Méliès' Munchausen's Missing Missing Mirror Routine

 

 First, let's at least celebrate the surprises of Georges Méliès' first flop, including this Cassandran vision of Snorky from The Banana Splits. Best value though is probably given by the manic dragon marionette left over from Méliès' The Witch, four years earlier. At twelve minutes' running time, The Witch was considerably slower-moving than this, but only because something actually happened in it. There's nothing to wait for when you watch someone dream.

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 The sad truth is, despite its aesthetic, when it turned up on the Public Domain Review I didn't even recognise 1911's Baron Munchausen's Dream as Méliès' work. It has the feel of a contractual obligation: the spectacle's there but sloppily thrown on, and on and on, the interactions are uninspired – there's only so long one can watch someone pretend to be poked – and Méliès' trademark jump cuts don't seem to be even trying to match any more. Also, the man himself (pictured above), whose amoral charm, spry timing and alpha goatee would have made him the perfect Baron (pictured below, by Gustave Doré)... 

 

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... is nowhere to be seen. Instead we have a Baron far more ineffective, overweight, and cleanshaven. Actually we have two, which bring's me to the film's strangest omission: Munchausen's dreams are shown emerging from a giant mirror, but use of an actual mirror probably would have been prohibitively expensive, and definitely have reflected the camera and studio, so instead, Méliès constructs the room's reflection as a separate set, and casts a second actor as Munchausen's reflection to imitate the lead's movements exactly, which he does. Without deviation.

 Throughout the entire film. 

 There is no Mirror Routine.

 Georges Méliès – Georges Méliès! – built and populated a studio-sized mirror set in a film about a dream – BARON MUNCHAUSEN'S dream! – and then used it to... just pretend there was a mirror there. In fairness, it's the film's one genuinely effective effect, so maybe the Baron was cast because he was part of a double act, and this was their specialty. Anyway, here it is, but I won't judge you if you don't stick with it.

 

 

 

 Do you know what I mean by the Mirror Routine? I've read that it was already a staple of the music hall when this film came out, but maybe they just meant this illusion, in which case Méliès would indeed have been – so far as I know – the first to film it. But an illusion's not a routine. What I'm thinking of involves the breaking or setting up of that illusion for comic effect, a little like what Charlie Chaplin would do five years later in The Floorwalker...

 

... only there's no fake mirror here, and it's being shot side on, so the illusion wouldn't work for the audience, even if there was. 

 In 1921, the French comedian Max Linder made 7 Years' Bad Luck, in which a hungover toff's staff try to cover up the breaking of his mirror during a canoodle, by electing someone to dress up as his reflection. This is generally considered to be the cinematic début of what I think of as the Mirror – or Missing Mirror – Routine, and it is excellent...

 

 

 In 1924, Leo McCarey directed the even more excellent Sittin' Pretty with Charlie Chase – last seen on this blog man-spreading admirably in Tillie's Punctured Romance - in which, mistaken for a cop, Chase tries to capture a knife-wielding maniac by going undercover as his reflection. The stakes are higher than in 7 years' Bad Luck, but the rules of the game are the same. The routine starts seven minutes in. I'm posting the whole ten minutes though because, frankly, despite its title-heavy opening, I think this might be a perfect comedy. Maybe I should have just blogged about Sittin' Pretty...

 

 Nine years later, in 1933, Leo McCarey found himself directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, which is both generally and fairly considered one of the greatest comedies ever filmed, and just stuck the mirror routine from Sittin' Pretty right in the middle, joke for joke. By this point though, the routine's own familiarity had become one of its ingredient, but this is the version people now know best. And of course it is excellent.

 

 

 I would stop there, if I hadn't on my searches turned up this from Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan. You may have thought there was nothing to add after Duck Soup, but Spike manages it, with an arm through the door. Excellent.

 

 

 Do you know any more? Do you know any earlier? Are they excellent? Let me know in the comments. (Oh, if you're reading this on your phone, there are loads of videos here. I've heard they don't always show on a phone.)

I Just Watched The First Comedy Ever Made, and Laughed a Lot and Realised Things.

When Comedy Was Queen

 Beaneath this hilarious hat is Marie Dressler, star of stage, screen, and Tillie's Punctured Romance, the world's first feature-length comedy film (or "photoplay", as it was billed on the poster, this being a medium so young nobody had yet settled on a name for it.) Made in 1914 by Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, I finally got round to watching this the day after Biden's inauguration, newly bouyed after a good night's sleep, and freshly in love with the promise of its place of origin. This was also where I'd got up to in David Cairns' invaluable run-down of the early works of Charlie Chaplin, as it was his first feature too. 

 

And here's the new favourite, joining hot acquisition Dressler, and Sennett's star fixture – and the woman who gave him more than one break – the brilliant Mabel Normand, for a lovely curtain call at the film's end.

 

 While not top billed, Chaplin is definitely one of the film's stars, and if you're normally turned off by him, you might still enjoy to a surprising degree his turn here as the gold-digging, Fairbanks-'tached louse – Bialystok in the body of Bloom – whose pursuit of Dressler makes him the butt of many jokes... literally, in fact, this being Keystone, and butt placement being key.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Chaplin played a lot of heels before he turned auteur, I'm learning, and it suited him. Here, he hopes to marry Dressler's Tillie Banks for her millions despite, simultaneously dating fellow grifter Mabel Normand, having met the heiress when, playing fetch with her dog, she accidentally threw a brick in his face. Bricks in faces are an early Keystone staple, I'm also learning, and knew no gender boundaries: Mabel Normand could take a brick to the face as well as anyone. Custard pies were a later refinement, but not I feel, necessarily an improvement. 

 

The third act.

 

 I laughed a lot at this film. It's full of excellent violence, but also, as with Tille squeezing behind her unnamed suitor to join in the eavesdropping above, the ticklish interplay of people who are just too close together. Here's another example: future comedy star Charlie Chase who, given essentially the role of an extra on Mabel Norman's right, seizes his moment with laudably shameless man-spreading.

 

 

Watching the film within a film (noticeably more realistic than the film which it's in – 

ARGH, WHAT DOES THIS REMIND ME OF? Answers below, please.)

 

 Everyone in these Keystone comedies is slightly in each other's way, I realised. It's how so many of the jokes happen – the patting of the wrong knee, the cane in the arse, the plank in the face – but it's also just a good way to maintain comic tension. I also realised I enjoy this as a comic device every bit as much as I enjoy someone being interrupted. 

 

 Side note: I'd already been thinking about the invasion of space when Blackadder III turned up on televison and I suddenly noticed how close Hugh Laurie was standing to Robbie Coltrane. Everyone in those middle two series of Blackadder stood weirdly close to each other, which might be why those two series were the funniest. Would Upstart Crow feel more like Blackadder, I wondered, if everyone just got up in each other's face more? (And might this be a part of the secret of the success of Ghosts? Of course, the modern aspect ratio requires a larger cast.)

 

Normand, unbothered.

 

 Anyway, the headline is: I laughed a lot at the first ever feature-length comedy, over a century after it was released. Maybe it's non-reputation is down to critics who didn't think it was Chaplinny enough. Too anarchic. I've no idea. The other headline, I guess, is that the first ever feature-length comedy starred two women. So maybe it's down to that.

 Here's the excellent, historic, pioneering Tillie's Punctured Romance. I love it.

 

New Things To Do With A Face, from Charlie Chaplin and Ralph Fiennes.

 

  Charlie goes Gorgona! 

 

 Following on from his unsettling teeth-baring in Lucy's Complex Dilemma, here's Chaplin doing something a little more heightened as a man who thinks he's been poisoned in Cruel, Cruel Love. I'm catching up with more of his earliest work over on David Cairns' blog where you can see this film in full, and I've also, finally, got round to replacing the battery in this laptop, so for anyone wanting to see more of my face, hopefully the old version of iMovie I was using to edit Simon Goes Full Shakespeare won't instantly overheat now every time I open it. If you're looking for some Shakespeare in the meantime, I keenly recommend Ralph Fiennes' film of Coriolanus that's currently on iplayer, detailing events in the history of Rome which precede both Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar, but shot in modern so you can tell why what's going on might actually matter. It's confident, credible, and clear as a bell, and quite unlike the far more shouting-in-long-leather-coaty Coriolanus I saw Ralph Fiennes perform in a decade earlier – the very first time I'd ever seen him jut out his jaw – hitherto always shily sheltering hiding behind his stiff upper lip – giving lines like "Ge-heh-heh-het ye gone, you fragments!" a frankly distracting ring of Leonard Rossiter. I'm pretty sure Peter Serafinowicz must have seen it too.

And how perfectly pitched is Belinda S-W's discomfort in this?

Snarlie Chaplin

 

 

 

 And sometimes this blog will just be a straight swipe from David Cairns'. 

 Mabel's Strange Predicament is not, as it sounds, the sequel to Lucy's Complex Dilemma (although lip-reader Cairns notes our heroine is also saying the plot out loud) but, in fact, the début of Charlie Chaplin's iconic "Little Tramp" costume. No "park" nor "policeman" in this film, though, and the "pretty girl" is director and star Mabel Normand – dressing for work in her pyjamas, a woman after my own heart – and unambigiously menaced by Chaplin's vagrant. Aided by distrurbingly haggard make-up, this is an astonishingly observed performance, employing little more than what a villain on the brink of passing out might do, teetering between slapstick and threat therefore, building genuine suspense. Chaplin's drunk act was infamous, but it's still a revelation to see his first appearance in this get-up not as a protagonist, but as a nightmare, repelling sympathy. And it feels a bit like the missing piece of a puzzle: That costume's nasty. 

 Thanks, Shadowplay, for drawing this to my attention.