I just finished the most wonderful course on silent comedy, focusing on Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the bizarre Harry Langdon, plus a few silent and early talkie shorts from Laurel and Hardy. I realize that developing an appreciation for silent films is a massive ask for most people. There is no denying it requires a huge cultural leap but the rewards of silent comedy are amazing. I would love to hear from anyone who has enjoyed and appreciated these brilliant movies.
The key thing that you realize is just how much was lost when the greatness of physical comedy was almost completely replaced by talk comedy. Modern comedians simply do not develop the skill of telling a story with gestures, facial expressions and bodily movements that all the great silent comics brought with them to film from a variety of sources, such as the pantomime tradition of the English music hall (Chaplin), the American vaudeville stage (Keaton) or even the circus. Chaplin developed an amazing vocabulary of knockabout comedy gags, plus astonishing creativity and a perfectionist approach, which blossomed as he gained ever greater artistic control of his movies. I now own the complete works of Chaplin and watching how he develops the tramp character from his second ever 12-minute short for Keystone in 1913 and uses it to eventually create an incredibly moving comedy of feeling in masterpieces like City Lights, The Gold Rush, Modern Times and The Kid, is thrilling. The tramp is the ultimate outsider, literally a down on his luck impossibly eccentric Victorian gentleman using his wiles and irrepressible spirit to survive in a very unwelcoming world. The great challenge was how to mine the emotional potential of a character who like everyone else needs love but is impossible to sexualize. He achieved that in The Kid through his love for the abandoned baby he raised and child welfare attempted to take away, offered us a fantasy happy ever after love ending in The Gold Rush and tears your heart literally out with the ending of City Lights, in my mind the greatest of all screen comedies. It is both emotionally powerful and unbelievably funny. The total absurdity of the five-minute cabaret scene with Charlie and the manic-depressive millionaire he saved from drowning himself is the funniest sequence I have ever seen.
Everyone acknowledges Chaplin was a genius, but I believe that Keaton is his equal. There has never been a comedian to match the bizarre creativity, surrealistic gags and mind-blowing acrobatics of the Great Stone Face. As Chaplin is the ultimate outsider, Keaton is the stoic, sad-faced existentialist, adrift in a capricious and totally unpredictable world, taking each random punch from nature and each unexpected and inexplicable blessing in stride. He was a vaudeville star in his family act at the age of 3, touring with Harry Houdini and a wide range of crazed acts, soaking in those influences and like Chaplin a fabulous natural mimic. He initially specialized in having his father hurl him around the stage and into the audience without injury in an act that pushed entertainment into the realm of child abuse, likely the source of a sadness about the Keaton character even though he always wins the girl in the end. For me The General, Sherlock Jr., Steamboat Bill Jr. and Seven Chances are among the very short list of of comic masterpieces.
I really enjoyed the Harold Lloyd films as well, especially Safety Last, the one that features the iconic shot of him hanging onto the bending minute hand of an immense clock about 10 storeys above the street. The sequence where this bumbling nerd climbs up the side of the 12-storey building where he works to raise enough money to marry his girl is justly famous. Lloyd always plays the nice but impossibly nerdy kid in over-sized glasses with limitless spunk always trying to climb the management chain, win the big American football game to become the big man on campus or capture crooks to impress his manly dad, does not intrigue me as much as the Chaplin and Keaton characters, but then there has never been a comedy character than can compare with them.
I loved the Harry Langdon film, The Strong Man, but I suspect few people would enjoy a distinctly unmasculine character who is like a 45-year-old man in diapers. There is a scene on a public bus where Langdon, who has a horrific chest cold, mistakenly lathers his chest with limburger cheese and is literally tossed out of the bus by disgusted passengers, rolls down a hill and crashed unintentionally back through the roof of the bus, landing in the same seat he was ejected from, which is hysterically and improbably funny .
Finally I feel completely back in love with Laurel and Hardy. There was one brilliant silent film but my favourite was their early talkie, The Music Box, where they try to carry a box containing a piano up an endless series of stairs to deliver it to the home of an obnoxious professor. Not everyone in the class liked it but every time I watch it I find myself laughing out loud in pure delight.
Anyway, I realize silent comedy is not for everyone, probably not even for most, but it is truly a treasure for those who can step outside their contemporary film-going habits and appreciate a great, lost art, whose only living descendant is the Mr. Bean character, a near-silent outsider figure in a talking world whom I also dearly love.

There is a new Silent film out now, or very soon, sorry I'm not sure of the title etc. Modern slapstick is pretty much rubbish, except when Daniels gets his tongue stuck to the ski-lift in Dumb and Dumber, obviously (Even Some Mother Do Ave'em is over 30 years old.)

Chaplin tends to get the plaudits as he crossed over to the talkies, with Great Dictator being a classic. (I also think Chaplin was the funniest, but that could be down to taste, and who I watched most of as a kid.)

The other thing is that you have to think yourself back in time, similarly to when watching Battleship Potemkin.

The film you are thinking of is The Artist, which I haven't managed to see yet. The adjustment needed to watch a film like Battleship Potemkin is for greater than watching Chaplin or the other great silent comedians, as physical comedy is essentially universal.

Unless you are getting hit

When I was younger there were often compilation programmes on the telly which I used to love and there was still the occasional full length feature that the whole family would watch. Fond memories and great viewing.

There was Bob Monkhouse's 'Golden Silents' and Laurel and Hardy, especially at Christmas, on the box when I was a kid. I was lamenting the lack of L&H only today, given how many repeats are on these days you'd think that they'd be cheap enough to show!?

I don't know what it says about me, but I prefer Harry Langdon's 'naive' and Harold Lloyd's chirpy chappy to either Chaplin or Keaton. The overly-sentimental pathos of one and morose perspective of the other just don't engage me particularly, funny as some of the sight gags are.

My real love from the era is Laurel and Hardy, though, and their talkies, more so (I watched 'The Music Box' again just last month - sublime). I've got about 60-odd of all their 100 or so films - but I've never joined 'The Sons of the Desert'.

I agree utterly about 'Bean' continuing the tradition and offer Jacques Tati as a 'missing link' in the story. Remember 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday' and how ephemeral the little dialogue it has was?

Yes Tati's Mr. Hulot, is certainly a bridge to Mr. Bean. In fact we watched Mon Oncle in class as well as the Jerry Lewis film, The Bell Boy, for just that purpose. I agree that Chaplin does sometimes cross from pathos to bathos, think of the unwed mother in The Kid, who is visually compared to Christ carrying the cross, but the relationship between Chaplin and the five-year-old Jackie Coogan in that film is beautifully portrayed and their phenomenal chemistry has an authenticity which overrides any charge of sentimentality. We are, of course, now in the arena of personal taste as nothing is as individual and as impossible to argue about as what we find funny and what we find moving. In City Lights, Chaplin reaches back to an old form of Victorian melodrama but his incredible acting performance and the perfect mix of pathos and knockabout comedy shows that properly used that form can still pack a tremendous punch. Many claim the final seconds of City Lights are the most powerful moment in the history of film. I know I cannot watch it without tears.
Keaton is the most imaginative and thought provoking of them all for me and his view of the total absurdity life is the most modernist for sure. I find that his work really stands up and that there is nothing in modern comedy that even comes close to what he and Chaplin accomplished, a view shared by Woody Allen among others. I love the way Keaton sometimes defies the dictates of classical Hollywood cinema and privileges the gags over the narrative as when he is chased by thousands of would-be brides in Seven Chances and accidentally starts a landslide of boulders which he runs in the midst of in the amazing climax which is stunning and hilarious but doesn't really add much to the story line.
I admire Lloyd but his character's shallow desire to seek social status at any price, as in Safety Last where his climbing the building is a positive metaphor for social climbing and he accepts eating dirt from managers so he can make others eat dirt when he gets ahead has a hollow ring in today's dehumanized and commodified world. I prefer Chaplin's view of the alienation of labour in Modern Times to Lloyd's joyful acceptance of it in order to get ahead.
As for Langdon, I absolutely loved him in The Strong Man, but he is like a fascinating odd little instrument making compelling music compared to the orchestras of Chaplin or Keaton IMHO. After 2 or 3 feature films there was nothing more for him to do and he faded away.

tap tap

(my mime for creating a paragraph )

I can't disagree about the technical excellence of Chaplin and Keaton and I realise that my fondness for Lloyd comes from my childhood when his unremitting exuberance was much more appealing. I must give Keaton another go soon. Politically, Chaplin was 'King' (or 'Commissar' ) if you're anywhere left of McCarthy.



Sure, Langdon's character was very limited but he was still a great comedian, in my book. I can't place* a wonderful Harry Langdon scene where he's on a stage coach in the Wild West and gets into a fistfight with another passenger - a villain twice his size. I think he actually picks the fight then throws punches like a 5 year old.
Ring any bells with anyone? I'd love to see it again.

Internet Archive has a fair selection of silent movies available to stream.

Edit: It's The Strong Man, isn't it?


Edit edit ..... No, it's not! The Strong Man is here and it's not got the scene I was thinking of. I'm pretty sure it was more Wild West than post WWI.

I am not sure which Langdon film that is, but it isn't The Strong Man. He does throw that pathetic little punch you are describing on three different occasions in The Strong Man, always with particularly disastrous results; getting flattened in response. Not in the old west though. I love the way he is portrayed in the film as a Belgian soldier who is useless with a machine gun but brilliant with a slingshot. Or the way he shows up in NYC after the war looking for a woman named Mary Brown who wrote to him but never told him where in America she lives, asking random strangers if they know Mary Brown. Of course he somehow ends up finding his Mary Brown in the end.
The reverse rape scene where he is absolutely terrified because he thinks a not unattractive woman who lured him to her apartment by claiming she is Mary Brown is going to force him into sex is hysterical. When she locks the door and slips the key down her cleavage and he runs around the room like a terrified cat I cannot stop laughing. Of course she has hidden money inside his jacket and only wants to pin him down and get it back,
Have you seen Long Pants, Flyman? It is totally bizarre. The Langdon character meets a sultry but corrupt city woman and decides he must marry her even though he is engaged to marry the wholesome gal next door. His solution is to murder the local girl (Why not just break off the engagement????) and rescue his true love from prison. He tries hard to shoot this poor sweet woman but keeps screwing up and stops abruptly when he sees a ''No Shooting'' sign, before having a series of crazed misadventures in the city. I love Langdon. I just think his range is pretty narrow.
I have another Langdon film I haven't watched yet, called Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, with Joan Crawford, which I believe is set in the west. Maybe that is it.
The Prof thought Langdon would be a hard sell and was pleased to see how many people liked him but was surprised to see how few liked Lloyd. Make no mistake I did like him, particularly The Kid Brother, but just don't believe his character has the depth of Chaplin or Keaton. I was shocked that there were only a few of us who loved Laurel and Hardy, who are wonderful and have their own cult following. We also watched the Marx Brothers' masterpiece Duck Soup, to mark the transition to sound comedy and it was also only mildly popular, another surprise.

HI Pouzar . Great thread.

For me Laurel and Hardy are the kings of comedy. They were the only silent comedians to adapt from silent movies to "talkies". I've just finished reading Chaplin's biography and even though he sailed to the States with Stan Laurel (they were part of the same vaudeville troop), Charlie doesn't mention Stan at all Both men had more than a handful of marriages behind them and Stan was living a relativley mundane life until his death in 65 ; the alimony payments had taken their toll. Chaplin's main movies are excellent, Harold Lloyd was peerless in his field, Keaton's movies I don't realy get but put on a Laurel and Hardy and I can laugh at loud - "the dumb guy who thinks he's smart and the dumb guy"

L & H will live on forever more because more than most, children get them. Just watch a 7 yr old watch an L & H movie and see the reaction. They get it straight away. I had the VHS videos and I've got the DVD box set (sadly a couple of key movies aren't included) but when you're feeling down, whack Brats, Busy Bodies, Helpmates or The Music Box on the DVD. They cheer you up no end. Genius is over used but Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Oliver Norvell Hardy were two of a kind, the likes of which will not be seen again. I suggest you read John McCabe's autobiography if you can get hold of it.

The Magicians Penn and Teller base themselves loosely on Laurel and Hardy. Now tell me who you think is the funniest, the one who does all the talking and tries to be funny, or the one who says nothing.

They REALLY are a pair and I adore them both, but if I must pick one it would have to be Stan Laurel.
Okay, you L&H nuts are simply too persuasive. I have virtually everything ever done by Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon. Influenced by the enthusiasm of Bluenosey and Flyman, but mostly by the shorts we watched in class and my love for their films as a boy, I broke down and just shelled out $96 for Laurel and Hardy, The Essential Collection, a 10-disc re-mastered compilation of all the talkies they did for Hal Roach from 1929-1940. Should be here in about a week.
Has anyone seen their silent short, Big Business? If I recall they take a job selling Christmas trees and get in a row with a prickly home owner that ultimately turns into an escalating feud in which he completely destroys their car, step by step, and they do incredible damage to his house. The hilarious part is that each side watches passively and does not interfere as their property is savaged, waiting patiently for their opportunity to up the ante, as a policeman watches the entire scenario passively until everything is destroyed. It ends with the boys running down the road with the copper in hot pursuit. You can find it on google but the video sticks a lot.

Stan was the brains, absolutely, but so often you end up at laughing at the misfortune which is coming Ollie's way. Of course Hal Roach was pivotal too and when they left Roach in '39, there films in the early 40s I like to pretend were not made - some are that bad.

Big Business is arguably the best silent, up against arch nemesis James Finlayson (who gave Homer Simpson the "doh" we all recognise today). PS Pouzar there is a pub in Birmingham called the Charlie Hall - another L & H regular - and his brother lived down the end of my Nan's Road years ago.

The only issue I have with the box set is no Fra Diavolo (absolute classic), Babes in Toyland or Bonnie Scotland, although mine is 21 DVD. I don't like the films remastered in colour. It doesn't look right.

Something to keep you ticking over Pouzar

Great gag idea, creating a pair of little child L&Hs, which emphasizes that the full-sized pair are really overgrown children. Interesting that they refer to the mother as one person. I don't even want to think about the implications of that! I love the back-and-forth shots of the big guys playing checkers and the little ones playing with blocks, equally unsuccessfully. No one can weep quite like Stan Laurel and no one can milk a gag like these two. It is funny just to see Hardy without his signature moustache. I had never seen Brats before but it is included in the collection I ordered. I am sure it will look even better on my 52-inch TV. It is interesting that of all the comedians or comedy pairs none other has a comparable legion of devoted fans.
Thanks Bluenosey.

Will the quality of the film work on a 52" TV? I remember the "colour" experiment, and it was plain wrong with Stan having bright ginger hair.)

The joy of being of a certain age and growing up in UK was the loads of Chaplin and L&H that was shown in the late 60's and 70's. (Along with the under-rated Norman Wisdom, the biggest grossing film star in UK for most years in the 1960's.)

Stan did have ginger hair, blahblah how 'bright' I don't know.
I've read that he lived modestly towards the end of his life but always welcomed visiting fans and corresponded to fan mail.

'Brats' is fantastic. I'll throw 'Sons of the Desert' in there as another classic.

How is Fatty Arbuckle regarded over there, Pouzar? My grandmother always referred to him as ''a beast'' but a recent documentary (Paul Merton) suggested that he'd been falsely accused of rape/manslaughter. Like Ollie, he was surprisingly light on his feet.

Something I think is interesting about the silent era is that these guys were grasping a new art form. Technical difficulties aside, discovering a form of acting for the moving camera and also acting silently took time, and the audience had to learn a new 'vocabulary of drama', too. I suspect that performances which seem today ponderous and overstated were so not because of poor acting or direction but because the audience wasn't trusted to follow the plot which was therefore 'shouted' at them. And I suspect that the lengthy time some captions are held was because of the lower level of literacy at the time.

Oh! And 'Toad-in-the-Hole'. Pure magic.

Funny Flyman but I was just thinking today I should have mentioned Fatty Arbuckle as I really like him as well. We watched a bunch of his shorts, including one with Chaplin called The Rounders, where they play a pair of hilarious aristocratic drunks with battleaxe wives who escape to a restaurant and raise havoc. Chaplin uses the head of a bald guy to light his cigar, uses his napkin to blow his nose and then steals his tablecloth for a cover as he and Fatty try and sleep on the floor. I also watched a series of Arbuckle-Keaton films, The Butcher Boy, Back Stage, etc. including one in which Fatty, who was an immense man, dresses convincingly as a girl to see his love in her all-female boarding school, and another where he plays a doctor with Keaton as his whining, lollypop-sucking son, who drives into crowds injuring people and passing out his business cards.
He has amazing gracefulness for such a big lunk and a delightful baby face. If it hadn't been for his unfortunate presence at a party where a young actress died, and the outlandish charges he was rightly acquitted of, he might well have obtained the stature of the other great comedians of his time. Instead he was essentially ostracized.
Most silent actors came from the stage where exaggeration of body movement (and voice) was needed to reach the folks in the back rows. It is less of a problem in Silent Comedy but in silent dramatic films it involved what we understandably consider over-acting. It is best to look it as another style, like watching the cinema of another country with different traditions. What I like about silent film is that it is like what Hitchcock called ''Real Cinema'' telling a story without words or with the minimum necessary, making the audiences do more work and allowing more room for individual interpretation.

It's a tough one to call, given that there's no film record of pre-film theatre performances (durr! ). I know that there was a tendency in the turn of the (19th) century British theatre towards 'fluting' Shakespeare, i.e. putting near total emphasis on the poetry and the voice at the expense of physicality (John Guilgud was the last great of the school), then there was the influence of German Romanticism which I believe was prone to more exuberant animation. Were there many directors of German origin working in the USA in the silent era?

Having said that, how many of the silent comedians came through Classical stage roots? Chaplin and Laurel were with Fred Carno's Army, a music hall troupe. Arbuckle won a local talent show for singing and had a vaudeville background, as too did Langdon. Hardy started as a projectionist before entering vaudeville as a singer ....

I think there's a theme emerging .....

Some fantastic dialogue in this clip, with Fin and the excellent Daphne Pollard as Ollie's pint sized but not to be messed with Missus.

Oh and Ollie never learns...he always ends up listening to Stan....

:-

PS Flyman, it's "Towed in a Hole". Call yourself a fan, honestly

The famous soft shoe shuffle from Way Out West :-



...which is swifly followed by this little musical nugget :-

Love the clip with the singing which ends with Stan conked out on the floor with a smashed spittoon as a pillow, after a display of his literally unbelievable vocal range. I ask you, how can anyone not like these two? Like all the silent comedians the boys get tremendous mileage out of the screen personae they have created with their signature clothes and gestures, like Chaplin with his moustache, hat, cane and absurdly over-sized gentleman's rags, Lloyd's oversized glasses and too-tight outfit, and Keaton with his boater hat. You can import these two into any conceivable setting, such as the wild west, and they will have tons of material to work with. Again, thanks Bluenosey, although at this rate I may see all their work before my copy arrives!! No chance of that, but this is the kind of material you love watching again. And again.