The Silent Clowns – Walter Kerr, 1975 ★★★★

Flickers of Glory

Greatness has a habit of arranging itself in sets of three. From the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to Willie, Mickey, and the Duke, it seems atavistic. Not sure if it’s safe to count the U. S. government anymore, but there are three branches of that, too.

Three also rule the world of silent film comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. In The Silent Clowns, legendary culture pundit Walter Kerr explains why the trio came to dominate in a way that still resonates decades after sound and punchlines took over.

The Silent Clowns begins with a quote from a silent star who was not a clown, Mary Pickford: “It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way round.”

To Kerr, there is a lot of truth in that suggestion of de-evolution. As he puts it: “Serious film lost nothing with the coming of sound. Comedy lost, or changed, its character completely.”

A champion of what he terms “the realm of factual fantasy that was silent film comedy’s distinctive vein,” Kerr’s focus here is not so much on the laughter (though he doesn’t discount that) so much as how the camera became a unique fulcrum to view life comedically, a way to both capture and warp reality that sound film doesn’t allow.

He explains:

…you mustn’t falsify what is in front of the camera; but you are free to select what is to be photographed, and to decide how it is to be photographed. The camera is an eye, and you are at liberty to squint or blink or do whatever you might do with your own eye. Just don’t lie about what you finally see.

In this case, he is writing about Buster Keaton, who took second honors to no one when it came to camera tricks or stunt work, elements Kerr prizes highly in evaluating the wheat from the chaff in silent comedy.

Buster Keaton slides into immortality in Steamboat Bill Jr. Kerr notes how a real-life boyhood experience surviving a tornado inspired one of the most majestic comic sequences on film. Image from https://www.hurlbutacademy.com/remembering-buster-keaton/.

If Kerr rates Keaton below Charlie Chaplin, and he does, it is no blot on Buster, but rather acknowledgment of one who dared to mix profundity and pathos and pulled it off by being funnier than anyone else.

In his first feature-length film, 1921’s The Kid, Chaplin gambled his career on naked sentiment, the ruin of many screen comics to come. His famous vagabond character, “the Tramp,” is walking through a back alley where slum-dwellers hurl trash at him. Suddenly he discovers an abandoned infant crying at his feet. The tramp’s eyes register surprise, and something more, a sense of empathy for this impending tragedy.

Then, without missing a beat, he gets his laugh by looking up, as if to see who threw that at him. Kerr notes this as a critical marker in Chaplin’s career, what he calls “making seriousness funny:”

The comedian has hit upon the trick – it is more than a trick, it is a philosophical premise for dimensional comedy – of permitting us to see and to feel what is realistically distressing about life through the magnifying glass, and only through the magnifying glass, of humor.

Before Chaplin, there was Max Linder, an inventive comic who Kerr notes was the first famous screen comedian. Chaplin was one of many who took notes from this supremely silly Frenchman, though much of Linder's work is now lost. Image from https://www.screenslate.com/features/1045.

Kerr devotes a lot of pages on Chaplin; you get the feeling it was personal for him. His hero had been through a lot: the coming of sound, charges of anti-Americanism, messy divorces, and by the 1970s some scholarly pushback on how great Chaplin really was.

Kerr acknowledges a strain of sentimentality in Chaplin’s work that sometimes creeps into bathos. Chaplin was also given to having his character act out his happiness in dance, something which Kerr admits worked better in smaller doses than Chaplin thought. But Chaplin made comedy matter when it came to connecting with the camera.

It happened very early, in his second-ever film, Kid Auto Races At Venice, in which the Tramp made his first public appearance as a bystander at a children’s soap-box derby. He keeps jumping in front of the camera as if to say: “Never mind those brats, look at me!”

Audiences laughed uproariously at the six-minute spectacle, the way the young Brit called attention to the camera by calling attention to himself. Chaplin was off and running: “If what you are doing is funny, you don’t have to be funny doing it,” he would say.

Chaplin won't be ignored in his first star turn, as an interloper in the gag newsreel Kid Auto Races At Venice. The crowd's total attention to this Tramp in their midst is noteworthy given Chaplin was unknown when this was filmed. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chaplin_Kid_Auto_Races.jp.

Keystone Studios, which made Kid Auto Races and 35 other Chaplin films in 1914, was the springboard for silent comedy stars: Mabel Normand, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, Ben Turpin, Marie Dressler, and Raymond Griffith all cut their teeth there. It also had the Keystone Cops, a name that still registers with many.

But Kerr has little use for the gaggy, slapstick ways of Keystone. He calls its founder, Mack Sennett, a “carpenter” rather than a king of comedy: “He built the house. It is hard now to believe that he ever entertained friends in it.”

Kerr understands and appreciates the rougher side of silent comedy. But the man was a snob, and I found his contempt for comics who focused mostly on laughter a source of steady if minor annoyance.

Fatty Arbuckle was one of silent comedy’s biggest stars, a surprisingly acrobatic fat man who invented a lot of gags and brought Buster Keaton into the business as his partner with a series of popular shorts. But he was a compulsive gag comic and thus earns Kerr’s scorn:

He was, I think, one of the “lucky” ones whose simple physical outlines established him swiftly and archetypically in the public mind when films were new and the identities of those appearing in them dreamlike and godlike. He was loved not so much for what he did as for what he looked like.

Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle in the last of several popular shorts the pair made together, The Garage (1919). Kerr notes Arbuckle's unusual willingness to cede the spotlight to Keaton and help him on his way. The two made a great pair. Image from https://silentfilm.org/fatty-buster-the-comique-world-of-fatty-arbuckle-and-buster-keaton/.

Kerr puts “lucky” in quotation marks as Arbuckle was ruined by one of the first major Hollywood scandals when he was accused – and resoundingly acquitted – of raping a woman to death in 1921. Still, he seems to regard Fatty as walking punchline, and not an acrobatic and inventive marvel whose work can still astound today.

Kerr’s hard gaze is a bit softer with Harold Lloyd, the third member of silent comedy’s power troika. Kerr clearly regards Lloyd as the least of the three; his famous do-good all-American character with his trademark glasses is a trifle too capitalistic, even plutophilic, for Kerr’s liking.

But Kerr won’t discount the man behind silent comedy’s most iconic image, in Safety Last when Lloyd held onto the minute hand of a clock while suspended some 20 stories over a city street. And Kerr notes Lloyd’s gift for subtler stuff, too, like developing a character that dared to be more normal than anyone else:

Starting off with no true gift for inventing any other persona, no lucky insight that would give him instant mythological status; straining this way and that to ape or approximate or invert other men’s work; putting his intelligence to the task of learning, and keeping at it even when he was himself filled with dismay, he arrived at the one character he was qualified to play, the one image he could adopt with complete integrity: his own.

Harold Lloyd gets ready for some more hanging around on the set of Safety Last. Kerr notes there were mattresses strategically placed out of camera range, but mattresses can be bouncy, too. Image from https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2821-up-in-the-air-with-harold-lloyd-and-his-followers.

Lloyd was also the most successful silent comedian commercially, Kerr points out. Though he started later than Chaplin or Keaton, he was more prolific than Charlie and more beloved than Buster. Stunt work was part of it; so was Lloyd’s ability to connect emotionally with audiences in films like Grandma’s Boy (1922) and The Freshman (1925).

For a time, a fourth comic, Harry Langdon, vied for the big time, finding it in a series of popular comedies Kerr praises as unfairly forgotten classics. In 1926’s Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, Langdon gets his sweater stuck in a fence overlooking a steep drop. Kerr sets the scene:

What he hasn’t noticed is that he is now suspended hundreds of feet directly above a highway teeming with traffic. He goes right on working to free himself for the fall. The sequence is a very funny one. But its existence depends on Mr. Langdon having no ears. Highways are noisy.

This is another example of the factual fantasy of silent comedy Kerr likes to tout: Hearing can kill a good joke. The same principle works in Buster Keaton’s 1924’s The Navigator where Buster and Kathryn McGuire run around the decks of an adrift ship barely aware of each other. In a sound film, Kerr notes the joke of them just missing each other wouldn’t quite work; they could hear each other coming. Here the synchronicity is perfect.

Mabel Normand was one of the first silent comedy stars, directing and co-starring with Charlie Chaplin in his early days at Keystone. As with slapstick, Kerr is not a fan of female comic leads: "Comediennes, from Mabel Normand all the way to Marion Davies, labored under an instant handicap: they had to be pretty." Image from https://www.rapidrivermagazine.com/2014/mabel-normand-film-comedy-pioneer-finally-getting-her-due/.

Sound would be the downfall of many silent clowns. Keaton had a gravelly voice. Lloyd’s voice was fine, but now when he climbed skyscrapers, in 1930’s Feet First, you heard him grunt and cry for help.

“In the silent Safety Last there is really no time for grunting: Lloyd is too busy, too much of life’s inch-by-inch passage through space has been elided,” Kerr writes. “Here there is time to get a new hand grip, painfully, to call out in despair, whimperingly.”

Kerr does a great deal of analysis; most of the time he’s engaging and illuminating if a bit windy. His writing on Keaton is first-rate, and, as with Chaplin, focuses equally on his feature films and shorts. Keaton’s uniqueness, Kerr writes, was an extension of a baseline principal of factual fantasy: “The world has holes in it. Just find them.”

Though more impressionistic and subjective an overview than some might like, The Silent Clowns is a winner for the way it dares to seek, and often find, deeper truths amid the pratfalls and slow burns these pioneers so deftly employed. Their candle flickered but briefly, but Kerr does fine work here to keep it alight.