Slapstick at the Altar

In honor of four months of wedded bliss, and as part of the spectacular Slapstick Blog-a-Thon hosted by Thom at Film of the Year, I thought I'd profile a handful of slapstick weddings and near-weddings: one from an unlikely director and one with an unlikely straight man, one featuring my favorite unheralded comedian and one featuring perhaps the best-known comedy pair in slapstick, and one unfunny, derivative snooze.

Balked at the Altar (1908)

When one thinks of slapstick, D.W. Griffith might be toward the bottom of the list of people who spring to mind, somewhere between Chester A. Arthur and Laurence Olivier. But Griffith, in his early days at Biograph, directed at least one film that fits the slapstick mold, and perhaps helped establish some of the film genre's conventions: 1908's Balked at the Altar. The scenario involves a young woman's attempts to snag a husband—any husband. She makes eyes at every man who passes by her doorstep (except the "elderly fat black man"; more on that later), and when that fails, her pappy journeys to town to recruit a likely suitor. When he brings the lucky guy home and then produces a shotgun to seal the deal, the new groom goes along with it until the crucial moment when he apparently yells "I don't" and leaps out the nearest stained-glass window. Thus commences a fall-down, drag-out chase in which the wedding party attempts to recapture the groom and finish the ceremony.

There's little here that screams "Griffith" or "first genius of American film"; there aren't any directorial flourishes, aside from one instance when a woman offscreen seems to wave her hand in front of the camera, which was the closest any of the actors get to the camera. There are no closeups (indeed, no shots that show less than the actors' full lengths), and the film is badly deteriorated, so it's nearly impossible to tell what anyone looks like, but most people of consequence have comical identifying traits that survive the ravages of age: the bride-to-be wears her hair in a summer-squash-shaped formation atop her head; the reluctant groom minces around, elbows cocked, and has a pointy beard; and the "elderly fat black man" is clearly a white guy in blackface wearing a pillow strapped around his stomach. This racist caricature seems to exist only to provide a running gag in which an older white lady beats him up at every opportunity.

The chase scene is something Mack Sennett would have been proud of producing in his Keystone days (and in fact, Sennett appears in this film, although I'm not sure in what role; Griffith appears too, but again, all the faces are washed out). The wedding party tumbles out of the church like clowns from a fire engine, and each phase of the chase is defined by some obstacle they must overcome: a wooden fence and the two boys lolling against it, a steep incline and the drunk trying to sleep it off at the bottom, and finally the tree where they bring their quarry to bay.

That Little Band of Gold (1915)

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle starred alongside Mabel Normand in dozens of Keystone comedies in the teens. In many of them they were married, but in this one, they get married, thus qualifying the film for my completely arbitrary category. Within the first three minutes, Fatty proposes in the back of a cab, she accepts joyfully, they get hitched at the courthouse, and then she's waiting in front of her mirror, tearfully, for her wastrel husband to come home. Which he does, drunk and falling down. Fatty Arbuckle has one of the best "drunk" walks in film history: the top of his body stays mostly still, as if he were sober, but his legs twitch fitfully, making it look like he has to take multiple steps to cover the same ground as one sober step.

Mabel and her disapproving mother (and she has a lot to disapprove of—she catches Fatty fondling the help, and he continues to do so as she lectures him) force the big guy to take them to the opera, but as soon as they're in their seats Fatty is causing trouble: sneezing loudly, laughing at the funny-looking singers, unbuttoning his pants to get comfortable, and making pantomime plans with Ford Sterling, who occupies a box across the auditorium, to sneak off with the two buxom beauties Ford has in tow. The four end up at a restaurant where the furious Ford has to watch Fatty woo the woman they both want (Ethel Madison).

I was surprised to see Fatty as essentially the straight man. He cedes the screen to Ford Sterling, whose pointy beard, wagging eyebrows, and grimaces make him look like the kind of guy who'd tie a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. There's not a lot of physical comedy involved; I was expecting repeated scenes of a drunken Arbuckle falling down, but he apparently wanted to go in a different direction here. The most interesting thing about the film (which is stellar throughout) is the almost self-referential nature of some of the jokes. Early on, when Arbuckle is about to get dressed for his night out, his butler points at the camera and Arbuckle slams a door in our faces. And I think the opera scenes were shot at a real opera, with an audience of civilians instead of extras. When Fatty and Mabel sit down in their box, people in nearby seats point at them in surprise; you can see at least one person mouthing "Fatty Arbuckle." Similarly, when Ford Sterling sits down, people point and stare at him. Later in the restaurant, many of the other patrons are staring at the foursome and the camera, but the line between civilian and actor blurs when some of them get involved in the escalating conflict over Ethel Madison's affections. I suppose these were "plants" of film folks among the patrons.

The only moment of "traditional" slapstick violence is a tad shocking, given the generally tame feel of the rest of the film. At the end of their sojourn at the restaurant, before Mabel and mom can drag Fatty away, he grabs a champagne bottle and smashes it over Sterling's head. Because of the muted comedy to this point, it almost feels out of place, like a real person was smashing a real champagne bottle over a real head, and maybe real blood would follow. Of course Sterling short-circuits any such thought with some patented grimacing and gesticulating, but for just a second, it felt like the goodwill was gone.

His Wooden Wedding (1925)

I chose this topic mainly because I wanted a chance to write about my favorite slapstick short, which is this Leo McCarey-directed Charley Chase two-reeler. A well-to-do man (Chase) is about to get married when his best man (Fred DeSilva) slips him a note warning him that his bride-to-be (Katherine Grant) has a wooden leg. Charley is horrified, and who wouldn't be? At least, in this film, that is. Of course, right at that moment (it is Friday the 13th, after all), she sprains her ankle, causing a distinct limp that seems like proof of woodenness to Charley. When he gets a splinter from a cane while attempting to verify empirically the presence of lumber under her dress, he's convinced, and runs off in a fright, consoling himself with a large bottle of brandy. Of course, all his best man wants is the famous Dhulip Diamond, an heirloom that's been in Charley's family for years and is now perched on Grant's finger. I won't go into how it ends up stashed in Charley's top hat aboard a steamer bound for the South Seas as Grant and her frantic father chase them down in a yacht.

The comedic sequences, much like Buster Keaton's "trajectories," work as self-contained gags but also feed into the next routine in logical ways (well, in the film's logic, at least). Thus DeSilva's attempt to knock Charley's top hat off to retrieve the diamond runs into Charley's experiment with tossing hats into the wind aboard the steamer, which in turn segues smoothly into Charley's effort to free the diamond from inside the dress of a homely woman, which culminates in an uproarious dance sequence where Charley teaches her energetic, wiggly dances, hoping to force the diamond to fall out of her dress, with unintended consequences.

Chase is my favorite silent comedian, partly because few have heard of him and I can sound like a serious film nerd, and partly because I really love him. Mostly the latter. His career in front of and behind the camera lasted from the early teens, when often supported bigger stars such as Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin (he appears in That Little Band of Gold as a ticket-taker), until his death in 1940 at the age of 47. He was a graceful acrobat who, like Chaplin and Keaton, translates his grace into elaborate physical comedy. Many of his shorts start with him making an embarrassing decision that he spends the rest of the film attempting to make up for, in increasingly absurd situations. I like that he isn't afraid of coming across as a jerk, like he is here and in one of my other favorites, 1931's The Pip from Pittsburgh, in which he agrees to go on a blind double date but decides to make the experience as bad as possible for everyone involved. I've seen only a small fraction of the over 200 films he appeared in and the over 100 films he directed, but my esteem for him grows with every new discovery.

Oliver the Eighth (1934)

In this odd little short, which is funny for much of its running time but then squanders its promise in an abrupt ending, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy play barbers who both answer a personal ad from a rich widow seeking a new husband. Ollie cheats his partner by promising to mail his letter and then hiding it, but Stan comes along for the ride when the widow (a divine Mae Busch, vamping it up like Gloria Swanson 16 years later in Sunset Blvd.) chooses Oliver as her husband-to-be. Too bad for both of them that she's a deranged murderess who was slighted by a guy named Oliver and has vowed to exact her revenge on anyone bearing that name.

There's not a lot of traditional slapstick to the humor: poor Ollie gets bonked on the head several times, but only once is it part of a sustained gag. Most of the humor comes from pantomime (something the former silent film stars, including Busch, knew pretty well): Busch has a similarly deranged butler named Jitters (Jack Barty) who plays solitaire with invisible cards, does card tricks with those same cards, and serves an invisible dinner that Ollie and Stan are obliged to pretend to eat to avoid setting Jitters off. Laurel and Hardy are masters at delivering punchlines: it's sort of funny to play solitaire with invisible cards, but it's hilarious to cheat; the pantomimed dinner scene is funny, but it's hilarious when Stan, having knocked the invisible salt over, tosses an invisible pinch over his shoulder for luck.

As the ending approaches, Stan and Ollie are locked in a guest room as Busch prepares to murder them both. I was looking forward to a series of gags as they attempt to elude her and Jitters and escape from the house, but I suppose the operative word in "comedy short" is "short": having spent their two reels on setup, the payoff is necessarily disappointing.

Caught in the Act (1936)

My celebration of slapstick weddings ends on a sour note, as this Andy Clyde short is the only one that I actively disliked. There's little to recommend this film or Clyde's skills as a comedian. His entire shtick is that he's a relatively young man (44 years old here) playing a doddering old man. Thus, his ability to execute a tumble or jump in the air is supposed to be amusing. But Clyde (who went on to achieve fame of sorts as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick in the 1940s) short-circuits everything by calling undue attention to himself, with far too many snorts, grunts, whimpers, and laughs.

In this film, he gets engaged to the energetic Esmerelda (Anne O'Neal) and sets off home to prepare for the big event, which is to happen the next morning. Distracted from his bath by a door-to-door salesman, he gets caught outside, naked but for a sheet wrapped around him. This is decidedly inconvenient, because there's a maniac named Jack the Kisser on the loose, who runs around wrapped in a sheet, kissing unsuspecting women. Andy quickly winds up in jail, handcuffed to the real Jack the Kisser (John T. Murray), who escapes, dragging the bewildered Andy with him.

John Murray steals the entire film as Jack the Kisser. He looks and sounds like a villain from a Warner Brothers cartoon, with waggling eyebrows, insane stares, and that mwua-ha-ha-ha laugh. Clyde himself only provides one big laugh, when the police administer a sobriety test—say "rubber buggy bumper" ten times fast—and his ability to do it convinces them that he must be drunk. The centerpiece of the film is an extended "nobody's piloting the motorcycle" stolen from the superior Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr.. The comparison may not be fair (Keaton being one of the undeniable slapstick geniuses), but it's impossible to avoid judging this film against its predecessor and finding it lacking in style, timing, and outrageousness. Keaton's routine was marked by constant and seemingly real near-disaster, but Clyde's is shot mostly against a rear-projection screen, and without any whiff of danger, it just doesn't work.