Category Called Comedy #12

 

CCC: Merry Clipped-Out Marxes, Bouncing Baby Sandy, Dapper Offscreen Harold, and Comedies Gone Till Now

KEEPSAKE MARXES --- Clippings, shavings, call these fragments what we will, but this was collecting on clowns before there was public access to posters, stills, lobby cards, wells into which much money is presently pumped by those who seek Marx artifacts long gone from theatre fronts and shop windows. Show of hands for those willing to give five thousand for an original Duck Soup 11X14, or three grand (likely more) for Night/Opera, Day/Races title cards, each, not for the both. All gatherers had to do in the thirties was sharpen scissors and go to work on what refuse they could access, magazines spent, newsprint featuring the team, a wide world of Marx mentions. What I’ve found in fragments so far is a Duck Soup ad chunked out (at left) from the original pressbook, desecration to be sure, like taking a razor knife to hundred-dollar bills. How valuable is such an item? Let me put it this way, I’ve collected pressbooks for sixty years and have never been offered one for Duck Soup … at any price. Whose image shouted “funny” so certainly as the Marx Brothers? I don’t know artists from film more caricatured than this unit of four, eventually three. These boys dressed comic to register comic, each able to attend fights, races, restaurants, without necessarily being recognized. They were constantly group posed, so Buster Keaton was right when he pointed out how one Marx drifting off could skid progress to halt when filmmaking. Suppose these brothers were happier when they were able finally to work as singles? I’m guessing Groucho at least preferred that arrangement.

Note closely these captioned images. Many of scribes who had no professional association whatever with the Marxes presumed still to speak for them, time-honored “wisecracks” the bane of thirties print,  seeming all to vie for placement among what passed then for wits. Thought balloons ascribed to one or more Brothers seldom approached level of what pro writers supplied for their feature comedies, but where thousands of dailies spat forth Marx images, license had to extend for staff, gifted or not with words, to apply print often hackneyed, seldom amusing, into the mouths of Marxes. From under what rock did someone emerge who called Groucho the “sad-eyed senior member” of the team or described Harpo’s “impersonation of an imbecile.” The boys must have dreaded sight of themselves so mispresented. We’re told the Marx Bros. left Paramount because Duck Soup lost money. Note though their MGM features did the same but for A Night at the Opera and The Big Store, and yet … virtually all such output was brought back in years to follow. All of Paramounts were reliable for late forties “Laffmovie” dates. I’d guess rentals were flat and no more than fifteen or twenty dollars for such engagements (save larger urban dates), but each played and were presumably liked. Same for the Metros, their five back to theatres and offered well into the sixties, this before the team became manna for cultists and designated “revival houses.” Receipts Films Inc. accumulated for 16mm rentals of the Metros between the mid-sixties and mid-eighties would be informative reading.

BABY STARDOM A LITTLE ACCIDENT? --- Was Jack Pierce during retirement ever asked what making up Baby Sandy was really like? Was Sandy informed in adulthood that the man who applied her greasepaint was one and same as he who created the Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster? Baby Sandy was among what was called “infant phenomenons,” except Sandy was celebrated more for being passive and managing a goo-goo here and there, being adorable whole of her inventory. Look at Sandy and consider: You too might have been a baby star and have no memory of it. I doubt latter-day Sandy recalled a jot of her celebrity, let alone what sort Hugh Herbert was to work with. She started at age one, retired at four. Had I done the same thing, would I retain a sliver of it? There was a girl at USC who in 1975 showed me a photo of herself at age three sitting on Clark Gable’s knee, but she couldn’t recall him. Universal made a series of Sandy features around the same time they launched Gloria Jean. Chance of reviving either is remote. I fully expect to die without having seen a Baby Sandy film (notwithstanding whatever dupey remnant might surface at You Tube). LIFE gave a cover to Sandy, which we may assume was framed and hung on her wall. I attempt to speak authoritatively of a player I’ve never seen play. The only time this happened before at Greenbriar was where we addressed artists of the nineteenth-century stage. This trade ad for Little Accident assured exhibitors that “Sandy Sells Seats,” which she undoubtedly did or Universal would not have continued making Sandy vehicles. To call her movie Little Accident implies something quite beyond kin of any Code release; possibly that was lure of a sort. There was vanished time I’m sure when Little Accident ran on late night television. It was regarded as sensible to have low comedians support stars not yet having power of speech, thus Edgar Kennedy as a “paperhanger,” Fritz Feld, and of course the inimitable Hugh Herbert, all under direction of Charles Lamont, who lived long enough to be profiled re his long career, but was he asked about Baby Sandy? “Woo-Woo vs. Goo-Goo” ads said as much as 1939 should expect of any supporting feature. What is psychology behind so many films centered around abandoned babies? The thirties were rife with them. Little Accident ran 65 minutes, I’m sure a gracious plenty.

HAROLD LLOYD: “BORN HUMORIST”? --- Harold Lloyd as himself could enter any market in any state and shop unmolested. So could Chaplin. But not necessarily Laurel and Hardy. Maybe Laurel with his hair combed back. W.C. Fields would have been unmistakable, as also Buster Keaton. Groucho Marx pre-mustache of his own and You Bet Your Life could sit all day at a sidewalk café and not be approached. Harold Lloyd posed often as offscreen man of affairs, as in affairs of high film finance and builder of mansions undreamt by even largest of stars. He was gifted in matters of business and of putting those with similar gift for comedy at his behest. Saving charm was Lloyd never claiming he did it all. He knew comedy was a corporate matter, like anything manufactured in volume. His most prolific of output was no coincidence, Harold perhaps wondering why rival comics couldn’t get as organized. Here with his cigarette, he looks like a lifelong world-beater. An industry knew him as an actor who affected funny, never as a man to be laughed at. He’d not exercise bad judgment like colleagues often did (Keaton), nor let hubris guide steps (Langdon). Lloyd could chair a lodge meeting of hundreds, this in fact his vocation once movies played out. There was no making go of reviving his old movies, efforts valiant to be sure, but I doubt it mattered so much. Lloyd’s ego did not hang on success he achieved apart from what could be counted in dollars, and of those, he kept more than most of peers combined. I note Lloyd features dried up on Blu-ray, also most of shorts, good as they all are, him in a way as hard a sell as in the fifties/sixties when going door-to-door for distributors. I salute this smoking pose for HL having a world by it’s tail at a time when/where he best basked in it. No waiting on posterity for this artist. If he couldn’t altogether revive “Harold,” there were plenty other pleasures for Lloyd to indulge.

MANY MOVIES OF MIRTH --- Mack Sennett was too successful not to be imitated. His slapstick formula seemed easy on its surface for copiers, but who of these could step before a camera and be reliably funny? Carl Laemmle hired a crew who might and called his series “Joker Comedies.” An overseer named Allen Curtis was responsible for 250 shorts made between 1913 and 1917. Pressure upon him might be imagined. Curtis hired funny folk who had plied trades on transient stages and knew from farcing, single reels done at such pace as to seem mostly improvised, but so were the Sennetts, and who complained about them? Nickel patrons liked to laugh and these humble efforts largely got the job done. Theatres changing their bill every day barely knew one clown from another, whether bought from this company or that. Split-Reel is the firm behind Blu-Ray release of Joker comedies plus others of obscure silent vintage. Subjects all derive from 35mm Library of Congress holdings, nitrate decomp here/there but who’d carp for knowing it’s the only way these rarities exist. Rivals to Sennett have too long been unseen. Diggers into comedy other than his are pleased to see something besides what forever floats about on film and video. The Jokers have not been seen for over a hundred years and would not/never have been but for effort of Split-Reel chiefs Rob Stone and George Willeman. Andrew E. Simpson supplies scores for the lot. Completists at comedy will not find a richer resource than these. Amazon among others (Rob Stone's own Split-Reel site) has the two-disc Blu-Ray of eighteen shorts. Get yours and support Split-Reel’s ongoing excavation of comedy’s past.

Stills That Speak #11

 

So Much Meat on the Hoof. Can Cornel Bring One Down?

STS: Three That Speak to Survival

Been fasting this week. Told by You Tube that it’s a good idea. They could be wrong, in which event I’m in little better circumstance that casts of three seen of late to rise and fail during the mid-sixties when bare-fist survival stories had not a vogue perhaps, but did appear to come out of nowhere in a seeming lump. Said trio unique for ferocity of content and unblinking grip at reality were The Naked Prey, Sands of the Kalahari, and Flight of the Phoenix, each deserving of success none would get, proof again that good pictures never assured good grossing. Movies were/are called candy-coated, then comes ones like these refusing to compromise, each spanked by a shocked trade and put-off public. I recall them coming/gone on scant notice. The Naked Prey limped to the Liberty as part of a Saturday only combo skipped by me for a too harrowing trailer. Cornel Wilde chased by natives through seeming whole of Africa was anti-Tarzan and reassurance that series had stood for. I was not old enough at twelve to process what looked like non-stop torture for Wilde, him in mid-fifties capable of astonishing feats not unlike Burt Lancaster at same age scaling sheer rock in same year’s The Professionals. I’d be years steeling myself to watch The Naked Prey, a kind of dread discoloring the interim. All know certain titles that compel and yet repel. Will they do psychic damage should we submit? Criterion has a splendid Blu-Ray to argue for The Naked Prey as one of key features done in the sixties, utterly unlike anything out the same decade, shamefully ignored then and still so now.

Torture Served Stark, and Never Mind the Guy They Roast Over an Open Fire

If auteuring may be defined, let alone exemplified, by any single artist, then surely it is by Cornel Wilde, who expressed by talent, let alone life and limb, his philosophy re man and limits humanity will pass where faced by savagery unchecked. I’ll venture that The Naked Prey is a lot more shocking today than in 1965-66 when it nibbled at edges of decorum movies upheld to that time. We’d witness crumble of the Code where a Naked Prey and ones like it (but wait, there was nothing like The Naked Prey) bent boundaries film hitherto observed, 1968 official recognition of a mainstream letting its ship of rules go ahead and sink. Of raw meat also served in ’65 was Sands of the Kalahari, the “baboon” one I heard mention of at school but missed a first go round despite a spectacular pressbook Col. Forehand gave me which cover had long-fanged apes forward lunging in full color, Paramount putting such aggressive sell on little else that blighted year. The Liberty brought back Sands of the Kalahari for a Saturday double where we'd finally intersect, my anticipation and appetite for baboons fierce as that aroused by Pom Poms and Baby Ruth. Guess Col. Forehand knew impolite product where he saw it, or maybe Paramount’s field man tipped him off that these were best snuck in on shortest terms, then hustled out before parents caught the odor. Worry over warpage of young minds had basis where such shows applied, Sands of the Kalahari cruelest exploration of man’s inhumanity to other men and a woman (Susannah York). Sands is of classic “ordeal” structure. Can ones off a wrecked plane survive on a parched and endless desert? All are reduced to same level of beasts that stalk them, Sands of the Kalahari Brit-cast and backed, if shot in South Africa, a re-teaming for folk behind Zulu success previous (director Cy Endfield, star Stanley Baker).

Not Your Next In-Flight Movie, I Hope

Sands of the Kalahari is one for watching in maximum comfort, “This could never happen to me” a soothing accompany, but not altogether as Kalahari fights complacency with brass knucks. Again, those baboons. They scared me more than otherwise apes in any movie. Did Stuart Whitman get extra pay for fighting one to the death with bare hands? Hope so. I would have been for handing out Academy Awards to Kalahari’s entire cast. For once such a trophy could mean something. We sweat with these unfortunates and wonder how one could endure even a fraction of what they go through. That last applies to the cast in undoubted real misery of shooting where clothes they wear become rags or discard altogether over two hour’s spread. Imagine Susannah York went from this to A Man for All Seasons. An actor’s life for thee but not for me (York incidentally gives a performance for the ages). S. Baker, Stuart Whitman, Nigel Davenport, Theodore Bikel, and Harry Andrews also suffer admirably. How much different to simulate such horror than to know it for real? Full marks for this ensemble. Same for miserable lot downed by defective aircraft in Flight of the Phoenix, star-hoisted by James Stewart as pilot for the group with direction by Robert Aldrich. Fox expected mighty things from Flight, entrusting $5.3 million to the negative and shooting on domestic desert floor rather than crossing oceans to do same. Reviews were rapturous but the public pointed thumbs down. Too many by now had bought color televisions. That much as anything was what put films in a doom loop during the mid-sixties. Fox chart, like every company else’s, dripped red in 1965 when Flight of the Phoenix did crash of its own ($3.4 million lost), proof again that you can make them good, excellent even, and still lose it all and more. Aldrich never got over the beating Phoenix took. At least there is Criterion to celebrate greatness achieved, their Blu-Ray outstanding with as fine extras. Stewart and distinguished support roast under a pitiless sun and we’re 142 minutes frying with them. Takes mettle to make this march, again mood of your moment to dictate.

This Should Have Clicked Instead of Jim in True Downer Shenandoah of a Same Year

Occurs to Me That All Three of This Week's Selected Shows are Triumphs of the Human Spirit

What did it say about 1965 where three of such stripe appeared, not by design obviously, just circumstance of culture giving birth to strikingly similar ideas around a same time, varied creators speaking similar language with all to depict hardship at levels not explored before by movies. There’d be little reward for harsh cards dealt, but what could they reasonably expect? Flight of the Phoenix was seemingly most hopeful of the lot, at least from money-spent-standpoint. There has to be hope in any venture, these three expressed by endurance and ours for enduring hours where no matter how well executed the telling, we take punishment same as those stricken on screen. There is precious little humor among the lot. We’d not want that for storytelling integrity kept intact. No one could accuse The Naked Prey, Sands of the Kalahari, and Flight of the Phoenix of being soft around the middle. None gave in to boxoffice call for compromise. How did Cornel Wilde negotiate studio support for a project so outlaw as The Naked Prey? --- him far from a Top Ten name in 1965-66 or any time. The Naked Prey collected $687K in domestic rentals. Short of walloping worldwide, it surely lost money. There would not be network airplay for Prey nor Sands of the Kalahari, which collected $931K in domestic rentals. Again hope … for another Zulu?, but word-of-mouth for Kalahari, Prey, and Phoenix was likely reserved if not ruinous among ticket buyers if not admiring critics (seldom much help in any event). Go At Nervous System Risk, leave kiddies home till a next Disney or Elvis, women will surely shun, all such reactions to collapse the boxoffice. I’d not discount these or claim “we weren’t ready” for these sorts of entertainment (but how “entertaining” was patron ordeal, detractors might argue). I instead say seek them out because all score in ways unique and not captured elsewhere, certainly not of timid now, and probably they won’t be equaled, even approached, again. Here’s too to note: None resolve on bummer basis --- you won’t go home to suck the gas pipe. I felt in fact invigorated by the outcome of all three. Fact the group are accessible in High-Def, streaming, discs, etc., well … there go excuses for not rooting them out. Go watch and collect Scout badges for doing so, earn real “Courage Awards.”

Two Sure-Fire and Past a Century Old

 

"Written by Mark Twain" Said Credits

True or no? --- most films improve upon novels they adapt. Why buy books for adapt to movies? Many are useful as pre-sell. Lots have a concept surefire, can’t miss. How was Jaws anything other than bulletproof for screens? Mark Twain wrote The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, two not taught much at school, but bore his name on covers and him having wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn made all subsequent classics by default. Fact is Pauper/Yankee had ideas a natural for picturization. Lookalike boys switch identities, complication ensues, presto makes and remakes on screen. And what of Yankee's time travel to valor and jousts? Mark Twain lived long enough to let at least one of his stories be screen-adapted. I could believe he would have seen Prince and Yankee on filmic terms had films been around when he wrote the two novels. Bernard DeVoto was the twentieth century’s leading Twain/Clemons scholar. He found The Prince and the Pauper “second-rate” but conceded it had “structure … developed from within,” that last known necessity to Classic Era filmmaking and manna to whoever was put to scripting Clemons. Again, and as with all adapted from literature, there was right-away critic assumption that result would not live up to its source. DeVoto as spokesman for the learned may well have seen Warner’s 1937 Prince and the Pauper and come away figuring it was at least as good as source material having “already lost (its) luster” (DeVoto wrote this of the Twain novel in 1946) but would “still charm children as it once charmed Victorian adults.” Here was faintest praise, DeVoto figuring grown-ups, even youngsters after 1946, too sophisticated to enjoy Mark Twain’s fancy. Think was and is as of 2026. I dug out The Prince and the Pauper plus A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to see (or read) if indeed we are too advanced for either. Verdict: Both are comfortably ahead of us. In fact, try most any nineteenth century work on WTF/OMG generation and prep for a fall.

To no surprise, I found The Prince and the Pauper a plenty sophisticated read, even as DeVoto called it kid stuff. Here was still child level as measured by 1946 education not so far declined from Twain’s time where him and those as motivated took self-improvement by daily if not hourly dose. The author has his “pauper” seek Latin study from an as-impoverished priest, then uses acquired knowledge to thrive among if not lead beggar-boy class he is heir to, such character device to make us wonder what rewards might come of latter-day boys and girls gearing toward humanities, speech, communication, even as public education shuns these things. Could skills unique and of real value (pecuniary even) come of this? I like how the Pauper teaches himself to read and uses that to assist his masquerade as the Prince once the two swap identities. Mark Twain got in digs at inhumane system that was English life in the sixteenth century. This author went medieval on then times plus current ones, his social commentary bitter as in relentlessly so. He wrote in Connecticut Yankee how “terror” of the French Revolution was as nothing beside suffering haves had imposed upon have-nots for thousands of years leading up to turn of eighteenth-to-nineteenth century, and so what if a few thousand aristocrats got theirs on French scaffolds? They had it coming, says MT. Hanged (right word) if this didn’t feel like reading modern and radicalized fiction today. It’s known that Mark Twain’s wife vetted what he wrote and laid a heavy blue pencil where he went overboard, which apparently was often. Twain wrote pal William Dean Howells that “there wouldn’t be so many things left out” if he could do his books over again, this time with “a pen warmed up in hell.”

Mark Twain offered much opinion with regard “the damned human race,” such sentiment the more as he got older and life dealt deuces rather than aces previous. Most writers get a little caustic as they go, but his stuff heated sufficient for the estate to put lids on much, and for years after Twain’s 1910 passing, this a bur under DeVoto’s seat because he wanted Mark Twain out there and unexpurgated. Warts-and-all had to wait till survivor daughter Clara at-late-date relented and gave DeVoto keys to the store, Twain nevermore a benign old humorist in the ice cream suit. His senior output is tough swimming but let no one say this author threw soft balls. Check sometime his letters just to various editors, never mind private correspondence more explicit. Man as barbarous is threaded through Prince/Pauper and Connecticut Yankee. And I thought Injun Joe was the meanest tool in Mark Twain’s kit. Warner Bros. in 1937 needed kid gloves to handle The Prince and the Pauper, Twain’s spelled-out truth of London life an impossibility for Code Hollywood. Laird Doyle of campus wit past and previous Greenbriar celebration was put to softening-plus-getting values generous within the book, mere skeleton of which was enough for a more than fine show. WB was blessed by twin boys under contract, Billy and Bobby Mauch, so no need for split-screening or camera tricks with one kid in dual roles. There also was insurance of Errol Flynn who although first billed does not enter the fray till a second half which surely saw ’37 grousing like would issue from me 2026 watching, though absorbed enough in action to forget Flynn was in wings. Mark Twain was given possessory credit over the title, plus his image briefly in case we forgot that face, bringing pedigree to the enterprise even as WB took customary liberties with property they’d bought.

Now to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, rendered first with talk in 1931(a silent done in 1921). Bernard DeVoto offered excerpts from the book in the Viking Portable edition of Mark Twain which he edited, DeVoto of opinion that Connecticut Yankee was “the most tragically marred of Mark’s books.” He went on to impugn the presumed classic of American literature by first conceding “it might have been a masterpiece … but nothing is sustained … in short the book is at war with itself.” This could be a film reviewer confronting the 1931 or 1949 versions. To defend Mark Twain, I’d point out as DeVoto did not that it was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court where the author introduced, I’d aver for a first time, the story slant others of fantasy and sci-fi bent would play to a hilt, that being time travel as plot accelerant (what Twain referred to as “the transposition of epochs --- and bodies”). Here was brilliance enough to excuse the rest. Movies muffing a job of adaptation was their fail, not Mark Twain’s. His gag of an eclipse saving the hero from public burning is one any writer would long to dream up. Whole idea of an 1879 dweller thrust back to the sixth century and King Arthur’s time was based on Twain’s meeting a castle tour guide during a trip to England who claimed he had lived through Arthurian time, Mark figuring, what if he did? From such encounter did Yankee spring. Hollywood updated via Will Rogers as a 1931 radio repairman and occasional broadcaster, then for ‘49 Bing Crosby a blacksmith in 1912. Rogers treatment allows for humor of the known satirist’s sort, nowhere near raw treatment Mark Twain applied. It’s been suggested that Rogers was an update on Twain in his writings and general attitude, but short reading of Mark Twain will disabuse most of that. Both were charged by circumstance of a popular image to pull in horns to some extent, Rogers more than Twain, latter whom could doff kid gloves more readily when truculent mood called for it.

To The Prince and the Pauper again, novel which was compact and lent itself to action, intrigue, and pageant, all which were visually compelling like the Connecticut Yankee’s eclipse as rescue from execution. Warners’ Prince/Pauper aimed their treatment toward real-life Brit coronation seemingly timed to pump 1937’s release, event-inspired newsreels playing in tandem with the feature for many dates. WB treatment skewed heavy to youth per Mauch twins presence, plus there wouldn’t be observations from the book such as church premises being host to scaffolds in non-stop use. Errol Flynn was star assurance against too literary an association, though kept in mind should be Twain’s novel published but fifty-six years before (1881) the film was released. Pedigree was the more pronounced by 1962 and a Disney version produced in England, to be released theatrically there plus Euro markets, premiering on US television screens as three-parts on Sunday night’s Wonderful World of Color, broadcast dates March 11,18, and 25, 1962. A dullish telling of the Twain story said observers, host Walt Disney explaining harshness of the era it depicts, though standard/practices for TV at the time made spoon bread of what viewers saw. Guy Williams of Zorro habit assumed Flynn’s part, while Sean Scully took the dual title roles. Disney inaugural season for NBC saw money spent on larger scale than had been case at ABC, The Prince and the Pauper looking like a feature despite its low-budget, Disney as host making the case for Mark Twain as Number One favorite author from his childhood (“I read every one of his books”). Exposure on such wide seen forum as The Wonderful World of Color amounted to best exposure for the author but fifty years passed, The Prince and the Pauper appearing also in a comic book and children’s hardbound edition circa 1962. Considering influence Disney had on consumer choices during this his strongest period in both TV and film, we can assume The Prince and the Pauper got its best-ever boost to a contemporary marketplace.

Advantage with Connecticut Yankee was you could plug current personalities to Twain’s title character and get satisfactory result, or better where handled right. Will Rogers thrived with it, as though Mark Twain in 1881 saw his successor humorist coming. This might also have applied to Bing Crosby in 1949. Beauty in whatever Twain wrote was flexible to what a current public was judged to need, never mind close adhere to text. Crosby was a good actor and a great singer subject to same hot/cold winds as any star. A Going My Way happened once, while Blue Skies and others like it happened a rest of times. Weaker vehicles by 1949 outnumbered memorable ones. Bing’s best from this period might be hear-but-not-see Ichabod and Mr. Toad, voice only putting him in fuller command than cameras would permit. Swathes of Washington Irving got in his Ichabod Crane narration as overseen by Crosby, result like one of his expertly pre-recorded radio programs, these a summit of tech perfection. As the Connecticut Yankee, he falls prey to onus that is team effort, a nice opening to foretell not just comedy, some music, perhaps bittersweet romance (Bing joins a castle tour and casually announces he “was there” when sixth century events took place, a variant on Mark Twain tour experience that gave him Yankee’s inspiration). Being Paramount supervised, plus (over) produced, Connecticut Yankee obliges Crosby charisma to drag what shading he could manage across a finish line. Result was a film no better regarded then than now, points of interest yes, enough to wish Mark Twain’s property might be remade to at last emphasize a notion compelling now as what the author devised in 1881.