An excerpt from my upcoming essay about early silent film comedy.
It's impossible to say with any certainty who invented the pie-in-the-face gag so much associated with silent film comedy. The pie itself was probably invented by the ancient Egyptians during the Neolithic Period, around 9500 B.C. and my best guess is that the first pie was thrown for laughs somewhere around 9500-and-ten-minutes B.C. The tomb of pharaoh Ramses II, who took power in 1304 B.C., included etchings of royal bakers preparing galettes, a thin-crusted pie stuffed with honey and nuts—maybe the first artistic representation of a pie in history.
Legend has it that Mabel Normand threw motion pictures' first pie, hitting an unsuspecting Roscoe Arbuckle in the short A Noise From The Deep (1913). The fact is though, it was the otherwise forgettable Mr. Flip (1909) starring veteran comic Ben Turpin that was the first film to feature an actor getting hit in the face with a pie. Famous for his crossed eyes and brush moustache, Turpin began his career in burlesque and vaudeville before making his film debut in 1907 at the Essanay Studios. Mr. Flip has all the appearances of being based on a stage routine Turpin had earlier perfected, leading me to believe that the pie-in-the-face gag was already an old one by the time it showed up on film.
Still, there are historians who insist Normand should get credit for throwing the first pie (as opposed to merely shoving it into the victim's face). Well, maybe. Even that much is hard to confirm. I've read that Normand in fact threw the first pie at a stagehand who had made a pass at her, and that the story has morphed over time into credit for inventing the thrown-pie gag. I've also read that it wasn't Normand who threw the pie at all but Arbuckle himself and that he hit co-star Nick Cogley. A copy of A Noise From The Deep resides in New York's Museum of Modern Art where it is screened periodically. If I ever see it, I'll let you know the scoop.
For those interested in the fine art of pie throwing, Buster Keaton described the process in some detail in an interview with Fletcher Markle in 1964:
"[N]umber one is we don't use a regular baker's pie," he told Markle, "and throwing the pie in a cardboard plate is no good because that plate flying off detracts. So, what we used to do is our prop man would get our baker—whoever is closest to the studio—to make pie crust, two of them, with nothing in them, and take just a little flour and water to make a paste, just enough to glue the two together. That was so that your fingers wouldn't go through the bottom of it. Now you fill it, about an inch, with just flour and water mixed, which clings like glue and stretches. Now, on top of it, if I'm going to hit somebody in dark clothes, a brunette, you put a lemon meringue type of topping on it and garnish with whipped cream, you see. When it was a light costume, a blond, something like that, you put in blueberry, and then enough whipped cream just to splatter.
"Then when you threw the pie, you shot put up to a distance of about eight feet. But from there on back, you brought that pie from here [points to shoulder] right overhand, 'cause with a little practice you can learn to make that pie come in this way [vertically] and not crossways." The better to maximize the splatter, he said.
Keaton was credited with once hitting a movie villain "plum in the pus" from a distance of twenty-seven feet.
The pie-in-the-face gag became passé around the same time comics such as Chaplin and Keaton began making feature films. "[T]he minute we got into features," Keaton said, "where an audience had to believe the story we were telling, we had to stop pie-throwing. There was never a pie thrown in any of our pictures once we started into features. No impossible gags were done."
The Three Stooges later revived the art of the pie fight in such shorts as In the Sweet Pie and Pie, and Mel Brooks staged one of the best known pie fights in Blazing Saddles. And then serious film fanatics are aware of the pie-fight-that-wasn't that was originally to end Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The fight was to have broken out in the war room and the sequence was filmed, but Kubrick later decided to delete it. If you look closely though you can still see the pies when the Russian ambassador partakes of the war room's lavish buffet.
A Mythical Monkey and his niece Plain Chicken, that is.
In case you haven't checked out her blog, she writes about recipes—and quite well, too. Plain Chicken is one of the few bloggers I've ever heard of who actually makes money at it.
Not to mention she's a hoot when you get a couple of drinks in her.
I wish I could say the occasion that allowed us to hang out together this past weekend was a happy one. But in fact, my mother passed away recently after a long illness and we were in Nashville for the service.
As you no doubt know, I don't write about personal matters except to the extent that my insights into movies are colored by my own experiences. It's not that kind of blog. But in this case, I think I would be remiss not to mention my mother's passing, given the influence she (and my father, who passed away when I was a lad of eighteen) had on my movie-watching habits.
Obsessions start somewhere and my obsession with movies started in childhood. Both of my parents believed that a person can't be considered really literate unless they know something about the landmark movies that helped shaped our culture—not to mention they thought movies were fun. My mother especially was a devotee of classic movies from the 1930s and 1940s, and it was she, for example, who introduced me to both Cary Grant (with His Girl Friday) and the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business).
Not to mention she was also the only woman I've ever known who unabashedly adored the Three Stooges.
I should be back to the business of movie blogging in a day or two, first with a post commenting on the results of the latest Monkey Poll, and then with the long overdue essay about the best actress of 1932-33 (comedy/musical).
In the meantime, enjoy this free and legal copy of His Girl Friday. This future Katie award winner comes to us with limited commercial interruption courtesy of Hulu.com.
Katie is home early again today after a grueling two-plus hour trip to the dentist. While convalescing, she's been reading The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia by Glenn Mitchell, which I checked out from the library the other day.
Here's an interesting bit about an early draft of the Marx Brothers' movie, Duck Soup, which in June 1933 sported the temporary title Grasshoppers. According to Mitchell, in the original ending, Chico was to assassinate arch rival Trentino (Louis Calhern) with a bomb, but instead winds up blowing up himself and his brothers as well. The five of them fly off to heaven—Harpo plucking a harp, naturally—and as Trentino opines, "Well, where we're going, there'll be peace and happiness," Harpo begins to clip his wings.
"Think of all the trouble we had down below," Trentino continues, "just because I called you an upstart." At which point Groucho slaps Trentino and the pair begins fighting once again.
The idea was quickly jettisoned. But the Three Stooges must have liked it—they basically recycled the idea for the end of their 1939 short Three Little Sew and Sews.
[Click here for a fuller discussion of Duck Soup's screenplay.]
The results of the latest poll are in— despite intense lobbying efforts on behalf of both the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers were your favorite comedy team of the 1930s, taking a plurality of the 37 votes cast, with 18. The Stooges received eleven heartfelt votes, and Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang 3 each. Burns and Allen and the Ritz Brothers closed out the voting with one vote each, although support for the latter was strongly suspected of being an inside joke between readers Muleboy and bellotoot.
"I knew it!" Zeppo Marx crowed at the awards ceremony. "I knew I'd win an award someday! I've been carrying these guys for years and finally it's my moment to shine. I'm king of the world!"
In an expansive mood at MGM Queen Norma Shearer's always raucous after-party, Chico Marx opined, "Comedy is a chair. I'm an artist and if you give me a tuba or perhaps a French horn or any of the wind instruments, I'll bring you a laugh out of it, either by falling into it or maybe by blowing on it and making a funny sound."
His brother Julius, who performs under the stage name "Groucho," was more subdued as he shared a quiet drink with his cigar and grease-paint moustache. "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. Those are my principles," he added, "if you don't like them, well, I have others."
Accepting the silver medal on behalf of the Three Stooges was an eloquent Jerome "Curly" Howard whose tearful speech was the highlight of the awards ceremony. "Woo woo woo!" he said at one point, which he followed quickly with, "Nyuck nyuck nyuck."
George Burns was philosophical in defeat. "Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that's down can come up."
"They laughed at Joan of Arc," his wife and lifelong partner, Gracie Allen, interrupted, "but she went right ahead and built it."
"Gracie, did the maid ever drop you on your head when you were a baby?"
"Don't be silly, George, we couldn't afford a maid. My mother had to do it."
"Say goodnight, Gracie."
"Goodnight!"
On the other hand, Spanky McFarland, one-time star of the Our Gang comedies, now every day third baseman for the Washington Nationals, was inconsolable after the loss.
"I blame Buckwheat," he said bitterly. "The Little Rascals were a tight little comedy act—me, Darla, Alfalfa, Stymie. Even a no-talent stiff like Dickie Moore could get a rise out of an audience from time to time. Then Buckwheat goes on Saturday Night Live and gets himself shot and suddenly we're a national joke! Comedy is no laughing matter, dammit!"
For the first time in Monkey Blog history, intense lobbying efforts from outside interest groups attempted to influence the outcome of the poll, no doubt a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate spending in elections. Who Am Us Anyway and Thingy, who supported the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, respectively, sparred good-naturedly but passionately in favor of their candidates.
"Look what I'm up against," Who com- plained, "a basic misunder- standing on the part of the electorate regarding the actual question presented. And since there seems to be some confusion on this point, let me put it plainly: Comedy, to the aficionado, means 'falling, hitting and making funny noises.'"
His ardent support for the Stooges, he said, was motivated by "my continuing quest to drive away all high-class, intellectual readers who are smarter than me," and added that if you couldn't at least muster a wry grin at the antics of Moe, Larry and Curly, "I don't want to know you."
For her part, Thingy would stop at nothing to boost the chances of Laurel and Hardy, even at one point posting an enticing cheesecake photo of her legs. Yet afterwards, she shrugged off the duo's defeat. "I think I'll go watch The Thin Man," she said. "Now, that was a comedy team."
Thingy from Pondering Life is calling for the equivalent of the "mercy rule" on the favorite comedy team poll—the Marx Brothers have a comfortable lead over the nearest competition, the Three Stooges.
But we here at the Monkey don't believe in mercy, at least not where the Marx Brothers are concerned. Besides, we got two votes for Our Gang just last night and some interesting information about old radio broadcasts from Uncle Tom down in the comments section—don't want to shut that down.
Still, maybe Thingy will be satisfied if she has a second poll to vote on. This one really has no effect on anything. "What's your favorite Lionel Barrymore performance?" Grand Hotel? You Can't Take It With You? It's A Wonderful Life? Key Largo? Or some other classic movie, such as Captains Courageous, Dinner At Eight, Sadie Thompson, A Free Soul?
I'm working on my essay for the best director of 1931-32. A thousand words so far and I don't know who the winner is yet.
In the meantime, be sure to vote in this week's Monkey Poll: Who is your favorite comedy team of the 1930s?
Here are your choices:
Burns and Allen Laurel and Hardy The Marx Brothers Our Gang (The Little Rascals) The Ritz Brothers The Three Stooges Other Remember, every vote counts and the results have no effect on anything. So vote early and vote often.
The Monkey's big brother, "steveparker1," also known in some circles as the father of Plain Chicken, has alerted me to a Three Stooges marathon broadcast in hi-def. For my American friends with cable television, this marathon is on AMC starting at 7 a.m. and running all day and all night, as the man says.
The Three Stooges first made their appearance on the big screen in 1930, in the Ted Healy short Soup To Nuts (although as a youngster, Moe Howard appeared in the 1909 short We Must Do Our Best), and since we're talking about 1930-31 for a few more days, it's entirely appropriate that I mention them here.
Now I admit the Three Stooges are not everyone's cup of tea. Even now, thirty-four years after the death of the last of the original troop, the Three Stooges remain a polarizing force in American culture, dividing movie fans into camps of ardent admirers and equally-committed haters, often (apparently) along gender lines. Whatever your feelings on the subject, however, I commend two Stooges shorts to you, You Nazty Spy and A Plumbing We Will Go. Both are as fundamental to an understanding of film language as Citizen Kane or the movies of Ingmar Bergman—with a lot more laughs to boot.
You Nazty Spy is often credited as Hollywood's first film spoof of Adolf Hitler, beating Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator into theaters by nine months. A Plumbing We Will Go, featuring Curly Howard's unique approach to the repair of a leaky shower, serves both as a study of the limited value of good intentions as well as a vivid demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, and as such, should be required viewing for building contractors and politicians of every ideological stripe.
The latter airs, as far as I can tell, at 9:43 p.m. EST. Both coincidentally are from 1940 and I will revisit them in the future, no doubt with a Special Katie Award in hand.
By the way, we're on a tight blogging schedule this week here at the Monkey. Tomorrow I'm posting the essay for best picture of 1930-31, Wednesday I give you a recap of 1930-31, Thursday promises a top ten list of sorts, and Friday (the New Year) will bring the Katie nominees for 1931-32. In the meantime, I also have to walk the dog, go to the cleaners and make dinner.
If I found the choice between Lillian Gish and Maria Falconetti for the best actress of 1928-29 nearly impossible to make, the choice for best actor is a no-brainer: Buster Keaton may well have been the best actor of the Silent Era and Steamboat Bill. Jr. rivals The General as the best movie of his career. I had this pick ready to go months ago when I started this blog and watching Keaton's movies again has only deepened my regard for this wonderful talent.
Born Joseph Frank Keaton VI into a family of traveling vaudeville performers, legend has it he was dubbed "Buster" when escape artist Harry Houdini saw the infant Keaton take a fall down a flight of stairs and bounce up unharmed. Whether he was born with it, or developed it doing "knockabout" routines on stage with his father, if Keaton wasn't the most talented pratfall artist in movie history, I'd like to see the guy who survived long enough to be a better one. He did stunts that rivaled those of Douglas Fairbanks, and when he was done, he doubled for his co-stars and did their stunts, too.
"The secret," he once said, "is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat."
Keaton made the leap from stage to screen in 1917 after meeting Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle who invited Keaton to shoot a scene with him in an upcoming short, The Butcher Boy. The rotund, expressive Arbuckle and the slender, deadpan Keaton proved to be a highly-successful team, making more than a dozen films together before Keaton struck out on his own, directing himself in the classic short One Week, which was just last year included in the National Film Registry.
Soon after, Keaton formed his own production company, and in 1923 made his first feature-length film, Three Ages, beginning a run of classic comedies that included Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman, a body of work that for pure laughs—no song, no dance, no sentimentality—surpasses even Charles Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. Which is saying something considering the number of Katie Awards I see in the future for each of those acts.
Like Chaplin, Keaton in the Silent Era was virtually a one-man act, writing, producing, directing, editing and starring in all his movies. One difference between Keaton and Chaplin, however, was Keaton's very un-modern reluctance to take credit where credit was due, often as with Steamboat Bill, Jr., slapping names like Carl Harbaugh on movies that he had, in fact, written and directed himself. (Of Harbaugh, Keaton later said, "He didn't write nothing. He was one of the most useless men I ever had on the scenario department." When asked why Harbaugh then received sole credit for writing Steamboat Bill, Jr., Keaton said, "Well, we had to put somebody's name up that wrote 'em ...")
I'm afraid this reticence cost Keaton Katie nominations for writing and directing this year. Somehow, though, I suspect his reputation will survive.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Katie winner Ernest Torrence). The son soon becomes a pawn in his father's battle with the town banker for control of the local riverboat trade. In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl.
Keaton conjures up an endlessly inventive series of gags—involving hats, collisions, chewing tobacco, a baby stroller, a jailbreak, an umbrella on a windy day, and many more—mostly turning on his misfit persona, his odd-couple relationship with his dad and his cheerful determination to succeed despite a preternatural inability to understand what it takes to do so.
One of my favorite early bits centers on the father's effort to give his son a makeover. After two deft flicks of a barber's razor remove Keaton's pencil-thin moustache, the father marches his son into a hatters to replace Keaton's beret with something he deems more suitable for a steamboat captain's son. Keaton tries on a number of hats, including his own trademark pork pie (which he immediately rejects) before settling on an overly-large Panama. He and his father step into the street, a gust of wind blows the new hat into the river, and when his father turns around, Keaton is again wearing that same silly beret. (The Three Stooges later recycled the scene to great effect for their 1936 short, 3 Dumb Clucks, with Curly Howard and a touring cap substituting for Keaton and the beret.)
Keaton delivers all of these comic moments with the understated deadpan style that made him famous and earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face."
"I developed the 'Stone Face' thing quite naturally," Keaton said later. "[E]ven as a small kid, I happened to be the type of comic that couldn't laugh at his own material. I soon learned at an awful early age that when I laughed the audience didn't. So, by the time I got into pictures, that was a natural way of working."
It's this understated approach to comedy coupled with an utter lack of sentimentality that makes Keaton seem so modern.
The most unfor- gettable sequence of Steam- boat Bill, Jr., maybe the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through.
"First I had them build the frame- work of this building and make sure that the hinges were all firm and solid," Keaton explained. "Then you lay this framework down on the ground, and build the window around me. We built the window so that I had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder, and the top missed my head by two inches and the bottom my heels by two inches. We mark the ground out and drive big nails where my two heels are going to be. Then you put that house back up in position while they finish building it."
It was actually a gag he'd first used in the short One Week but in this case, not only were they dropping a finished wall (rather than an open frame) on top of him, they were doing it during a simulated cyclone using six wind machines that proved powerful enough to accidentally blow a truck into the Sacramento River.
Most of the crew walked off in the set in protest, certain the stunt would kill him. Keaton himself declined to practice the stunt first, saying he knew it would work. "You don't do those things twice."
This attitude was in keeping with Keaton's standing order to his cinema- tographer to keep the camera rolling until he said cut or was killed. But it also gave his stunts a realism that puts your heart in your throat even as you're laughing at the gags.
Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
Despite his legendary prowess as a stuntman, Keaton landed wrong when after the release of Steamboat Bill, Jr. he jumped from producing his own films to signing on as a contract player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was a move that pretty much wrecked his career.
"[T]hey were picking stories and material without consulting me," he said, "and I couldn't argue them out of it. They'd say, 'This is funny,' and I'd say, 'I don't think so.' They'd say, 'This'll be good.' I'd say, 'It stinks.' It didn't make any difference; we did it anyhow. I'd only argue about so far, and then let it go."
After a promising start at MGM with The Cameraman, which I have nominated for best picture, the studio forced Keaton into a series of second-rate productions. Always the perfectionist, Keaton drowned his frustrations in alcohol, a habit which soon became a problem in and of itself. Always an acquired taste, what little popularity Keaton had soon faded and MGM released him from his contract in 1934.
The same story, incidentally, played out for any number of directors and actors at more studios than just MGM. The money men who ran the studios didn't seem to grasp that sound movies were something other than just silent movies with a song and a little talking thrown in. Care was needed to create a new medium—talking pictures—that was the equal to what directors such as Keaton, Chaplin, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang had created during the Silent Era. Care was something few producers were willing to invest.
Keaton continued to work after leaving MGM, most memorably in Chaplin's 1952 comedy Limelight, but he never again reached the heights he'd attained during the Silent Era. He did live long enough to see a revival of interest in his career and was directly involved in the restoration and re-release of his silent comedies. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1960 in recognition of "his unique talents which brought immortal comedies to the screen." His last movie appearance, a supporting role in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, was released eight months after his death in 1966.
A Personal Note: Many years ago, when video tape was expensive and DVDs were non-existent, Katie-Bar-The-Door bought me a box set of Buster Keaton movies for $75. That was back when we could still afford both Christmas presents and the mortgage. Adjusted for inflation, those $75 would now buy you all of General Motors with enough left over to pick up your neighbor's house at foreclosure.
"Did you ever watch those Buster Keaton movies?" she once asked me.
Yes. Yes, I did. But I can see on the horizon hundreds of movies I haven't. What have I been doing with my time?
By the way, if you're wondering where the quotes for this essay came from, many of them came from a book I ran across while I was on the road this last weekend, Buster Keaton Interviews, edited by Kevin M. Sweeney. I highly recommend it if you're at all interested in Keaton.
It's impossible to say with any certainty who invented the pie-in-the-face gag so much associated with silent film comedy. The pie itself was probably invented by the ancient Egyptians during the Neolithic Period, around 9500 B.C. and my best guess is that the first pie was thrown for laughs somewhere around 9500-and-ten-minutes B.C. The tomb of pharaoh Ramses II, who took power in 1304 B.C., included etchings of royal bakers preparing galettes, a thin-crusted pie stuffed with honey and nuts—maybe the first artistic representation of a pie in history.
Legend has it that Mabel Normand threw motion pictures' first pie, hitting an unsuspecting Roscoe Arbuckle in the short A Noise From The Deep (1913). The fact is though, it was the otherwise forgettable Mr. Flip (1909) starring veteran comic Ben Turpin that was the first film to feature an actor getting hit in the face with a pie. Famous for his crossed eyes and brush moustache, Turpin began his career in burlesque and vaudeville before making his film debut in 1907 at the Essanay Studios. Mr. Flip has all the appearances of being based on a stage routine Turpin had earlier perfected, leading me to believe that the pie-in-the-face gag was already an old one by the time it showed up on film.
Still, there are historians who insist Normand should get credit for throwing the first pie (as opposed to merely shoving it into the victim's face). Well, maybe. Even that much is hard to confirm. I've read that Normand in fact threw the first pie at a stagehand who had made a pass at her, and that the story has morphed over time into credit for inventing the thrown-pie gag. I've also read that it wasn't Normand who threw the pie at all but Arbuckle himself and that he hit co-star Nick Cogley. A copy of A Noise From The Deep resides in New York's Museum of Modern Art where it is screened periodically. If I ever see it, I'll let you know the scoop.
"[N]umber one is we don't use a regular baker's pie," he told Markle, "and throwing the pie in a cardboard plate is no good because that plate flying off detracts. So, what we used to do is our prop man would get our baker—whoever is closest to the studio—to make pie crust, two of them, with nothing in them, and take just a little flour and water to make a paste, just enough to glue the two together. That was so that your fingers wouldn't go through the bottom of it. Now you fill it, about an inch, with just flour and water mixed, which clings like glue and stretches. Now, on top of it, if I'm going to hit somebody in dark clothes, a brunette, you put a lemon meringue type of topping on it and garnish with whipped cream, you see. When it was a light costume, a blond, something like that, you put in blueberry, and then enough whipped cream just to splatter.
Keaton was credited with once hitting a movie villain "plum in the pus" from a distance of twenty-seven feet.
The Three Stooges later revived the art of the pie fight in such shorts as In the Sweet Pie and Pie, and Mel Brooks staged one of the best known pie fights in Blazing Saddles. And then serious film fanatics are aware of the pie-fight-that-wasn't that was originally to end Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The fight was to have broken out in the war room and the sequence was filmed, but Kubrick later decided to delete it. If you look closely though you can still see the pies when the Russian ambassador partakes of the war room's lavish buffet.
