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.