Film's First Robot Flicks the Bird

 Mack Sennett's more famous for being an early filmmaker than a good one, but if the comedies he produced rollercoaster in quality, that does at least mean there'll be highs. Here's Ben Turpin in A Clever Dummy, playing possibly cinema's first Robot, three years before Karel Čapeck invented the word. Clockwork dolls were clearly already a thing though, as attested to by Turpin's brilliant impersonation of one, two minutes in. That's one high. 

 

Another is the repeated and unambiguous raising of his middle digit, as seen at the top of this post, when eight and a half minutes in, the "lovesick janitor" played by Turpin – upon whom the automaton is modelled – takes its place to perform a series of sinuous physical jerks for a couple of talent scouts. It's pleasingly reminiscent of Brigitte Helm's robot dance in Metropolis made a decade later, and these talent scouts are won over, although not as won over as Metropolis' panting swells. Director Herman C. Raymaker is not as silly as Fritz Lang. 

 A third highlight is this intertitle:

 And a fourth is the last seventy seconds, into which Sennett suddenly seems to have decided to see if he can cram the entirety of Con Air. He doesn't do badly either. I like Mack Sennett. Enjoy!

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.

 

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.