Max-imum overdrive

The above is a screen capture from the 1940 Three Stooges comedy No Census, No Feeling—a two-reeler that begins with a thrift shop owner pulling down the overhead awning that adorns his business and depositing Moe, Larry and Curly to the street below (the three men were taking a siesta in the closed awning).  The actor playing this small but memorable part is Max Davidson—a comedian whom I’ve talked about on the blog before, and who is well represented on a 2011 Edition Filmmuseum DVD release that I purchased about two weeks ago after hemming and hawing about doing so for a couple of years.  I am not disappointed that I did.

Davidson’s career in movies can be traced all the way back to the teens; he appeared in a series of “Izzy” one-reelers (produced at Reliance-Majestic) and throughout the silent era can be spotted in such films as Intolerance (1916—he was a close friend of D.W. Griffith, and some speculate he might have been responsible for David Wark’s career), The Hoodlum (1919) and The Extra Girl (1923).  (In watching a handful of Bobby Vernon comedies on an Alpha Video DVD, I was amused to see Max in a 1923 short called Plumb Crazy.)  Hal Roach remembered in a 1978 interview that he saw Davidson in a feature film with Jackie Coogan (either The Rag Man or its follow-up, Old Clothes) and wanted him to work at his studio; it was a particularly fortuitous time for Max, movie-wise, because his stock-in-trade—playing Old World Jewish characters—was boosted by the popularity of stage plays like Abie’s Irish Rose and films like the “Cohens and Kellys” series at Universal (with Charlie Murray and George Sidney).

Davidson’s character—that of the Jewish immigrant struggling to assimilate in his adopted country—is also one of the reasons why his work isn’t more prominently placed in retrospect; though there was no malice in Max’s characterizations (identified by his shaggy mop of hair and beard, clad in a derby hat and long coat) some of the stereotypical humor might not pass muster with the audiences of today.  If you’re able to put that aside, Max Davidson made some fitfully funny two-reel comedies—the most accessible of which is a 1927 outing entitled Call of the Cuckoo.  It’s been issued on a number of Laurel & Hardy DVD releases (you’ll find it on Image Entertainment’s The Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy, Volume 1) because Stan and Ollie have small roles in it as well as fellow Roach funsters Charley Chase and James Finlayson.  Stan, Ollie, Charley and Fin play a quartet of “inmates” whose asylum is next door to a house that Max is trying to sell; the Davidson family finally moves into another home but experiences just as many problems in their new domicile as the old.  Cuckoo is an entertaining comedy that also features this disturbing image…

…that I am truly sorry for burning onto your retinas, by the way.  The Max Davidson Comedies collection (a 2-disc set) features Cuckoo, as well as a pair of shorts that were once shown during American Movie Classics’ Film Preservation Festival (do you remember when they sponsored these?  Good times…) in 1995, Don’t Tell Everything (1927) and Pass the Gravy (1928).

Don’t Tell Everything is a bizarre but funny short; the plot has Max (as Papa Ginsberg) courting a widow (Lillian Elliott) at a party where his bratty son Asher (Spec O’Donnell) is terrorizing the guests, among them a man trying to perform a magic trick (and played by none other than James Finlayson himself).  Annoyed by Asher’s antics, the widow asks Ginsburg if he knows who that “brat” is…so to avoid scotching his romance, he pretends not to know him.  The couple ties the knot, and Asher arrives on the scene to move in—but he’s donned drag and pretends to be the new maid so the new Mrs. G doesn’t get wise.  Everything is a comedy that has to be seen to be believed…and if you thought the bathtub bit in Cuckoo was disturbing, you need to check out Spec as a girl—the most unconvincing onscreen female until Ben Blue in the Taxi Boys comedy Bring ‘Em Back a Wife (1933).

There is nothing like a dame.

Pass the Gravy remains one of the funniest silent comedies I’ve ever watched; Max is a planter who’s been scrapping with his next-door neighbor Schultz (Bert Sprotte), who raises prized chickens.  Since Max’s daughter (Martha Sleeper) and Schultz’s son (Gene Morgan) are engaged to be married, the two men decide to let bygones be bygones, with Max inviting Schultz over for a chicken dinner with all the trimmings.  The problem: he’s given his idiot son (Spec again) a couple of dollars to get the pullet at the market, and Spec decides to pocket the cash and avail himself of a chicken he’s come across in the yard.  Yes, this is headed precisely where you think it is—but it is hilarious reaction comedy; if the scenes where Sleeper and Morgan are pantomiming to Max that he’s tucking into Sprotte’s beloved Bingham rooster do not make you wet your pants in laughter, then you need to cultivate a sense of humor, comrade.  Pass the Gravy was chosen for inclusion in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1998…but the injustice is you almost have to purchase this German DVD set to see it.

Gene Morgan and Martha Sleeper play one of the falling-down funniest games of "Charades" in film history in the silent comedy classic Pass the Gravy.

So much for the Davidson comedies which I had already seen (but were a pleasure to revisit).  The Filmmuseum collection features four additional shorts from the comedian’s Pathé period—the funniest is undoubtedly Jewish Prudence (1927), where as “Papa Gimplewart,” Max’s daughter (Martha Sleeper again!) is engaged to a man (Gaston Glass) who’s just out of law school.  Martha’s beau won’t be allowed to marry him until he’s won his first case…of course, that won’t be too difficult because Max and son Johnny Fox are trying to scam a trolley company with an injury lawsuit (Max has had Fox pretend to be injured in a crash) and his would-be son-in-law is representing the trolley people.  The highlight of the comedy is a scene where Johnny has his “paralyzed” leg looked at by two men Max believes to be insurance investigators…

…but they’re actually just there to collect the rent (and you might recognize them as Eugene Pallette and Fred Kelsey).  Johnny’s been hiding his good leg in a hole on the sofa on which he’s reclined and a false leg represents the paralyzed one—but when he’s not able to make the switch quickly enough a second time Pallette and Kelsey play “mumbly peg” with a knife on his good leg, and Johnny strains from wincing and yelling out loud.  Prudence has two great payoff gags that I’ve left out of the summation for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it…suffice it to say, it’s Max at his best.

Flaming Fathers (1927) features Martha Sleeper as Max’s daughter again (I positively adore Martha—and have recently acquired a copy of her solo Roach comedy, Sure Mike [1926], on a budget DVD); she’s going to the beach with boyfriend Eddie Clayton and Max’s wife (Lillian Leighton) orders him to tag along so the young couple won’t sneak off and elope.  Crammed with hilarious gags (Max loses his bathing suit in one sequence, and his attempts to find suitable cover are a highlight), Fathers is a real pip as is Should Second Husbands Come First? (1927)—in which the widow (the return of Lillian Elliott) Max is sparking has a pair of sons who do not under any circumstances want the two manacled together in holy matrimony.  The two boys—one of them O’Donnell, the other future film director David Butler—pretend to be insane in order to tamp down Max’s amorous intentions; the day of the wedding, they don disguises (Spec gets to do drag again) as a father and daughter claiming that Max is the father of the daughter’s infant (this sequence alone is worth the price of admission). 

The final Pathé comedy is Why Girls Say No (1927)—Max’s first two-reeler for Roach; it’s a pleasant if slightly average outing that features Davidson as a stern papa who’s dead-set against his daughter (Marjorie Daw) dating a man (Creighton Hale) whom Max dismisses as “an Irisher.”  So Hale, twenty years before Gregory Peck and Gentleman’s Agreement, pretends to be Jewish—and hilarious havoc is wreaked at the family table when he’s invited to sup.  Once again, the ubiquitous Spec O’Donnell is on hand as Max’s disagreeable son but the bonus is that Oliver Hardy has a small contribution early in the short as a beat cop who manages to fall into a puddle twice; this short also features a deflated cake gag that would later resurface in a number of comedies, notably An Ache in Every Stake (1941) with the Three Stooges.

Many of Davidson’s Roach-MGM comedies did not survive the ravages of time and neglect.  There’s an abbreviated version of Love ‘Em and Feed ‘Em (1928) on this set that runs about ten minutes and uses a fragment recently found in the Library of Congress along with production stills and the script continuity.  This will give you an idea of the shape it’s in:

Nitrate never waits.

Davidson and Oliver Hardy are a pair of prospectors who strike it rich and decide to whoop it up in New York City…where they acquire the company of two women (Martha Sleeper as a stenographer, Viola Richard as a telephone operator) and treat them to a night on the town.  In the accompanying booklet for the DVD set, film historian Richard W. Bann notes that Love ‘Em was originally going to be a Laurel & Hardy comedy; Stan was late getting back from a European vacation and so Max was pressed into service.

The first reel of Came the Dawn is all that remains of this 1928 Max Davidson comedy while reel two of Dumb Daddies (1928) is the lone survivor; both shorts are present and accounted for on this set, restored as best can be with stills and the continuity scripts.  The 1928 comedy The Boy Friend has survived intact, however; Marion Byron plays Max’s daughter in this one, and she falls for a boy (played by future B-western star “Wild” Bill Elliott) who’s actually the son of Max’s employer, a bank president.  So, in retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best course of action for Max and Mrs. Max (Fay Holderness) to pretend (a lift from Should Second Husbands) that the cheese has slid off their respective crackers.  I liked this one a lot despite its familiar territory (it even recycles a great rumble seat gag from Flaming Fathers), mostly because of Edgar Kennedy’s secondary role as a chowhound cop (there’s a bit where he’s shown tempted to take a bite of a kid’s hot dog…and he gives the camera a look as if to say “Should I?”).

There are also two bonus shorts on the set: a sound comedy (according to Smileage Guaranteed, the first sound “All-Stars” romp from Roach) called Hurdy Gurdy (1929) that features Max, Edgar and TDOY goddess Thelma Todd in the cast of a dismal outing involving the denizens of an apartment building who want to know why Thelma’s character needs so much ice on a hot day (much of the action takes place on the fire escapes of each apartment).  It’s not particularly funny, and the windup gag is strictly from hunger, but it’s a classic when you compare it to the other extra on this set, 1931’s The Itching Hour.  Louise Fazenda joins Max, Spec and Irving Bacon for painful “scare” shenanigans in a haunted hotel.  (You’ll watch this once for curiosity sake.)

Another memorable Max performance: as the "bogeyman" terrorizing Allan "Farina" Hoskins in the Our Gang comedy Moan & Groan, Inc. (1929).

Like the previously discussed Anita Garvin and Marion Byron, Max Davidson got his walking papers in the 1928 Roach “purge,” and though he would occasionally work in some of the studio’s two-reel comedies (he’s in Charley Chase’s Great Gobs and Harry Langdon’s The Shrimp) he spent the rest of his career in small extra parts, rarely getting a chance to utter a word.  He worked because he wanted to, and he had fortuitously socked away enough money to live decently until his passing in 1950.  Again, though I don’t get a commission for chatting up these DVDs if you are a devotee of the Hal Roach Studios they are well worth the investment.  In our next post: another overseas purchase in the form of a two-disc set starring the studio’s big breadwinners…Our Gang.

Why Christopher Hitchens should burn in Hell*

You may remember that two weeks ago on the blog I chatted up film historian Richard M. Roberts’s book Smileage Guaranteed: Past Humor, Present Laughter—a invaluable reference volume on the history of the Hal Roach Studios.  If this subject is your particular cup of chamomile then you might want to walk over in an orderly fashion (single-file, please) either to Grapevine Video or Amazon.com (my personal recommendation would be Grapevine, because they’re good people and…well, really—why does Jeff Bezos need more money for a friggin’ clock?) and grab yourself a copy because Richard mentioned to me in an e-mail that there probably won’t be another print run.  (Honest to my grandma, this isn’t some sort of cheap Butterball turkey ploy…I just thought you should know that you need to get a copy because when they’re gone, they’re gone.)

Reading the book reminded me that I still had not acquired those two Munich Filmmuseum sets that I mentioned in this post from January 2011: one a collection of Max Davidson comedies, the other a compilation entitled Hal Roach: Female Comedy Teams.  I’ll talk about the Davidson films in a later post (I haven’t finished the set yet) but I did generously sample the Female Comedy Teams discs this weekend and I don’t regret the investment (though I am glad I waited since the price had come down a bit).  The focus is on those wonderful two-reelers starring Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts (and later Todd and Patsy Kelly) but the collection also contains three comedy shorts from producer Roach’s first attempt to create “a female Laurel and Hardy” with comediennes Anita Garvin and Marion “Peanuts” Byron.

Former Ziegfeld Follies girl Garvin was a comedy veteran by the time Roach paired her with Marion Byron in 1928; she had worked at the Al Christie and Educational studios before joining the “Lot of Fun” (she was asked to appear in Mabel Normand’s 1926 feature Raggedy Rose) and during that time played a lot of imposing dowagers and disapproving wives in Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase comedies (including one of my L&H favorites, 1928’s From Soup to Nuts—in which the tiara she’s wearing keeps slipping down over her eyes) due to her statuesque height.  Byron (you know her as Buster Keaton’s love interest in Steamboat Bill, Jr.) complimented the Amazonian Garvin with her smaller stature (Marion was only five-foot), although in their first two outings they made Byron sort of a female Harry Langdon.  The Garvin/Byron series was instituted to replace Max Davidson’s output for the studio (his comedies, while undeniably funny, were not as popular as Roach had hoped) but to keep Max happy he was given a role in the first try, Feed ‘em and Weep (1928).

Feed ‘em and Weep is essentially a heavy-on-the-slapstick venture set in Davidson’s whistle stop café; he’s expecting a large influx of train passengers making a scheduled lunch break, and instead of “competent” waitresses he’s wound up with Anita and Marion.  You can probably guess what transpires: trays of food are spilled and people wind up face down in same—it’s not a great comedy (directors Leo McCarey and Fred Guiol literally make the women a copy of Laurel and Hardy, and it’s been argued by many that roughhouse comedy often doesn’t work on the distaff side) but it has its moments; my favorite bit is early in the two-reeler, where Anita, after Marion has tripped over some rocks, lectures her friend via title card “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?  Keep your head up!”

Wait for it…

…it was not unexpected, but it did make me laugh out loud.

Byron is still channeling Harry Langdon in Going Ga-Ga (1929).

The girls’ second comedy, Going Ga-Ga (1929), is an improvement—Anita and Marion manage to acquire a kidnapped baby and after leaving it in an orphanage try to retrieve the tyke to collect the reward—but you still can’t shake the feeling that somebody just dusted off a discarded Laurel & Hardy scenario for this one.  (Max Davidson is in this one as well, as the detective on the case.)  The interesting thing about Ga-Ga (and Feed ‘em and Weep as well) is that the two shorts are incomplete comedies; there is footage missing from both shorts (nitrate won’t wait, folks) but they’re fairly well reconstructed with the help of surviving continuity scripts and a photo still here and there.  If you glance at the booklet that comes with the set, you’ll see that Ga-Ga isn’t listed among the shorts (though it is mentioned on the DVD’s back cover); instead it receives the designation “Work in Progress: The Restoration of GOING GA-GA” with a “5’” after it.  Is it possible that the short was missing in an earlier edition but after being finally put together was included in the later one?

Roach gave up on the Garvin-Byron teaming with the release of their final short, A Pair of Tights, in 1929…and this is a pity, because this two-reeler was not only their best outing it’s one of the funniest silent comedies I’ve seen.  If you’ve watched the Robert Youngson compilation When Comedy Was King (1960) you’ve seen some of it; Anita and Marion get a visit from Marion’s boyfriend (Stu Erwin), who’s brought along his boss (Edgar Kennedy) as a date for Anita—the women are positively famished but the men don’t plan on spending any more than necessary on their dates.  Stu and Edgar decide that if they spring for ice cream that will take the edge off the girls’ appetites and the second half of the short involves Marion’s attempts to purchase four cones without dropping them (an exercise in futility).  Complications further arise when a cop (Edgar Dearing) who’s dead set against Stu’s double parking enters the scene, scotching Marion’s mission at every turn.

Now…the simple act of buying four ice cream cones only to watch them wind up on the sidewalk is funny enough (the hysterical part of this is when a hungry dog keeps leaping up on the five-foot Marion) but for some reason I laughed harder in the earlier part of the short, when Anita and Edgar are introduced to one another and the animosity between the two of them is so palpable you could cut it with a knife.  Anita keeps giving Edgar the stink-eye the entire time as he fidgets nervously and avoids eye contact.  Finally he breaks the ice with a title card: “Well, how are you?”

“Starving!” is Anita’s icy reply.  The lobby card above will kind of give you an idea of how his attempts to woo her go over:

Both women were later released from their contracts at Roach during what Roberts describes as a “purge” in 1928; Byron worked at Warner Brothers for a little while afterward (I’ve seen a few of her films mentioned at the IMDb, notably a bit part in The Crime of the Century) before settling down and doing the rice-and-old-shoes thing.  Garvin also went the matrimonial route, marrying bandleader Clifford “Red” Stanley while continuing to appear in small roles—she’s in a number of Columbia two-reel comedies, including Andy Clyde’s Now It Can Be Sold (1939) and The Three Stooges’ Cookoo Cavaliers (1940), her final film.  She’s also in two of the Todd-Pitts comedies that are in this set (which I’ve discussed previously here), Show Business (1932) and my personal favorite of the Thelma-ZaSu shorts, Asleep in the Feet (1933).

This is one of my favorite Thelma and ZaSu stills (from Asleep in the Feet).  The two women had such a wonderful working relationship; it was said that they weren't able to make eye contact with one another because they would burst out laughing and ruin takes.

The Todd-Pitts-Kelly comedies in this collection were ones I had previously seen on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ and elsewhere with the exception of The Pajama Party (1931).  Party features Thelma and Zase at a swanky society party when the car in which they were traveling is run off the road and winds up in a lake.  The woman responsible invites them to her house for dry clothes and they stick around while she entertains her friends; one of them is celebrating a birthday and is subjected to the other guests giving him a birthday kick in the fanny while they shout “And one to grow on!”  ZaSu, having come in on the tail end (pardon the pun) of this, thinks this is the norm in polite society, and copies the gesture whenever someone happens to bend over…while shouting in her tremulous manner “One to grow on!”  Party is an entertaining comedy with some rib-tickling gags (the sequence where a French maid tries to help Pitts off with her wet things is a riot) including a recurring bit where some of the more amorous male guests keep inviting Thelma to see “the Japanese pagoda” and wind up getting a black eye for their trouble.

"Imagine my embarrassment!" Thelma steps into a sunken bathtub in The Pajama Party (1931).

The Female Comedy Teams set also includes a 1931 Todd-Pitts outing entitled On the Loose, in which the girls become fed up with the fact that all the men they date are convinced there’s nothing like a good time at Coney Island.  When the two women wind up splattered with mud from a careless motorist (John Loder), he offers to buy them new outfits (cue Billy Gilbert, hilarious as a dress designer) and take them someplace “smart and original” with his friend (Claud Allister).  Guess where the four of them go?  Loose is another winner (though I already owned this on another DVD set), and its windup gag features one of the greatest cameos in the history of movie comedy.

Although I had seen the rest of the shorts on this 2-DVD set I got to revisit some old favorites; in Babes in the Goods (1934), Thel and Patsy are department store employees who are asked by their boss (Jack Barty) to demonstrate a dishwasher in a window display…and are given strict instructions that they are not to leave as long as they have an audience.  Their “audience” finally dwindles down to an inebriate (who else but Arthur Housman?) who won’t take a hint and go elsewhere…so when he finally does leave the girls find themselves locked in the store (the night watchman mistakenly believes they’ve left already).  Goods is one of the best of the Todd-Kelly romps, but Female Comedy Teams also features Beauty and the Bus (1933), Maid in Hollywood (1934) and my personal favorite of the Thel-and-Patsy’s, Top Flat (1935).

Finally, the other day when I was browsing the racks at my friend Martin Grams, Jr.’s Finders Keepers at some of the clearance stuff, I succumbed to an impulse buy and bought a couple more collections of Todd-Pitts-Kelly two-reelers—some I already own, but many I do not.  So there will be a follow-up post to this, as soon as I avail myself of the material.  (And there might be a test, so be prepared!)

*It’s not because he embraced atheism.  It’s because he famously wrote an article for Vanity Fair proclaiming that women weren’t funny, and in the time I spent watching this 2-DVD collection it was proven categorically he didn’t know sh*t from shinola.

A thriller of a birthday…and Thrilling Days of Yesteryear prize winners!

It was on this date in 1887 that William Henry Pratt made his entry into the world…and fans of the actor’s work know him, of course, as the one and only Boris Karloff.  Over at the Radio Spirits blog this morning, we decided to give him a birthday shout-out so if you’re in the neighborhood, we cordially invite you to drop in.  I have never made any secret of my love for the man’s work; you might remember my enthusiastic participation in the Boris Karloff Blogathon that was hosted by Frankensteinia back in 2009, when I looked at a few of his movies (including my favorite, Targets—which won me a CMBA Award) as well as Karloff’s work in radio and TV.  There’s no denying it—Boris is a true Thrilling Days of Yesteryear fave.

And speaking of TDOY faves (smooth as glass, I tells ya) I’m pleased to be able to announce the winners in the blog’s Steel True Giveway—whereupon two lucky entrants from the TDOY readership won copies of the new Barbara Stanwyck biography by author Victoria Wilson, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940.  I only wish I had been able to give out a copy to everyone who entered…and let me tell you, with the number of people we had enter this thing that would have been a buttload of copies; I had more entries in this than the previous record-holder, the Johnny Dollar: Confidential giveaway I did back in April 2011.  The two recipients of a copy of the book (valued at $40.00) are Elizabeth B. of Norcross, GA and Christine L. of Elverta, CA.  Congratulations to both of them, and I want to once again thank Elina Vaysbeyn at Simon & Schuster for generously donating the prizes.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll have some more freebies to giveaway soon, so keep watching the skies!

Time and Babs wait for no man (or woman)

Just a quick reminder that if you want to get in on a chance to win a free copy of the new Barbara Stanwyck biography, Steel True, you need to e-mail me an entry at igsjrotr(at)gmail(dot)com by 11:59pm EST tonight.  As you know, I have two autographed copies (signed by the author, Victoria Wilson) to hand out to two lucky people—provided they live in the U.S. or Canada—but you have no chance whatsoever of winning if you don’t enter.  The response to this, by the way, has been incredible—I think this contest has had the most participation second only to a Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar giveaway Thrilling Days of Yesteryear did a couple of years ago.  Saturday morning I’ll draw the winners…Monday morning I’ll mail out the prizes (knock wood).  So enter today!

Accidentally Preserved II: Texas Blood Money

(No, this is not the real title of the follow-up to the successful DVD release first mentioned in this post from November 2012.  I just wanted to see if I could make a Croissandwich come out of Stacia’s nose.)

Silent film historian-accompanist Ben Model announced on Facebook the other day that Volume 2 of Accidentally Preserved, a sequel to a DVD release of silent film rarities that I reviewed on the blog in June of this year, will be released sometime in January 2014.  I informed him that I’d talk up the project on the blog as soon as the word came down when he would start passing around the hat on Kickstarter.

He then told me that Kickstartering this bad boy would not be necessary: because the first disc sold so well on Amazon and other venues where he offered up the DVD—plus there was a bit of fundage left over from the first open guitar case at Kickstarter—he had more than enough capital for the January 2014 release.  The thing is: I should have known this, because I mentioned it in this post from July—which proves that my memory isn’t what it used to be (that or I need to read my blog more).  I blame this influx of dementia on my parents, by the way, who are determined to drag me kicking and screaming with them on their trip to Fogeyville, USA.  (Their television ritual now involves watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy in the evenings.  Sadly, medical science has yet to find a cure.)

So do I have the skinny on what to expect on Volume 2?  Funny you should ask that—one of the gems scheduled is a Lloyd Hamilton comedy entitled Papa’s Boy (1927), which to me would be incentive enough to purchase the DVD, since I am a huge fan of this silent comedian.  There are also comedies from Charley Chase clones Neely Edwards (a 1927 Bluebird comedy entitled The Little Pest which also features frequent Three Stooges player Bud Jamison) and Henry Murdock (1927’s Cook, Papa, Cook), as well as Bobby Vernon (1920’s Why Men Go Wild), with whom I recently became familiar after purchasing an Alpha Video DVD of some of his comedy shorts from Oldies.com.  There is also a 1924 “Telephone Girls” two-reeler featuring Alberta Vaughn entitled Sherlock’s Home; the “Telephone Girls” was a series produced by FBO (Film Booking Offices of America) in 1924 which featured Vaughn as “Gladys Murgatroyd”—Home also has a brief cameo from another unsung female funster, Gale Henry.

And for those of you who don’t like comedy…there’s sport cartoons.  A couple of animated entries from director Otto Messmer and producer Pat Sullivan that feature Charlie Chaplin (1919’s Charlie on the Farm) and Felix the Cat (1927’s Whys and Otherwise).  Two oddities round out the collection: a 1925 public service announcement (animated by Dick Huemer) for Christmas Seals and a 1928 cautionary tale entitled How Jimmy Won the Game, which preaches of the dangers of mixing America’s pastime with blasting caps.  As with Volume 1 of Accidentally Preserved, many of the shorts in this collection constitute the only known existing prints of these valuable films.

So keep an eye peeled at Amazon for a listing of this release…and if I get additional information in the meantime I’ll be certain to slap it up here on the blog.

The Chaney Blogathon: The Ace of Hearts (1921)

The following essay is Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s contribution (the second of two) to The Chaney Blogathon: Two Men, Thousands of Faces—which is currently underway from November 15-18 and sponsored by Movies, Silently & The Last Drive-In.  For a complete list of the participating blogs and the subjects being covered, click here.

From 1919 to 1921, the United States of America found itself in the grip of what historians would come to call a “Red Scare”—it was believed that because of the Russian Revolution of 1917, that sort of political rebellion would spread to Uncle Sam’s backyard and foment all sorts of trouble from anarchists, Communists, immigrants and any other member of the unwashed who refused to genuflect at the altar of capitalism.  It led to such government interventions as the Sedition Act of 1918 and the infamous “Palmer raids,” which were a series of attempts by the Department of Justice (the “Palmer” was U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) to “round up the usual suspects” and deport them because of their Bolshie leftist leanings.

The Red Scare provided grist for several feature films produced in Hollywood at that time, notably a Goldwyn Pictures effort called The Ace of Hearts (1921).  In Hearts—though the members of the secret society are not identified with any sort of political label—an organization carries out assassinations on citizens that the membership believe to be corrupt and a cancer on society’s fee-fee.  The targets are designated as “The Men Who Have Lived Too Long”—and the assassin who will dispose of said target is chosen via a deck of cards…with “the ace of hearts” being the winning ticket in the murder sweepstakes.

Two members of the organization, Farallone (Lon Chaney) and Forrest (John Bowers), are both in love with the only female of the group—a woman (Leatrice Joy) identified as “Lilith.”  Lilith deals the ace of hearts to Forrest, and announces that as a bonus for winning assassin blackjack, she will tie the knot with him.  Farallone is despondent at this news, but tries to keep his spirits up despite a bit of overacting.  Forrest, who’s been posing as a waiter at the restaurant where the target (Raymond Hatton) dines every day, will dispatch the filthy capitalist to The Great Beyond with a bomb device invented by the group’s chemist (Edwin Wallock).

Love, suffice it to say, has a way of changing people.  Lilith and Forrest, now wedded to one another, are starting to have second thoughts about carrying out their mission.  And the downcast Farallone will also be transformed by unrequited love into sacrificing himself on behalf of the couple.

The Ace of Hearts was the second of five films that “The Man of Thousand Faces,” Lon Chaney, made for Sam Goldwyn in the period between his contracts at Universal and MGM.  It’s considered second-tier Chaney, but despite its melodramatic elements I’ve always found it to be an entertaining picture.  It’s an early example of what would be recurring themes in most of the actor’s movies—unrequited love and self-sacrifice—plus it’s interesting to note that Lon doesn’t need elaborate makeup to play his character (he wears only a wig of long hair, to suggest that Farallone is an artist).  With the exception of The Penalty (1920)—which I’ll confess I enjoy a lot more because of its macabre elements—Hearts is the only one of the Goldwyn Pictures productions to survive: the other three presentations—For Those We Love (1921), Voices of the City (1921) and A Blind Bargain (1922)—are lost films.

The Penalty was directed by Wallace Worsley and scripted by Gouverneur Morris (based on his novel); both men would re-team with Chaney to make Hearts, and in fact Worsley worked with Lon on three other pictures, including the actor’s classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923).  In an audio commentary for the DVD presentation of Hearts—available on the TCM Archives set The Lon Chaney Collection—makeup artist and Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake explains that producer Sam Goldwyn wasn’t able to rely on a bevy of big motion picture stars at Goldwyn Pictures because of economics, and often had to sign performers to minimal three- or four-picture contracts (that was the case with co-star Leatrice Joy, who left Goldwyn after this film to become Cecil B. DeMille’s female star over at Paramount).  Instead, Goldwyn would keep top scriptwriters like Morris around, believing that the public would go to see movies with strong stories rather than just stars.

Ace of Hearts is pretty short-and-sweet (it runs about an hour and fifteen minutes) but it tells a cracking good tale and has some nice moments of suspense.  It also demonstrates why I’ve long believed that Lon Chaney was one of the greatest actors of both the silent and sound eras (though he was only able to make one talkie); he certainly was one of the most expressive, and I never cease to be fascinated by how he’s able to use body language and gestures to convey what’s inside his character—qualities that Blake speculates were a necessity since both of Chaney’s parents were deaf and mute.  (I won’t deny that there are a couple of occasions in this movie where Chaney goes a little overboard by hamming it up a little; a stronger director than Worsley might have had him tone it down a tad.)

If there’s a flaw in Hearts, it’s that there’s a plot point toward the end that doesn’t make much sense (I’ll keep mum about it for those of you who haven’t seen the film)—but I’ve never let it interfere with my enjoyment of the movie, since I maintain that even the weakest of Chaney films is far and away better than most of the material cranked out today.  Because of the movie’s brevity, you might want to think about pairing it with The Penalty—a swell double feature for that upcoming silent Sunday night.

At my house, “app” stands for appetizer

Back in October, I received an e-mail from Shannon Clute, a senior media manager at The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™, who informed me that Thrilling Days of Yesteryear would be one of several blogs featured in TCM’s new multi-platform app that was due to launch in November.  Those of you with an iPhone/Android phone or an iPad—and a cable company that carries Tee Cee Em—may be already familiar with this nifty little feature: it allows you to live-stream the channel as well as access nearly 300 classic flicks on demand…not to mention the usual goodies like clips, images, trailers and a whole lot more.

My Twitter compadre Will McKinley has a nice post about this over at his Cinematically Insane blog, where he mentions a couple of Classic Movie Blog Association members that were selected for the TCM Blog Reader like Once Upon a Screen and The Classic Film and TV Café.  I don’t know all of the blogs that are accessible in the Reader because I’m pretty much a Luddite when it comes to that kind of cell phone thing (we still have a rotary phone at Rancho Yesteryear, and depend on Sarah to make outgoing calls) but the Café’s own Rick29 has told me that Silver Screen Modiste got the tap, and Facebook chum Tony Dayoub clued me in that such august sites as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule (Dennis Cozzalio), Some Came Running (Glenn Kenny) and Shadowplay (dcairns) have also been included.

Suffice it to say, I am positively gobsmacked to be present in such esteemed blogosphere company.  You’ll have to excuse my embarrassment since I’m not used to this kind of respectability—does this mean I have to start wearing a tie?  (And I sincerely hope that the number of blogs available with this app increases soon, because there are so many good ones out there.)  All seriousness aside, for those of you now eavesdropping on TDOY with this new toy…welcome aboard.  We’re glad you made it!