We begin our story at the end. The end of what, you ask? The end of silent comedy. It is March of 1949, 20 years after sound came to Hollywood and laid waste to the traditions of silent slapstick. It is St. Patrick’s Day, and the California Country Club is playing host to an event called the Mack Sennett Alumni and Remember When Association.
The aging wrecks of once sprightly comedians have convened, decked out in ill-fitting finery that went out of fashion back in the days of Prohibition. They are here to reminisce, to drink, to throw pies at each other. Mack Sennett, one of the true pioneers responsible for creating Hollywood as we know it, has seen to it his friends don’t waste their efforts on something so ephemeral as mere fun. He’s brought cameras—to record their shenanigans for posterity. This is how he built his empire—by letting funny people do what came naturally and let the cameras roll.
This is not the first time these old coots have gotten together to “remember when.” Just the year before, the same cast of grizzled characters fêted Sennett at the Masquers Club. Just 10 years before, they were recreating their shtick on camera for a serious movie, Irving Cummings’ Hollywood Cavalcade. The gags are the same—the gags have always been the same, since Woodrow Wilson was elected president. Only the bodies have changed—the Keystone Kops have grown fat and gray, the once vampy Bathing Beauties now saggy and wrinkled.
Old age comes to us all—it is meaningless to make much out of it. It is just the accumulation of days on a calendar. But Sennett and his geriatric chums are more than just old. They are old-fashioned.
Once the unrivaled Kings of Comedy, these men and women are now relics of a form and a style long since relinquished to the dusty upper shelves of the attic. Resentful, the crusty-fusties of the Remember When Association drew the battle lines: We knew what was funny, we knew what was sexy, we knew how to make good pictures. You upstart youths don’t know a damn thing. Get a haircut!
To prove his point, Sennett assembled clips of his classic silent comedies into a compilation film, Down Memory Lane, distributed by Eagle Lion in the late summer of 1949. A few years later, Sennett went to the Cannes Film Festival for a retrospective of his classic shorts. He schemed ideas for a biopic about his storied life. In short, he clung tenaciously to his achievements and zealously defended them against the changing times.
Nothing came of his biopic idea, but no matter. Hollywood Cavalcade was for all practical purposes a biography of Sennett—wildly unreliable and inaccurate, sure, but likely no more inaccurate or unreliable than the one Sennett would have made about himself. The man turned himself into a legend, and even he started to believe the hype.
Hollywood Cavalcade was a symptom of a larger phenomenon. Throughout the first few decades of the sound era, Hollywood struggled to come to grips with its silent past. Or, put another way, the increasingly corporate movie-making industry struggled to spin its messy, anarchic past into a PR-friendly packaged narrative.
In September 1949, the same year as Mack Sennett’s self-congratulatory Remember When bash and recycled Down Memory Lane clip-job, critic James Agee published in Life Magazine the first substantial critical and historical overview of silent comedy. It was a landmark essay, the foundational stone upon which all subsequent critical and historical study of slapstick comedy would be built. It begins with Agee asserting that old-school silent comedy achieved better and more satisfying laughs than anything since, and that the reason talkie comedy could not compete was the basic flaw of talking in a comedy. In short, silent comedy was by definition “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” the title of his essay.
Mary Pickford once said, “It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way ’round.” It is a much quoted and deeply beloved remark among silent film aficionados—almost a mission statement. Kevin Brownlow quoted it at the end of The Parade’s Gone By as a summing-up sentiment, and Walter Kerr used it to open his book The Silent Clowns. There is certainly some sharp theoretical insight there—most art forms do follow a backwards progression from high fidelity into increasing abstraction and reductionism. Go to any art museum and take a look—the photorealistic images of people and landscapes are the older paintings, and the crazy scribble scrabble are the recent ones. By the same logic, should not the abstracted reductionism of Black and White silent movies have been a modernist improvement upon full-color talkies?
Mack Sennett’s notion of a Remember When Association became the default approach to celebrating silent comedy. Eventually Sennett and his friends went the way of all flesh, but their followers continued the rite in their stead, dressing up in the fashions of the twenties and nostalgically longing for an innocent age gone.
Personally, I find this whole thing curious. At practically every significant retrospective of silent comedy I have attended or arranged, there are some if not several guests who make a point of dressing in 1920s fashions. Screenings of other silent films—like Metropolis, or Dr. Mabuse—don’t provoke the same reaction.
Consider three successive screenings at the National Gallery of Art in the early 2000s. The first was for Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. I had been asked to introduce the show, which due to its massive length was shown on two separate afternoons. On the first day, I got into a lively conversation with the crowd about terrorism, James Bond, and 24. I took my seat and watched as the first two and a half hours of Mabuse unspooled. The next day I returned to introduce the second half, and found the same faces eagerly staring at me from the crowd. These were no casual lazy-day movie-goers, but a serious crowd ready to engage with a then 80-year-old movie as a current and living work of popular culture. A few years later I was back in the exact same auditorium for a retrospective of shorts by Georges Méliès. This time the crowd included a number of school groups from the Washington, D.C., public schools, who watched in rapt attention and fascination at crude special effects and magic tricks created half a world away, generations before they were born. My third silent film experience at the National Gallery was a Charlie Chaplin double feature, and it was for this show and this show alone that certain members of the crowd felt compelled to raid their grandparents’ closets. Please understand—I am not poking fun. I have to count myself among their number: when I was 18, I went to a revival of The General in a restored theater in Detroit, wearing my own homemade Buster Keaton outfit.
Buster Keaton contemplates a world of classic films in Sherlock Jr.
What’s especially odd about this nostalgic thrall is that almost without exception, the people caught in its grip are too young to have had any genuine nostalgia. People who actually lived in the 1920s are few and far between these days. Our nostalgia, however palpable it feels, is artificial.
So where does it come from?
One answer to that question has been staring us in the face all along: there it is in Down Memory Lane, there it is in “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” It’s baked into the plot of Hollywood Cavalcade, it’s in the titles of Robert Youngson’s compilation films When Comedy Was King and The Golden Age of Comedy. The history of the history of silent comedy has been a nostalgia industry since day one. By treating the advent of sound as a dividing line between Then and Now, any celebration of “Then” turned into a pining for something lost. Over time, that nostalgia became a self-feeding phenomenon.
The great slapstick comedians represent inconvenient facts. The story reads better if the great silent clowns not only did their best work on just one side of the silent/talkie divide, but did all of their work there. Like an adolescent who comes across her pacifier and blankie in a closet and marvels at how these items ever meant so much, Hollywood found the stubborn presence of its silent clowns to be an uncomfortable reminder of its own infancy. As Hollywood collectively looked back on its history before sound, it struggled to draw a distinction between Then and Now that would keep all the embarrassing pacifiers and blankies on the other side. As a result, any discussion of silent comedy would overemphasize the primitive aspects of physical comedy. Hollywood Cavalcade’s version of the Mack Sennett story says that slapstick comedy came about as a consequence of a bumbling fool (played in the film by Buster Keaton) being unable to execute a dramatic scene correctly. The implication is obvious: real skill and specialized talent might be needed to survive in today’s Hollywood, but back then any jackass could be a slapstick clown. Why, you could do that stuff by accident.
That the great filmmakers and comedians of the recent past were heroic figures with unusual skillsets and whose artistry and entrepreneurship reflected the best of American principles, well, that was a notion at odds with the orthodoxy that the film industry had progressed to maturity. As such it was a viewpoint that was infrequently and poorly articulated. The men and women who were themselves a part of that history did themselves no favors by insisting that the silent era was a superior one—because such an argument only validated the idea that the arrival of sound marked the crossing of a Rubicon, and that you had to choose sides, silent vs. sound.
It is also a losing proposition. If you want to make the case that what distinguishes silent comedy as fundamentally superior is that it is silent, you have to contend with the inescapable fact that silent film is a dead form, obsolete and abandoned. Like insisting that Aztec culture is fundamentally superior to every civilization that followed, it is a self-defeating stance to take. Nevertheless, this is precisely where most fans and champions of silent comedy set up base camp.
The other problem is that taking sides in a dispute between silent and talkie comedy implies a distinction that fuzzes into ambiguity the closer you look. If you want to say that The Jazz Singer killed off silent filmmaking, that is not an outrageous position to take, but it is nonetheless a position that tends to fall apart under scrutiny.
For one thing, even setting aside the gimmickry of The Artist or Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, there remain an array of films whose makers digested the aesthetics of silent comedy and managed to make sound films in that tradition: Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Pierre Etaix’s Yo-Yo, Pixar’s Wall-E. Arguably, much of the realm of animated cartoons from the 1930s through the 1960s recapitulated silent comedy aesthetics in a raucous, noisy new style. Filmmakers like Blake Edwards or Jackie Chan have self-consciously paid homage to the silent comedies that inspired them, and they did so in modernist talkie films.
Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon all continued to make movies without breaking their stride. It may be the popular consensus that their talkie era work was so diminished as to be incomparable to their silent greats, but that’s a matter of opinion, not an objective fact.
Even if we were to agree that the talkie era work by Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon was of such diminished quality that it couldn’t be connected to their silent work, that still leaves Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, and Charley Chase as silent era comedians who made the transition to talkies without missing a single step or changing their aesthetics at all. (Speaking of Hal Roach, I’d argue that Harry Langdon’s work at Roach in talkie shorts was a perfect translation of his experimental anti-comedy, and that he too made the transition without changing his style.)
What of the Three Stooges? Nothing about their act was dependent on sound—they could have been silent stars, if they just started making movies earlier. They represent the survival of physical slapstick well into the 1950s!
What of directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, who got their start in silent comedy but are best known for talkie comedies?
The fact of it is, the very existence of silent comedy is an almost inexplicable anomaly. It is not as if the traditions of comedy had been leading towards this. George Bernard Shaw did not go to bed at night wishing he could jettison all the dang words from his plays. Quite the contrary, at the moment that the movies came into being, nearly every form of comedy you could encounter in any media was centered around words.
The only meaningful tradition of “silent” comedy that predates the birth of the movies was the history of clowning. There is a line of thought that seeks to define the silent comedies of the 1910s and 1920s as a modern reinterpretation of clowning traditions. There is a respectable argument to made on this count, but you won’t find it from me.
My resistance to that line of thinking is simple: whatever common ground you may find between silent “clowns” and their non-movie antecedents are mostly coincidental. A rhinoceros looks like a triceratops not because they share any close relatives but because they independently evolved to live in similar environments.
Poster for the Three Stooges.
If silent comedy cinema was truly just a new medium by which to explore existing traditions of clowning, then you’d expect the great silent clowns to actually be clowns, to have come from a clowning background. You’d expect the filmmakers to be turning to the history of clowning for inspirations for their films. Basically, you’d expect exactly the opposite of what the history of slapstick actually was.
Silent cinema poached its comedians from vaudeville more than any other source—that is, from a tradition of live comedy that was heavily dependent on puns, dialect comedy, songs, and other forms of wordplay. The very word “slapstick” refers to the mechanism to produce a sound effect to accompany on-stage comic violence that punters in the back row could hear.
There were the occasional silent comedians who came from unambiguous clowning backgrounds (Poodles Hanneford, I’m looking at you), but the field was absolutely dominated by comedians who came from vaudeville, not the circus. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon were stage stars before they filmed a single frame, and their stage acts were not silent. Charley Chase started out with a primarily musical act built around his singing. Billy Bevan came from Australia’s music hall traditions. The prominent comedy stars who didn’t come from vaudeville or music halls just came straight to the movies (see Harold Lloyd, for example), they didn’t start as clowns.
During these early stage careers, the men and women who would become the great silent comedians weren’t trying to excise dialogue from their acts. They happily incorporated dialog comedy and other sounds into their physical comedy acts naturally—and only jettisoned the words when the technology forced them to. When the first silent comedy features were made, the filmmakers drew from source material from the legitimate stage and from literature—from essentially “talkie” sources.
Placed before the silent cameras, however, these comedians had to improvise and adapt. Whatever performing skills they may have honed on the vaudeville stage had to be warped to suit the limitations of silent cinema. The major comedians of the era (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Arbuckle, Chase) just happened to do this better than anyone else. They had competitors and peers, and some of those competitors and peers tried alternate approaches to adapting to the silent screen. Some are better remembered than others today. Put another way: many different kinds of artists tried different kinds of screen comedy in the silent era, and some of these were more successful than others—they are the ones that have been remembered and celebrated. But we shouldn’t assume by that result that their style of physical slapstick was somehow predetermined.
The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and Will Rogers all made silent comedies—but their particular approach to comedy did not adapt to the silent form very well. Their silent films are poorly remembered if at all, and they found their fame later when they could deploy words to their advantage, as had generations of comedians before them.
If the defining feature of silent comedy is silence, then we are only talking about a 20-year cycle firmly bounded at both ends by technological developments. But if we acknowledge that the key figures of silent comedy emerged from non-silent comic traditions, and that their silent work was in many ways an accident of history, we not only have the privilege of conflating silent and talkie comedies into a single history, we are also better situated to recognize just how astonishing their silent accomplishments really were.
Basically, there were a set of comedy aesthetics associated with silent films that were prevalent and popular in the 1910s and ’20s but a different set of comedy aesthetics associated with talkie films were prevalent and popular in the 1930s and ’40s. That’s a lot of qualifying weasel words, but it’s an easier stance to defend—and phrasing it this way shifts the emphasis away from the technological shift and onto an aesthetic shift.
The technology was never the central story here anyway, and putting it at the center was a mistake.
Just imagine, as a thought exercise, that sound technology had been part and parcel of the movies since Day One—that when Fred Ott sneezed, we heard “A-choo!,” that when the workers filed out of the Lumière factory we could hear them grumbling about their lousy jobs. This isn’t so much of a stretch, really—there are experimental films with prerecorded sound from this early period. The technology was not ready for primetime but there’s a plausible alternate history where sound-on-film emerged in the late 1800s.
In fact, there is an extant film from 1900 that is in color, with a prerecorded synchronized soundtrack. Choke on that, Jazz Singer! Experiments with sound recording predate experiments with motion pictures—indeed the inventors behind the movies had always intended to include sound as part of the technology. The technology existed at the dawn of cinema, but it was tricky, awkward, and expensive—and the support from audiences and filmmakers just wasn’t enough to overcome those logistical and financial hurdles.
For argument’s sake, let’s imagine that history took that different path, and sound was part of motion picture technology right from the very beginning. Would this have changed things so very much? I doubt it—the early history of cinema is dominated by forceful personalities, great visionaries whose pioneering work helped establish what the movies were and what they meant to audiences.
Film technology didn’t come to us with an instruction manual. The “language of film” had to be discovered by trial and error. It took people like G.A. Smith, Edwin S. Porter, Thomas Ince, D.W. Griffith, Georges Méliès, Louis Feuillade, and so on to experiment—and it took the filmgoing audience to provide feedback on what they liked, what worked, and what didn’t. If those early filmmakers had been given sound as part of their movie toolbox, they’d still have had to work through that whole messy process of trial and error to find their way to the film language we know today—and their audience would have had to react to each step, just as they did in the history we know.
The people were the artists they were because of their peculiar idiosyncrasies and personal quirks. Had they been given an extra tool to play with, they wouldn’t have suddenly been different people or had different sensibilities. The trajectory of American slapstick followed the course that it did because Mack Sennett was an anarchist rebel who liked to ridicule authority and convention. He had an eye for talent, and attracted ex-vaudeville comedians and their English music hall compatriots—such as Charlie Chaplin. Audiences responded overwhelmingly in favor of this, and turned Chaplin into a star—and inspired legions of copycats to follow his example.
Movies represent an enormous and complex feedback loop. On one end are the content providers: the visionary artists, and the businessmen and investors who support them. At the other end are the recipients: audiences and critics. The cycle depends on both ends—if audiences and critics respond poorly to something, then the content providers will have a powerful incentive to stop making it. If the audiences and critics respond positively, then there will likely be more.
The addition of sound at the outset of the evolution of film might have changed the movies the early pioneers made, but wouldn’t have changed any of the personalities involved.
You could argue, however, that the vaudeville comedians taking to the screen around 1910–1915 might have done more dialogue-based comedy, instead of the physical slapstick, had they had the ability.
Perhaps.
But doesn’t it strike you as odd that silent comedy as an artform took root so powerfully in the United States, more so than anywhere else in the world? Other countries (like France, Germany, and Russia) made terrific silent dramas, and science fiction films, Gothic horror, adventure yarns, detective thrillers, high-minded art films … but America cornered the market on comedy.
There’s more: America also cornered the market on comedy with foreign comedians. The talent existed abroad, but came to Hollywood to flourish. Chaplin didn’t become a star in his native England. That was never even on the table.
What was different here? Well, among other things, America at the dawn of the 20th century was a place dominated by polyglot immigrant enclaves in fast-growing urban centers. To appeal to mass audiences in America meant trying to appeal to an exceedingly wide array of folks, of all races and social classes and educational backgrounds. In turn, this meant that movies that appealed to Americans were likely to be highly exportable, and better equipped to translate across national lines. The environment encouraged visually-based comedy, physical slapstick and thrills, because this had the broadest possible appeal. A man getting clonked in the face with a brick is funny no matter what language he speaks.
This simple fact put a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of the development of a primarily visual, language-independent form of comedy in the earliest days of cinema—and this thumb would have been on that scale whether or not sound technology existed at the time.
I’m not saying that the very same movies would have been made, or the same comedians would have risen to the top—but in our imaginary alternate universe where sound caught on in 1900, I believe the form of silent-style physical slapstick comedy would still have arisen in the early decades of the 20th century.
Now, I want to turn that thought experiment on its head: what if sound never caught on? If The Jazz Singer never sang Mammy, then would silent comedy have thrived into the ’30s and ’40s?
In the years since Charlie Chaplin first rose to stardom, movie-going audiences around the world had experienced the First World War, in which traditional notions of national pride and military honor were cruelly thrust up against efficient modern technology. Ten million died, but worse yet were the survivors—maimed, disfigured things that returned home with shellshock to communities that had no place for them. Then came the Russian Revolution, further proof that the old way of doings things was permanently over. The world began to slide into a global Depression…. That Depression didn’t hit the United States until after The Jazz Singer opened, but Europe had been feeling it since the end of the war. If we want to be specific about America, we should take note of women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and the anarchist terrorism of the 1920s. Simply put, those golden years of silent slapstick were also years in which piece by piece the world lost its innocence. It seems unreasonable to expect that the audience that lived through these things would want the same things from their entertainment as the people who did not.
In other words, audience tastes were moving away from silent slapstick even before the advent of sound. The aesthetic shift happened to coincide with—and was benefited by—sound technology, but it wasn’t dependent on it. This is, in fact, the story charted by this book—the inevitable transformation of silent slapstick into talkie screwball.
And we can see this aesthetic shift in action, well before The Jazz Singer, if we take a look at Harry Langdon’s Three’s a Crowd.
In 1927 Harry Langdon was riding high, arguably the highest of all the great comedians at that moment in time. Three films in a row had been huge hits: Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, The Strong Man, and Long Pants. And for his next feature, Langdon made a bleak black comedy called Three’s a Crowd. It’s a harrowing tragedy with scarcely any laughs. Set aside the questionable wisdom behind making this thing (it’s a defiant work of iconoclastic filmmaking by an artist who wasn’t listening to any advisers), it marked the turning point as his career began to slide into oblivion. Three’s a Crowd has been tagged with the infamy of being the film that tanked Harry Langdon’s career. While this myth is easily debunked, the fact that Three’s a Crowd is a disorienting and deliberately off-putting experiment has always singled it out for criticism. It isn’t hard to imagine that something like this would destroy one’s career.
That being said, all of Langdon’s films are weird creations, and he shot into pop superstardom in 1926 and 1927 on the basis of stuff that was really quite strange, so Three’s a Crowd’s quirks should be measured against that benchmark, by which it doesn’t come off nearly as bizarre as if you compare it to, say, anything made by anybody else.
According to Frank Capra, the problem with Three’s a Crowd was rooted in Langdon’s misconceived direction of the film—an error that existed because, well, because Langdon went and made it without Capra. Capra had been with Langdon since 1925 and had been a key creative collaborator on Langdon’s most acclaimed works. Fundamental personality clashes drove them apart and Langdon fired Capra; Three’s a Crowd was the first feature he made without any Capra involvement of any kind.
Capra needed to insulate his ego from the humiliation of being fired, and so told the story that he was the source of all Langdon’s success—and by extension, Langdon’s fall from popularity was attributable to Capra’s absence. Mind you, Capra told this story after Langdon had passed away, after Capra himself had become a Hollywood fixture, and during a period where access to Langdon’s films was virtually impossible—Capra’s version of the story had no one to dispute it.
Three’s a Crowd does not appear to have been treated as a flop in its day. Critical reception appears to have been positive, and its box office performance not too far off the mark. The perception of it as a failure developed later, in hindsight, in large part due to Frank Capra’s sour grapes retconning.
To the extent that Three’s a Crowd did fall short of commercial expectations can be explained by a variety of factors—1927 saw something of a Langdon glut. When he quit Mack Sennett’s studio to strike out into features at Warner Brothers/First National, Sennett still had a handful of unreleased Langdon films waiting in the queue. Looking to capitalize on someone else’s investment, Sennett sat on them until Langdon’s First National features started to come out, then released them. And these were now pretty stale items—made in 1925 by a less experienced comedian, juxtaposed with his latest and most daring works. This may well have tested audience patience to the limits.
But here’s the thing: focusing on these minutiae is causing us to miss the big picture. As long as the argument stays focused on “was Three’s a Crowd a flop because Capra was fired” or “were audiences tired of Langdon’s man-baby character,” we are ignoring the fact that across the board, and all at the same time, the great silent comedians hit rocky shores together.
In the case of Harry Langdon, we have an intensely personal and daringly experimental work—Three’s a Crowd—underperform at the box office, and in response Langdon retreats to familiar material and makes The Chaser, a more pedestrian and conventional comedy. His career was in a tailspin, and he went from comedy superstar to being largely marginalized to being a has-been. (Let me be clear: I think Langdon’s late period sound era work is wonderful, but we’re talking here about commercial success measured on the ground, in the day.)
The same thing happened to Harold Lloyd—his personal, perfectionist project was The Kid Brother, the recipient of more gag-writing and cinematic effort than anything he’d made before it. Yet it grossed a mere $2.4 million, less than his previous For Heaven’s Sake. Lloyd was so disappointed by this he allowed the film to fall into complete obscurity for the next 30 years, unscreened and unrevived (although it is today hailed as a masterpiece). Having been bitten on his personal project, he followed it up with Speedy—which got an Oscar nomination and rave press, but grossed even less than Kid Brother. In strictly commercial terms, Lloyd was on a slide. Harold Lloyd never again made a silent film, and never again made a movie widely accepted as a classic.
Now consider Buster Keaton. When historians talk of sound killing the silent comedian, Buster is Exhibit A. One day, he’s making The General, the next he’s a washed-up alcoholic has-been slumming with Jimmy Durante. But how much of this is to blame on sound? Buster’s unhappy marriage had a lot to do with his drinking, and his misguided manager Joe Schenck was responsible for selling Keaton’s contract to MGM, the entirely wrong studio for him. If Keaton had ended up, say, at Paramount—or had never married Natalie Talmadge—or both—we’d be having a very different conversation. That’s not a sign that sound was fundamentally inhospitable to him—just that he had a run of very bad luck.
Also, drawing that line in the sand between Keaton’s “good” films and his “bad” ones is trickier than it sounds. Yeah, you don’t have to take much convincing to put The General on the “good” side and What, No Beer? on the “bad” side … but where exactly is that line?
The General cost Buster $750,000 to make. Adjusting for the changing value of the dollar, that’s just under $11 million in today’s money. It was an expensive undertaking—and a huge investment not just of money but of Buster’s effort. The painstaking attention to period detail, the hundreds of extras, the crashing of the train into the valley—Buster held nothing back. And what feedback did he get for all this? The New York Times panned it. Variety panned it. Life panned it. Critical consensus was that Raymond Griffith’s Civil War comedy Hands Up! was the superior film.
As for audiences … well, it gets tricky. Keaton biographer Tom Dardis published some box office figures that have been disputed and debunked, but they stuck around long enough to infect a lot of what is written about Keaton’s films, so putting a fine point on what his various films earned is always subject to some controversy. Although the details are fuzzy, it’s safe to say the box office returns weren’t what Buster was hoping for. He shored up, and played it safe by making his next film, College, in the same mold as Harold Lloyd’s successful The Freshman. This is not the action of a man who felt vindicated in his creative experiment.
And what of Charlie Chaplin? Following the success of The Gold Rush, he embarked on The Circus. David Robinson described this as “a production dogged by persistent misfortune. The most surprising aspect of the film is not that it is as good as it is, but that it was ever completed at all.” Chaplin suffered a nervous breakdown, quit for eight months, and then never even mentioned the film at all in his autobiography. Like Lloyd and The Kid Brother, he let it quietly vanish and didn’t revive it for many years.
The Circus was, like The General, an uneconomical production marked by excessive spending, which set the bar very high for it to be considered a profitable success. Despite strong reviews it performed disappointingly; although it won an Oscar (beating out Speedy) it failed to surpass the box office returns of The Gold Rush.
Chaplin retreated even more than his peers, and didn’t make another film until 1931.
Have you spotted the pattern?
All four of the top comedy stars of silent slapstick—Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd—made expensive, experimental, personal films in 1927. All four of these movies were received in ways that disappointed and demoralized their makers. All four of the filmmakers responded by pulling back, making less ambitious follow-ups in 1928 (or in Chaplin’s case, not even making a film at all).1
In other words, the audience reaction to these films was consistent. Slapstick comedy from the very best practitioners operating at the height of their powers, making the films for which they would be best remembered and for which they expected to be the proudest, was dismissed. You simply cannot come to the end of 1927 and believe that the future of silent slapstick comedy looks promising or bright.
Audiences had spoken with their pocketbooks and the world of American screen comedy was going to have to respond by recalibrating what it offered in the way of movie comedy—an aesthetic shift was signaled, before The Jazz Singer was even a gleam in Warner Brothers’ collective eyes.
If we had access to a time machine and used it to kidnap Al Jolson and avert the release of The Jazz Singer, it wouldn’t change history. Audiences were moving away from Keaton, Lloyd, Chaplin, and Langdon already—even though these comedians were still making terrific movies. The quality of their films had not diminished—not one bit.
It’s not that the movies got worse, it’s not that sound was competing, it’s not that the aesthetics had (yet) changed. The reason audiences were turning away in 1927 was, as discussed above, the cultural climate was changing. The world was a different place. The 1927 world needed different jokes and different kinds of jokes than the 1914 world.
And there was a new breed of comedian who had come along to tell those new jokes.
In the span of time between Buster Keaton’s first talkie, Free and Easy in 1930, and Charlie Chaplin’s last silent, Modern Times in 1936, the following took place: W.C. Fields made It’s a Gift and Man on a Flying Trapeze; the Marx Brothers finished all of their Paramount films including Duck Soup and still had time to move to MGM and make Night at the Opera; Ernst Lubitsch transitioned to sound and made all four of his naughty operettas and then: Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, and The Merry Widow; Frank Capra made It Happened One Night and inaugurated the screwball era; the first Thin Man movie arrived; Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers started making musicals; and Theodora went Wild; Mae West began her career and made such gems as She Done Him Wrong and Belle of the Nineties; and Leo McCarey made Ruggles of Red Gap. In other words, silent slapstick looked tired and atavistic compared to this fecund new world of sound comedy. Is it really any surprise that silent comedy gave way? It really doesn’t matter how bad or how good the scripts MGM gave to Buster Keaton in the 1930s—a new kind of comedy had blossomed and it suited the needs of the contemporary audience.
Conventional wisdom will tell you that the arrival of talkies killed off silent film, especially silent comedy. This book is my ramshackle, poorly organized, often incoherent counterargument. This book tells a story about Joan Crawford and Harry Langdon, Charley Chase and Cary Grant, Ernst Lubitsch and Mack Sennett—it’s going to build a bridge from F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise to Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday. It sounds like a sprawling mess, and I’m sure it will be, but bear with me.