Chaplin and Keaton Celebrate Old Times

Theatres As Once They Were: A Night In The Show and Spite Marriage

Not a few comedians born in the 19^th century dominated a next century’s humor. Better even than stage traditions they brought forward was re-creation, faithful by all appearance, of a performing world that formed them, but was no more. Of examples, more than I could list, are a pair Charlie Chaplin, and later Buster Keaton, did: A Night In The Show and Spite Marriage, both enjoyable as documentary or comedy. They played to a patronage that knew a stage-centered world the movies had or would supplant. Variety still was strong when A Night In The Show was released in 1915; there was even remnant of stock companies by 1929 when Spite Marriage came out. Both films, plenty good and funny even if we ignore context, give life to a period we’ll not see as there were no cameras or recorders to capture it. Talent who remembered put what they could into these and other meditations on ways of entertainment gone past. Road life must have been for most part a joy, based on upbeat depiction from Chaplin, Keaton, and scores of others who joined memories to film. Need we ask if live performing was more fulfilling than doing the act for anonymous watchers who'd see it on screens? There’s why the most vivid, often wistful, chapters in autobiographies revolve around early life on stage. Begin with Chaplin … Keaton … the ribbon goes endlessly from there.

A Night In The Show was for me the funniest Chaplin so far seen (as of 1970, in 8mm from Blackhawk for $11.98). I knew it was based on a skit he had headlined for English Music Halls and later US vaudeville. Mumming Birds was what put Chaplin over in a big way, his drunk act a wow, and natural for him to re-do for movies, only now he could double effect by playing the inebriate plus a disturber in the gallery. I wondered at age sixteen if theatre-going was really like this in ye vanished age. There wasn’t real-life footage to confirm or deny; you had to take history books and old folk’s word for what went on so far back. Later reading taught that yes, “theatre” as it encompassed variety, legit performance too, could get wild and wooly. Even Shakespeare and opera got the hook from audiences aroused to self-expression. Much of mischief was contained after a first half of the 1800's when crowd demonstration hit a peak. Managers more vigilant took the ginger out of “gallery gods” that once ran shows from an onlooker’s distance. A first rule of polite vaudeville was to make environments safe for women and their children. A family-friendly place could swell its till way past receipts gotten from libertines on the loose. Chaplin with A Night In The Show looked back to time before his time (at least in the US) where watchers dealt ruckus to acts that displeased them, be it tomatoes, dead chickens or other fowl, whatever abuse bad performance had coming.

Mumming Birds on Stage, Later To Be Film-Adapted by Chaplin as A Night In The Show

What got me was behavior that seemed outrageous on the one hand, believable on the other. There would still have been playhouses, smallest-time vaudeville, in 1915, crowds taking liberty not permitted at sites where decorum held sway. First, Chaplin’s venue is small, a theatre in miniature, where you can imagine chaos turned loose (Fred Karno’s stage-upon-a-stage, where Chaplin romped in Mumming Birds, was its own unique creation). Cheap seats seemed a license for base conduct, and to such a place, it seems odd to see Charlie arrive in formal dress. He figured, I guess, that this would enhance comedy, and put him in starker contrast to the rowdy he also played. We must ask, though, if crowds comport better even in our own enlightened age? I admit to being part of a frisky matinee crowd when the Liberty hosted King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1963. My group of a half-dozen, so loud as to merit a pitch-out, were warned of getting just that unless we calmed down. So how much progress did this represent since 1915? Consider today's knowingly rude audience members who carry devices into theatres on which they text or chatter during movies. A Night In The Show Charlie walks onstage to interact with, or assault, the performers. This happened lots once upon a time. Actors gone amiss with a line of Shakespeare ran risk of watchers stepping up to give reproof. Audiences were once divided by ticket pricing, more so by class. Box seating was for swells, the pit for ones who aspired to that, or escape from chaos of the gallery section, where hard benches prevailed and company was coarse. Chaplin gets laughs by letting his gallery group rain fruit and sprayed water upon victims in the pit, a very-real hazard of sitting below the balcony in an era before reforms were imposed.

Spite Marriage might be characterized as Buster Keaton’s Romance Of The Stock Companies. No film I know of captures so well the magic local players brought to communities where they did role after role to achieve something very like stardom within confines of their small town or city. Stock companies disappeared by inches. It’s said there were 2,500 of them in 1910. Feature-length movies made inroads so that by the Great War, far less survived, let alone thrived. Still, there were ones that hung on, if on a modest scale and with less revenue for members to divide. Clark Gable got his start with a stock company, as did many others who later did films. We see echoes of stock in Playmaker groups even if these are composed mostly of volunteers. A great writer, Edward Wagenknecht, born 1900 (and lived till 2004!), had a book called As Far As Yesterday, where he recalled growing up in Chicago and being enamored of the stock companies, and in particular an actress named Marie Nelson, “locally famous and nationally almost unknown.” Stock work was the hardest there was, and for never enough money. What was fame where you had to remain within county lines to enjoy it?

Dorothy Sebastian in Spite Marriage is Buster’s actress ideal. He is starstruck as are other eligible men of the town. When a small part player drops out, Buster takes his place in a Civil War melodrama to be near her, and makes a shamble of it. Backstage foolery of a first third are Spite Marriage’s comic highlight. I want to think that Keaton devised the most knowing gags, but I suspect all hands well understood stage struggle, on-set suggestion boxes filled to overflowing. The director was Edward Sedgewick, he of years with a vaudeville family act and writing for comedy. I can see he and Buster laying track for all of Spite Marriage, at least this marvelous section where Keaton gave on screen the kind of exhibition he had spent much of a lifetime performing on stage (Buster as a child did melodrama in addition to slap-down comedy, playing Little Lord Fauntleroy on occasion, and a doomed boy in East Lynne). You get a sense of everyone in Spite Marriage reliving some past or other. For all the story’s drift toward a less engaging second half, this affectionate salute-to-stock rates a favorite among Keaton work for Metro. It is also a record of how a typical Civil War melodrama (“Carolina”) might have played before an audience that knew the format and wasn’t inclined to laugh at scenes done straight. It is only where Buster bungles his part that they break up (our cue to do so as well). The melodrama is not ridiculed for being melodrama, 1929 still short of a time where it was incumbent upon crowds to laugh at anything a past generation took seriously. Don’t forget that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had only lately been (1927) a Universal Super-Jewel played with all due reverence. Spite Marriage is a priceless artifact of days when traditions from before a turn of the century could still walk hand-in-hand with modern modes of entertainment, even motion pictures with sound, or in this case, recorded music and effects.

First-runs furthered the accommodation. Three acts of vaudeville (“Direct From Chicago’s Loop”) accompany Spite Marriage as well as three short subjects, several with talk, to make up a “Mammoth 7 Unit Show” at the Rex Theatre (above ad). This, mind you, was a One Day Only show, a populace figured to put all else aside so as not to miss a grandest of all stage-screen aggregations. Imagine the sheer logistics of moving all this talent and their props, then reels to-from the booth, a projectionist’s nightmare, as was customary in those days. No wonder they got up a strongest union to protect sanity of membership. It would have pleased Buster Keaton to see the brotherhood of vaude artists still getting work, and on a same bill with him. Line-ups like what the Rex had were proof that variety was not dead so long as audiences spoke up for live acts with willingness to pay for seeing them. There were even tab versions of melodrama on some bills, and who knows but what local stock companies didn’t contribute to the live programs that went with Spite Marriage and other features that needed propping with something other than film. Spite Marriage is available on DVD in a box with The Cameraman and Free and Easy. It streams at Vudu in HD, which I have not yet seen. TCM has not so far run a High-Def transfer. Chaplin’s A Night In The Show can be had in a beyond-belief transfer both in an Essanay Blu-Ray box set, and as an extra with Criterion’s Limelight. You’d not dream for these last 104 years that anything so old and printed-to-pieces could look so good.