May 5-11: The 25th San Francisco Silent Film Festival (a.k.a Vive la France)

It is now spring 2022, knock on wood, and, slowly but surely (and puh-lease, don't call me Shirley) classic film screenings are returning. Lo and behold, NOIR CITY 19 and the 2022 TCM Classic Film Festival wrapped and San Francisco's 25th Silent Film Festival will return to the hallowed "movie palace" aisles of the Castro Theatre next weekend.



The comedy-crazed silent movie buffs at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are thrilled that, among the many great movies presented over the seven nights, comedy great Max Linder is on the bill.



For starters, we highly recommend watching the Kino Video DVD collection of Linder by Lobster Films, and reading the Trav S.D. piece Max Linder: Le Père du Cinéma Comique from the Travalanche website, The Nitrate Diva’s Just Dandy: The Art Of Max Linder, as well as the  terrific overview of Max' career film historian Lea Stans penned for Silent-ology).



The 25th anniversary San Francisco Silent Film Festival will include KING OF THE CIRCUS, a Max Linder film this avid silent comedy and Max fan has never seen! While Linder may have not been the first comedian to star in a movie - that would very likely be André Deed (1879-1940) - the dapper Parisian boulevardier was certainly among the first silver screen comedians to headline a popular continuing series, in his case for Pathé Frères, beginning in 1905.









Max Linder certainly ranked highly among the key influences on his friend and colleague Charlie Chaplin.



Chaplin described Max as "my teacher."





The official SFSFF press release elaborates:

The French were there at the dawn of cinema when the Lumière Brothers train pulled into the station at La Ciotat. French films are integral to the history of the movies and it is with great pleasure—or should we say plaisir—that we are presenting two extraordinary French films in exquisite restorations, DANS LA NUIT and THE DIVINE VOYAGE, and a third restoration of an Austrian feature, KING OF THE CIRCUS, starring the French comic genius Max Linder.

DANS LA NUIT was legendary actor Charles Vanel's directorial debut—and his only feature. This beautiful film had the bad timing to be released in 1930, when sound was in demand. Despite its excellent reviews, the film faltered at the box office and was doomed to obscurity.

But it had many acclaimed supporters — director Bertrand Tavernier called it "cinematographic poetry" — and we are thrilled to host the world premiere of Institut Lumière's gorgeous new 4K restoration. Film Noir Foundation's Eddie Muller will introduce the film and musician Stephen Horne will accompany.

Our friends at Lobster Films in Paris have been busy during the pandemic lockdown and SFSFF is the beneficiary with two beautiful new restorations! Julian Duvivier's THE DIVINE VOYAGE, set on the Breton coast, contains some of the most stunning sequences on film. Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius will accompany.

KING OF THE CIRCUS is Max Linder's last film and it displays the comedic genius that made him one of the silent era's kings of comedy. Philip Carli will accompany. Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films will introduce both titles.



For more Max: the pioneering movie comedian's daughter, Maud, an infant at the time of his death in 1925, wrote, produced and narrated a documentary, The Man In The Silk Hat about the life, times and films of the father she never knew. Here it is, in four parts:



Here's to Max and a successful 2022 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. It's a outstanding lineup of classic films seen in proper big screen glory. Vive Max and Vive la France!

Tonight: Max Linder kicks off the 2018 Broncho Billy Silent Film Fest at Niles

This is a stellar weekend for movie buffs on both coasts, with Rome, New York's Capitolfest in full swing and the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum starting tonight.



The Friday night program will pay tribute to the one, the only Max Linder, the first bonafide comedy star of the silver screen.



The always dapper Max, star of 238 films, was one of the greatest movie comedians who ever lived and among the very few who preceded Chaplin as a star of his own series, beginning in 1905. Before John Bunny and Mack Sennett, there was Max Linder.




Tonight's program, with accompaniment by pianist David Drazin, shall include the following Max Linder comedies. TROUBLES OF A GRASSWIDOWER will be presented in a 35mm print.

Max Juggler Par Amour
Max Victime Du Quinquina
Le Soulier Trop Petit
Max Pintre Par Amour
Max & The Statue
Troubles Of A Grasswidower (1912, Pathe, 35mm)
Au Secours! (1924) Directed by Abel Gance



One of these days, this writer and silent comedy buff would love to see a restoration and screening of Max Linder's hilarious sendup of The 3 Musketeers, Douglas Fairbanks and swashbucklers in general, The Three Must-Get-There's.



San Francisco Silent Film Festival? Pordenone? TCM Classic Film Fest? MoMA NY? Throwing down the gauntlet!




The Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival is in the Niles Historic District (of Fremont) where the early cowboy star Broncho Billy Anderson and comic Charlie Chaplin made movies for the Essanay Studios. There will be very rare screenings of drama, comedy, action, silent serial stars and travelogues to exotic lands, as well as the recently discovered A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET filmed shortly after the 1906 earthquake.

In addition to tonight's Max Linder program, Robert Bloomberg and Eric Kurland will be presenting early 3D films on Saturday, including Bob's 3-D doc on the 1906 and 1989 bay area earthquakes. A Sunday panel discussion, "Heroes and Villains- Film Collectors and Movie Pirates" will feature a panel of collectors/film detectives/archivists/restoration experts Jon Mirsalis, Peter Conheim and Kathy Rose O'Regan. The program concludes with screenings the spoof CAPTAIN CELLULOID VS. THE FILM PIRATES and THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY in a unique surprise presentation, both with musical accompaniment by Jon Mirsalis.

Go here to check out the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival schedule, as well as buy advance tickets and festival passes.

Happy Bastille Day 2017 from Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog

On Bastille Day, we pay tribute to one of the first movie comedians: the one, the only Max Linder. While Max may have not been the first comedian to star in a movie - that would very likely be André Deed (1879-1940) - the dapper Parisian boulevardier was certainly among the first silver screen comedians to headline a popular continuing series.









Possibly as a response to Linder's success, two more overtly physical European comedians, Marcel Perez and Ferdinand "Polidor" Guillaume (a.k.a. Tontolini) would soon launch their careers in silent film comedy.



Unquestionably, Max Linder's series for Pathé Frères proved to be an enormous influence on Mack Sennett. In the 1909 Biograph short subject The Curtain Pole, directed by D.W. Griffith, none other than Mack himself plays Monsieur DuPont, in a rowdier and more slapsticky interpretation of what Max had been doing.



Author Trav S.D. elaborated further on the influence of Max Linder's comedy on Keystone and beyond in his piece For Bastille Day: How the French Invented Film Comedy, excerpted from his book Chain Of Fools: Silent Comedy And Its Legacies, From Nickelodeons To YouTube.



Max Linder certainly ranked highly among the key influences on his friend and colleague Charlie Chaplin.



This writer and silent comedy aficionado also ascertains a strong link between Max' films and those of Charley Parrott Chase. It is highly likely that both Charley and key collaborator Leo McCarey, like Chaplin, were among Linder's biggest fans. Slapstick is frequently merely incidental for both Linder and Chase; the comedies - like those of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew - are often farcical and situational at their core. Chase took Linder's penchant for unwittingly getting into embarrassing situations and took it several steps farther in a brilliant series of Hal Roach Studio silents in 1924-1929.



In Sitting Pretty, a 1924 2-reeler written and directed by McCarey and Chase, Charley even reprised "the mirror gag" from Seven Years Bad Luck, performing it with, as his double, his brother (and director of numerous Laurel & Hardy short subjects in the early 1930's) James Parrott, (onscreen) A.K.A. Paul Parrott.



Max' daughter Maud, an infant at the time of his death in 1925, discovered his films in college and spent much of her life restoring his legacy as a moviemaking and comedy innovator. She wrote, produced and narrated a documentary, The Man In The Silk Hat about the life, times and films of the father she never knew. Here it is, in four parts:



On Bastille Day, we silent film aficionados at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog tip our silk top hats with the utmost respect to Max and Maud Linder, who did much to keep her father's name and films alive.



For comedy buffs interested in Much Ado About Max, check out the Kino Video collection of Linder comedies by Lobster Films.



There is also a well-researched and annotated Max Linder website, complete with a filmography.

Remembering The French Pioneers Of Early Cinema On Bastille Day!

Earlier today, started writing this post to raise our champagne flutes both to France and the early innovators of cinema in celebration of Bastille Day. This day in 2016 has turned out to be a crushingly sad one for France and the world - yet again - giving us all the more reason to raise that toast to the innovators who invented cinema and our friends and film historian counterparts there.

When it comes to filmmaking, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, sons of prominent portrait painter Antoine Lumière, were responsible for many early innovations in the field of photography and in the development of the movie cameras.



From the section on the Lumière brothers from the comprehensive and splendid Early Cinema.com website:

By early 1895, the brothers had invented their own device combining camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinématographe. Patenting it on February 13th 1895, the Cinématographe was much smaller than Edison’s Kinetograph, was lightweight (around five kilograms), and was hand cranked. The Lumières used a film speed of 16 frames per second, much slower compared with Edison’s 48 fps - this meant that less film was used an also the clatter and grinding associated with Edison’s device was reduced.



In 1895, the Lumières would be doing public screenings using the Cinématographe to project their films featuring scenes from everyday life.



These scenes being an immediate hit with audiences, they augmented them with film of dancers and other performers. Many of these Lumière Brothers productions - and films made not long afterwards by Georges Méliès - can be seen on the DVD The Movies Begin.





The Lumières would very soon be followed by producer, director and Solax Studios founder Alice Guy Blaché. When it comes to filmmaking outside of the "trick film" exemplified at the turn of the 20th century by Melies and his editor Ferdinand Zecca and (slightly later) Segundo de Chomón, it was Solax Studios founder Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) who got there first.



Blaché, the cinema's first mogul, is arguably the best known of the female producer-directors who blazed trails in the beginning. She beat everyone else, including Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith and Allan Dwan, to the punch, experimented with color technology, made sound films and also was a mentor to Lois Weber.



It would be an understatement to suggest that the pioneering producer-director wasted no time mastering the new technology.



Alice Guy Blaché was hands-on with the new and innovative motion picture camera technology in Paris and would be making short films for Gaumont as early as 1896-1897.



By the time the first great screen comedian, Max Linder, had become a frequent movie headliner in 1906-1907, Alice Guy Blaché had made hundreds of films. Comedy buffs will note that Alice Guy Blaché is tremendously important to the history of screen humor as both the first comedy filmmaker and the first to film the famous "mirror gag". It's in her 1912 Solax film His Double, which can be seen here, on historian Anthony Balducci's website.



The inventive Ms. Blaché also originated this classic comedy bit for her 1906 film The Drunken Mattress.



Although long overdue recognition, respect and acclaim may not have come in her long lifetime, her contributions to filmmaking were recognized in 1953 when she was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.

A comprehensive Alice Guy Blaché, Film Pioneer exhibition did hold forth (and wowed audiences) at the Whitney Museum Of American Art in November 2009 - January 2010.



Saw the following film, Falling Leaves, at the 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival and found it touching, beautifully filmed and very advanced for 1912.



There will be more clips in Be Natural, a documentary on the life and films of Alice Guy Blaché, currently in production.

UPDATE 2 Seeing Alice's Films A Fool and His Money (1912) from Be Natural on Vimeo.

UPDATE 43 The Intern & The Ocean Waif from Be Natural on Vimeo.


Thanks to Dr. Jane Gaines, Professor Of Film at Columbia University and students from both Columbia University Libraries/Information Services' School Of The Arts and Barnard College have created the The Women Film Pioneers Project website to shine the klieg lights on the largely untold story of Alice and other pioneering women filmmakers.





While he may have not been the first comic to make a movie, the dapper Parisian boulevardier was the first movie comedian to headline a continuing series: the great Max Linder (1882-1925), the man in the silk hat.



Author Trav S.D. elaborated on the influence of Linder's comedy on Keystone and beyond in his piece For Bastille Day: How the French Invented Film Comedy, excerpted from his book Chain Of Fools: Silent Comedy And Its Legacies, From Nickelodeons To YouTube.





Max would be an enormous influence on Mack Sennett (see the "Mack as Max" Biograph short subject The Curtain Pole) as well as Charlie Chaplin.



Here are some clips from Max' pre-1910 films, transferred from the 9.5mm format by Unknown Video.







The Kino Lorber compilation of Max Linder films for the Slapstick Symposium series, which includes his later films, is something we at Way Too Damn Mazy To Write A Blog recommend highly - on Bastille Day or any day.



We close with a charming cartoon made about dogs, fleas and Paris for MGM by Tex Avery, followed by two renditions of La Marseillaise (the first from Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog favorite Casablanca).


Tex Avery - The flea circus - Video Dailymotion... by cartoonworld4all

Happy Halloween 2014 From Way Too Lazy To Write A Blog

Photo by Christopher Walters

Happy Halloween! Since the last post covered musical short subjects of the early 1930's and it wasn't possible to get ALL of them in, here, straight from the cartoon universe and the deep subconscious, is the following stunner from Fleischer Studios. No matter how many times Mr. Blogmeister sees the following phantasmagorical cartoon, he's floored by the cinematic invention of it all. Making history as the dancing apparition: Cab Calloway.



Also pretty darn wonderful is this Aesop's Fables cartoon produced down the block from Fleischer's by the Van Beuren studio. Main characters Don & Waffles pretty much spent their entire screen career getting chased around by skeletons, goblins, ghosts and any ghoul who had a SAG card.



Many of us born at a certain time grew up watching The Dean Martin Show, which always had at least one comedian as a guest. Usually, if said comic was not Dom DeLuise, the featured comedian on Dino's variety program was the hilarious Paul Lynde.



Yes, THAT Paul Lynde, the one who repeatedly got away with flagrant censorship flaunting of the first degree inhabiting "the middle square" on The Hollywood Squares. So, submitted for your approval, here's The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which features, among others, Margaret Hamilton, Tim Conway and Kiss.



With a big time tip of the Max Linder/Raymond Griffith top hat to the San Francisco Giants, who beat an exceptional Kansas City Royals team to win the 2014 World Series, here is the dapper Parisian himself, Max Linder in Ah Secours!, a hallucinogenic and surreal black comedy more akin to The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari than Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush - and directed by Abel Gance of Napoleon fame.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival Returns!

It's back in big screen glory - the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, holding forth at the spectacular Castro Theatre yet again. The festival started with a bang last night with Rex Ingram's rousing action-packed epic The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, starring the iconic Rudolf Valentino.



On the big screen, Rudy's still a heartthrob, 88 years after his death, and it's not just because the camera loves him - Valentino, while wowing the babes every time, proves to be a surprisingly adept and facile actor who understands pacing, movement, shading and nuance on a sophisticated level.



The weekend of movie fun presents quite a packed schedule. When it comes to the films of Buster Keaton, well, for this correspondent, there's no such thing as too much!



One film that, in particular, sounds utterly fascinating: Dragnet Girl (Hijosen No Onna), a gangster picture directed by Yasujirō Ozu, a director known for such gentle and reflective family dramas as Tokyo Story. Clearly, Ozu is very likely the first and last filmmaker to combine these two genres - or even make an effort to do so!



Among the silver screen headliners included in this year's festival will be three Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog favorites, indefatigable action hero Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.





In The Good Bad Man, director Allan Dwan and ever-swashbuckling Doug - with his customary joie de vivre and panache - present a brilliant turnaround on the standard oater scenario. Fairbanks is great, as usual.


And then there are two incomparable great men of silent comedy, Mr. Keaton and Max Linder.





Going hand-in-hand with this wonderful festival's opening, a bit of shameless self-promotion: Your Blogmeister's latest article, from Eat Drink Films, issue 6, Not Just A Custard Pie: Dining Do's And Don'ts From The Surreal World Of Silent Comedy. It's a tribute to the great comedians and comediennes who rocked the theatres with laughter in 1914 and still do, at such 21st century events as the San Francisco Silent Film Fest and Pordenone Film Festival.



For more info and tickets, check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website.

New On DVD: The Max Linder Collection

Chaplin described him as "the great master": Max Linder (1883-1925), the cinema's first star comedian. A new DVD collection of Max' innovative comedy, curated by Lobster Films and Serge Bromberg, was officially released by Kino Lorber earlier today.



Along with André Deed, he was an accomplished movie headliner in France as the 20th century began, back when Méliès and Zeeca were cranking out 1-reelers, when Edwin S. Porter was about the only American experimenting with movie cameras - and a couple of years before D.W. Griffith started his film career as Biograph's producer-director-chief.



Linder, the dapper, top-hatted Parisian boulevardier, headlined comedy short subjects as early as 1905-1906.



Max pre-dated U.S. comedians Ben Turpin, John Bunny, Mack Sennett, Fred Mace and "Keystone Mabel" Normand, as well as his equally inventive filmmaker-comedian countryman, Marcel Perez.







Max' daughter Maud, an infant at the time of his death, discovered his films in college and spent much of her life restoring his legacy as a moviemaking and comedy innovator. She produced the following documentary, The Man With The Silk Hat.

The Mirror Bit

The news that Max Linder's Seven Years Bad Luck will get the big screen treatment at the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival has prompted your correspondent to ponder THE MIRROR GAG.





Unquestionably, historian Anthony Balducci, both in his book The Funny Parts and in blog posts The Mirror Prank (covering over 100 years of the mirror bit's variations in movies and TV) and 14 Versions Of The Mirror Routine, has written the last word on the topic.



While the earliest known version was in a 1912 film by cinema innovator Alice Guy Blaché, the most famous versions of the mirror bit were made after the advent of talkies. Catapulting the routine into the popular zeitgeist: Duck Soup, starring the Marx Brothers.



Even more so, the famous episode of I Love Lucy co-starring Lucille Ball and Harpo Marx.



The great scene in Duck Soup wasn't the first time director Leo McCarey filmed this bit. Here, in Sitting Pretty, a 1924 Charley Chase comedy written and directed by McCarey and Chase, the mirror routine is performed by Charley and, as his double, his brother (and director of numerous Laurel & Hardy short subjects in the early 1930's) James Parrott, A.K.A. Paul Parrott.



Granted, while it's a good bet that two Athenian comics made Socrates laugh himself silly with a 409 B.C. version of the mirror bit, these are some distinguished and funny examples by our celluloid heroes.

More Silent Comedy Clips

Following up the last post about Steve Massa's new book, here are some more imaginative bits of classic comedy goodness from the days of silent pictures.



First and foremost: Mr. Lloyd "Ham" Hamilton.



Marcel Perez, A.K.A. Tweedy and Tweedledum, among that first wave of screen comedians (along with Andre Deed and Max Linder) is becoming a favorite at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog. Not many Perez films survive (he died in 1929), but those that do show a highly creative and original comic mind.



Perez' sense of humor is wacky, surreal, outrageous and a bit risque, by comparison to American comedies from the same period. Here are examples of Perez' early Robinet series.









The aforementioned and always dapper Max Linder was one of the greatest movie comedians who ever lived and, like Perez, preceded Chaplin as a star of his own short subjects series, befire going on to feature films.





Watching 1941, Stephen Spielberg's effects-laden epic (in the vein of Stanley Kramer's It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Blake Edwards' The Great Race) on Turner Classic Movies last night, I couldn't help thinking of Larry Semon, the prolific silent film comedian, director and cartoonist who loved sight gags on an operatic scale.



Mr. Semon would have adored 1941, still the last word in epic cartoonish set pieces and "mass destruction of property is good for a laugh".


Semon began his career directing and writing films for other comedians at Vitagraph, including the team of Earl Montgomery and (future comedy film producer) Joe Rock.





In retrospect, it's too bad Semon, who died in 1928, didn't live long enough to write gags for animated cartoons in talkies. One could imagine him dreaming up way-out stuff for Van Beuren, Fleischer or Terrytoons.



Here's Larry at his manic peak, supported deftly by, among others, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.