Too funny for words
Kevin Brownlow SILENT COMEDY by Paul Merton Random House, £25, pp. 322, ISBN 9781905211708 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 1 n 1989, when David Gill and I celebrated the Chaplin centenary with a week-long run of City Lights at the Dominion Theatre, several critics declared than no one under 40 found Chaplin funny. That ruined our advance box office and not even the presence of Princess Diana on the opening night revived it. Yet those that came were thrilled. We had a live orchestra conducted by Carl Davis, and there were times when you couldn't hear the music above the laughter. We recorded all those people under 40 not finding Chaplin funny and sent the tapes to the critics. That was as satisfying as the 'House Full' notices that went up halfway through the week.
So I was delighted to discover that Paul Merton, one of our top comedians, is an unrepentant Chaplin supporter. That doesn't mean that he rejects the work of everyone else. He regards the Chaplin v. Keaton debate as 'tiresomely idiotic' and adds, 'The good news is that they are both fantastic.' And that goes for Harold Lloyd (a superb boxed set of his films has just been released.) Merton emphasises how the leading comedians influenced each other. 'This rivalry and desire to make better and better comedies ensured a stream of high-quality pictures.'
Alas, the technology that can preserve these pictures can also ruin them. We all remember those wretched prints of Chaplin films shown on TV. The Chaplin features are now available in excellent transfers on DVD, thank heaven, but some DVDs are put out by idiots. Merton owns one of an early Chaplin with a jazz vocalist on the soundtrack proclaiming, 'Hi there everybody and welcome to the club. Tonight the band wants to play for you the hottest numbers. Let's go!'
Television is not the ideal way to watch silent comedy because it separates the audience. Chaplin expected his comedies to be seen on screens 25 feet wide, not 25 inches, the laughter to be shared with hundreds of people. Nothing can beat the cinema experience, since audiences are as important to comedy as the film itself. Merton writes wistfully of seeing silent comedies cold — no music, all by himself.
I sympathise. I remember seeing the Syd Chaplin film The Better 'Ole on a viewing machine. I thought it the crudest film I'd ever seen. A few months later I saw it at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, with a sympathetic audience, and laughed so much I ended up on the floor.
In this dismal period when mainstream television avoids black-and-white, let alone silent film, Paul Merton is something of a hero. Chaplin's Easy Street was presented at an open-air screening in 2005, and the local council commissioned one of those modern scores so inappropriate that it makes your teeth fall out. Merton yelled over the throbbing din to the operator and got it turned off — and was promptly escorted out of the park by security men. Chaplin would have been proud of him He even sponsored a score by Neil Brand for the Laurel and Hardy classic You're Darn Tootin'. I saw it not so long ago and am still in recovery. And he recently presented a TV series about the great comedians. It sprang from the highly successful Slapstick festivals staged by Chris Daniels at Bristol Silents. Now comes the book on this fascinating subject. It is beautifully produced and contains some remarkable illustrations. Merton guides us through the careers of each of the top comics, together with Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy and a selection of the lesser lights. He makes some striking biographical connections the rest of us have missed.
He pays tribute to David Robinson, whose books on Chaplin and Keaton first inspired him (along with the BBC series Golden Silents). We are all in debt to Robinson. I remember as far back as the 1950s, there was widespread snobbery about Laurel and Hardy until Robinson staged a season at the NFT and changed our opinion overnight.
I was fortunate enough to meet all three of the great comedians, and if you asked them who they considered the greatest, they would answer 'Lloyd Hamilton'. It must have been an in-joke they had cooked up; judging by what you can see today, no one over four would find Lloyd Hamilton funny, and Merton has not included him in his book.
It is a relief to find that while Merton takes the films seriously and adds fascinating information, he does not slice into them with an academic scalpel — although, as a professional, he provides plenty of insight.
He certainly knows his subject, but occasionally misses an essential fact. In Go West, when Buster Keaton is ordered to smile at the point of a gun, he is not just parodying his own style, he is quoting a famous scene from The Virginian, and mimicking a gesture Lillian Gish makes throughout the great D. W Griffith film Broken Blossoms (1919).
There are times when I think Merton reads too much into the films His theory that Joan Crawford obscured her face with a hat because she was less than enthusiastic about appearing in a Harry Langdon comedy doesn't wash. I always thought the CrawfordLangdon comedy Tramp, Tramp, Tramp was a damned good film It had a fine director in Harry Edwards, and if he didn't like the way Crawford wore that hat he'd have ordered her to change it.
In the world of film appreciation, to criticise someone's favourite film is to risk social exclusion. I gasped out loud when Merton panned Keaton's The Navigator. I regard it as one of the most perfect comedies ever made. In fairness to Merton, I have to admit that it died the last few times I ran it to large audiences. How can such a brilliant picture suddenly fail in its appeal? Is it the same syndrome that afflicted Harry Langdon? He was the fourth greatest comedian until a few years ago; now he is totally out of fashion. Let's hope the pendulum swings them back into favour.
Although Merton neglects one of my favourite comedians, Raymond Griffith, he doesn't forget Max Linder, the first international comedy star. His earliest films are 100 years old, yet he still comes across as a master, whom Chaplin described as 'My Professor'. And he deals with Roscoe Arbuckle, and the scandal that destroyed him, and some of the lesser figures like Larry Semon. He was a rough-and-tumble comic who could go to New York confident that his pictures were still in production in California, with stunt men standing in for him I was delighted to read, on the evidence of director Leo McCarey, that Chaplin loved Laurel and Hardy. It reminded me that George Stevens, who photographed them, once asked Hardy about his little gestures, the business with the tie and the adjusting of the hat. 'Don't you know where those come from?' he said. 'Charlie Chaplin. But because I'm fat they seem completely different.'
The book is designed like a magazine article, with selected quotes in large type. Oh well, anything to attract the young. But if they think that silent films are too high-flown and intellectual, they should bear in mind that Chaplin and Keaton had virtually no formal education and some of the early comedians were illiterate. It would astonish them to think that now they are studied in universities, and celebrated in books like this.
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