Silent Laughter

Before the year 1920, comedy and humour in film was essentially bound and chained to the two-reeler. The feature length comedy film  Tillie's Punctured Romance by Mack Sennett (1914) was the only real exception to that rule.  The majority of full length features were produced by highly rated
comedians, funnyfolk, those that were acclaimed and proved successful via the box office for their
respective shorts. And until the 1920's, these economical short story films were preferred even by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, who were truthfully just reluctant to devote themselves
to the daunting prospect of working around the clock.

In the 1910's, there were an influx of Anglo-music hall comedians, including Chaplin himself, and Stan Laurel, who cut their teeth with Fred Karno's music-hall troupes. More entertainers would expatriate, seduced by this now rollicking comedy explosion in America. Highly adroit stage comics
as Lupino Laine and Billie Ritchie would secure leading roles in short films for Hollywood companies. Most of these actors were moth to flame, when it came to the US of A, for the wages
were infinitely higher and they had the perfect platform to showcase their chops and wares. Comedian Walter Forde, would be one of the rare exceptions, to return home to his British roost
and actually achieve more success as an actor and director.

                             Can you tell which one is The Kid?






Chaplin's first release as both a director and lead, The Kid (1921) was seen as the turning point and the milestone for this breed of silent comedy. Paradoxically, it was Chaplin that had been the most successful with both his two and three reel shorts. He even held the reservation, that he may not be able to cope with longer films of five or six reels, he even felt defeated at one point, on the cusp of retirement and giving up the business completely. The saving grace for Chaplin was that some critics
were able to discern, even from his two reel performances, that this was no ordinary showman. Chaplin, would now have the impetus to begin again and this time, infuse his emotions with his signature blend of vivacious slapstick, some of which was influenced by the comical antics of Mack Sennett.

        Mabel was able and coulda been a contender if not for that little murder rap snafu in 1922








Chaplin, whose grandiose stories appeared to exist in a world unfettered, without any sense of what time and place it was, it would be his comedian peers of the Twenties that were content to carry on with the lines of the earlier, off the cuff impromptu plots, or the popular satirical stories of books and magazines, trendy inventions of the age. Sennett, rather than seeing the goldmine of combining elements to give dimension and gravity to his features, obstinately produced only two types of features - one that followed the tradition of slapsticks circa 1910, as seen in Small Town Idol (1921), and another in the innocuous tradition of polite situation comedy, such as Molly O (also 1921), which starred Mabel Normand. Miss Normand was long considered to be one of the finest American comediennes, this formula may have well proved workable, had Normand not become involved in a scandal, when the English director, William Desmond Taylor (1872-1922), was mysteriously killed. Sennett, now backed into a proverbial corner, had to withdraw the film Molly O from distribution, due to public indignation, and as a result, it would be the end of Mabel Normand's promising career.

Wallace Reid, always played it safe 

The safe humour tradition was more fully conveyed by such American light comedians as Douglas Mclean, Johnny Hines, Wallace Reid and Charles Ray, and their material source was almost always magazine short-stories. Johnny Hines, having already matriculated from the two-reel comedy school of the late 1910s, it was here that he would portray the archetypal American boy next door. He would go on to features with such titles as Burn Em Up Barnes (1921), Luck (1923), The Early Bird (1924) and The Live Wire (1925) , which centered on the struggles of a young man trying to make good, in the manner of the nineteenth century author Horatio Alger's stories of success. Maclean, Reid and Ray garnered acclaim in the early Twenties, when they rehashed this same type of material. Representative of the genteel-comedy actresses of the day, was Colleen Moore, who in coalition, was the highest paid woman of the silent cinema in the late 1920s. She would star in such entries as Ella Cinders (1926), a middling comedy based on a famous comic strip of the day.

                 Charles and his bruvver Syd who wasn't very vicious



There were some attempts to go outside of grain of popular fiction in the Twenties. In England, as example, the music-hall comic, George Robey, after appearing in a plethora of shorts, based on the novellas of W.W. Jacobs, was eventually rewarded the role of Sancho Paza in Don Quixote (1923), based on the classic novel of Miguel de Cervantes with Jerrold Robertshaw in the titular role. A decade later, in a talkie version which was directed by G. W. Pabst, Robery played the same role to the Don Quixote of Fyodor Chaliapin, the famous Russian operatic bass singer, and the outcome was a marked improvement on the earlier film. In America, the Fox Film Corporation would release an updated interpretation of the famous Mark Twain novel of 1889. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, made in 1921, and starred Harry Myers, who would be later known for his role as the inebriated millionaire in Charles Chaplin's City Lights (1931). The lauded comedian's brother, Syd Chaplin, appeared in a popular late nineteenth century farce Charley's Aunt in 1925, where he was featured as the boy-hero in a Famous Players-Lasky adaptation of playwright J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, directed by Herbert Brenon.






Trying to enhance the image of movies by adapting literary 'classics' and often employing noted stage actors and actresses, Famous Players-Lasky would produce in 1925, a film of Ferenc Molnar's sophisticated stage comedy The Swan, that starred Adolphe Menjou. In fact, quite a few refined films were made in mid-period of the decade. Ernst Lubitsch translated Oscar Wilde's popular 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan to the big screen in 1925. James Cruze, most famous for his Western The Covered Wagon, would direct Beggar on Horseback (1925) based on a contemporary play, and the most sardonic of the George S Kaufman and Marc Connelly collaborations. A whimsical farce and satire from France, Chapeau de Paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat, 1927) would not seem to suffer in the transmigration from stage to silent screen. A great bulk of the translations from the more verbal media (novel and play) suffered oversimplification as adapters were in hopes of appealing to a wider audience. The use of inter-titles, would also present problems in themselves. Lubitsch obviously worked hard at avoiding a flood of titles for the Oscar Wilde adaptation, even as far as removing the famous playwright's forte, the epigrams. It would not be until the screen could speak, that such literary pieces as Shakespeare's The Taming of The Shrew, acquire the full dimension of which the medium was capable, the 1929 version, directed by Sam Taylor (who was one of Harold Lloyd's directors ), starred Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.






The literary works would always please the critics, but the general public flocked to the films of the famous four of the decade, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. In the prolific year of 1925, when the comedy feature would finally bear it's fruits, Chaplin spun The Gold Rush and Lloyd would deliver the good with The Freshman, both of which yielded in a depth of comic character, this was seen as Faberge egg rare in the full-length humorous films of the era. Keaton, Lloyd and Chaplin would keep the total production of each film under their supervision, usually serving ( In Lloyd's case uncredited) as story editor or author, director or co-director as well as star of the show.