel, Margaret Joslin and Harry Todd - and produced by G.M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson. Silent film expert, historian and author Sam Gill elaborates:
VERSUS SLEDGE HAMMERS is one of the highly entertaining surviving entries of the Snakeville series.
After Essanay, Ben co-starred in short subjects for Vogue Comedies with his Keystone co-star, stock company member and former circus clown Rube Miller (1886-1927), who also directed the series. Rube is remembered today for directing and co-starring with Alice Howell and triple-jointed Al St. John in the wonderfully way-out 1914 Keystone Comedy SHOT IN THE EXCITEMENT.
In 1917, Turpin was hired by Mack Sennett, where he would star for just short of a decade. At Sennett, Turpin's character was gallant yet unorthodox and pixilated, likable, plucky, ever-nonplussed and weirdly endearing.
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In tribute, we're posting a bunch of Ben Turpin Sennett comedy classics, starting with this excerpt from A CLEVER DUMMY.
LOVE & DOUGHNUTS is one of our favorite Turpin comedies.
Here is an excerpt from one of the funnier Turpin Sennetts, TEN DOLLARS OR TEN DAYS.
Turpin, whose vaudeville career as Happy Hooligan began in the nineteeth century, did slapstick through the 1920's. Yes, Ben's starring role in classic The Stunt Man notwithstanding, there are stunt doubles - but not anywhere near as often as seen in the films of such contemporary comedy kings as Larry Semon.
In these Sennett films, a good number of the somersaults, pratfalls and other physical comedy bits were done by Ben, who was in his mid to late fifties at the time! Gotta love Ben Turpin the action star in Yukon Jake!
At the Mack Sennett Studio, Ben co-starred with several of the very good comediennes on the lot.
Madeline Hurlock and Thelma Hill are both in THE PRODIGAL BRIDEGROOM (1926).
Turpin's earnest sendups of silent movie mega-stars can be both highly absurd and oddly heroic. Particularly riotously funny: the series for Mack Sennett in which Ben played romantic mega-star Rodney St. Clair!
Would FOOLISH WIVES have been a better movie with Ben starring instead of Erich von Stroheim? Maybe. . .
In particular, those Sennett comedies starring Ben as "the great lover" are a scream!
Ben finished his stretch as a star of silent comedy films with a series of short subjects produced by the Weiss Brothers/Artclass, a studio that cranked out low budget comedies and westerns which were often surprisingly good. They can be seen on the Weiss O' Rama DVD. Ben, nearly 60 years of age, performs slapstick and somersaults as if he's 30 years younger.
Ben Turpin would continue into talkies, beginning with an appearance in one of Louis Lewyn's The Voice Of Hollywood series.
Ben has small roles and cameo appearances in a bunch of 1930's feature films, including Cracked Nuts (1931), a frequently uproarious Wheeler & Woolsey flick from RKO Radio Pictures.
Expanding his reach into westerns, Ben Turpin co-starred with none other than Rex, the King of the Wild Horses in the Mascot Pictures western serial The Law Of The Wild (1934).
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As comic relief, Ben transitioned into westerns quite well in The Law Of The Wild, and also continued appearing in comedy short subjects and features.
The 1930's included several attempts by short subject producers (including Sennett) to bring back the silent era slapstick approach of yore, with Jules White's Columbia Shorts Department proving by far the most successful.
Paramount Pictures distributed a series of 2-reelers produced by Phil L. Ryan in 1930-1932 and starring ex-Sennett and Chaplin players Chester Conklin and Mack Swain. In LIGHTHOUSE LOVE, Ben co-stars with fellow goofy comic Arthur Stone, early 1930's Mack Sennett stock company member and periodic star of Hal Roach Studio's Taxi Boys comedies Franklin Pangborn,and the patented "big dumb lug" from the 1931 Marx Brothers' classic MONKEY BUSINESS, Tom Kennedy.
Another is Ralph Staub's Vitaphone 2-reeler KEYSTONE HOTEL (1935), which constitutes something of a last hurrah for the 1920's Mack Sennett Comedies gang, including Ford Sterling, Ben Turpin and Marie Prevost, with Keystone Comedies and Charlie Chaplin Productions favorites Hank Mann and Chester Conklin. Billy Bevan and Al St John must have not been available!
Improbably, Ben works in the mythical land of Klopstokia as a spy!
At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we especially love Turpin's cameo that closes the great Laurel & Hardy short Our Wife. It is a clever twist ending to a classic L&H 2-reeler which co-stars the talented and very funny Babe London as Ollie's fiancée.
Ben is among a slew of silent film comedians who appear in the 1939 Alice Faye vehicle Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), one of several features which attempts to look back nostalgically on the slapstick of 20 years earlier (note: very oddly, the one guy who actually didn't do slapstick per se, Buster Keaton, leads the plethora of comedians in this Fox movie). Ben has a cameo with the ubiquitous Chester Conklin. It's Ben's second-to-last film.
Alas, this number of clips is finite and must end - in this case with Ben's final silver screen appearance, in the 1940 L&H feature SAPS AT SEA.
There is no greater tribute to a comedian than to be caricatured in an animated cartoon. Ben is caricatured in a slew of classic cartoons, first in Otto Messmer's 1923 opus Felix In Hollywood.
Closing today's tribute to Ben Turpin, shall note his appearance - along with fellow Sennett stars Ford Sterling, Mack Swain, Harry Langdon and Chester Conklin, in the Hollywood star caricature-packed 1933 cartoon Mickey's Gala Premier (note: it is on Mickey Mouse In Black & White volume 1, used copies of which can still be found periodically on eBay).
In the Acknowledgements department, a big time assist for many of the video clips in this Ben Turpin tribute goes to the outstanding Reel Comedies YouTube channel, a treasure trove of silent comedy goodness; thanks a million to Dave Glass and the late silent movie historian David Wyatt).
As we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog join many around the world in mourning the passing of celebrated actor-standup philosopher-improv comedy master, cartoon voice artist par excellence and big time San Francisco Giants fan Robin Williams (the ever-astute Madame Blogmeister phrased it aptly and best, "depression is a goddamn killer"), it is apropo that today's posting be devoted to devastatingly funny screen humor from a century ago.
This is the first of two volumes, both of which will feature 50, count 'em 50, wacky Mack Sennett comedies, digitally re-mastered in HD and all produced by the guy dubbed in the silent era The King Of Comedy (with, frankly, some hot-and-heavy competition from the studios of Hal Roach and Jack White throughout the 1920's). Here's the promotional trailer.
It's highly recommended to have Brent Walker's comprehensive, painstakingly researched and splendid Mack Sennett's Fun Factory on hand as a reference to go with the Blu-ray set.
Never fear, however - there are plenty of films featuring the Sennett studio's many other resident funsters, a.k.a. THE USUAL SUSPECTS!
Roscoe Arbuckle
Billy Bevan
Sydney Chaplin
Charley Chase
Andy Clyde
Chester Conklin
Vernon Dent
Louise Fazenda
Raymond Griffith
Phyllis Haver
Thelma Hill
Alice Howell
Madeline Hurlock
Harry Langdon
Fred Mace
Polly Moran
Charlie Murray
Mabel Normand
Marie Prevost
Al St. John
Ford Sterling
Slim Summerville
Mack Swain
Gloria Swanson and Bobby Vernon
Ben Turpin
While the two volume collection primarily consists of silent films, it does feature a few "Mack Sennett Talking Pictures" featuring Andy Clyde, W.C. Fields, Daphne Pollard, Marjorie Beebe, Harry Gribbon and Grady Sutton.
Author and historian James L. Neibaur has penned an excellent overview of the Blu-ray release and will be writing daily reviews of each and every one of the 50 subjects on the three discs that comprise volume 1, starting with The Curtain Pole, the D.W. Griffith-Mack Sennett collaboration film from 1909. To Mack and all of the performers, filmmakers and technicians who worked so hard to make magic over his lengthy career - thanks for the laughs!
