Wednesday, January 02, 2008

1913. This was the year that was.  In Art, the “armory show” displayed the modern masters of cubism, impressionism, and fauvism in New York.  In Chicago, the mayor had a gallery owner cited for indecency for displaying a painting called “September Mom”, the mayor lost the case, a signifigant free speech victory for Art.

Stravinsky premiers “The Rite of Spring” in Paris to a total riot in the audience that is only partially quelled by police as of intermission. Fistfights, booing, and arguments between supporters and detractors drive Stravinsky from the theater in tears as Diaghliev and Nijinsky try unsuccessfully to quiet the crowd by flashing the lights on and off.  Niels Bohr publishes his quantum model of the atom, and the fastest plane in the world has a top speed of 45.75 mph/avg and wins the Schneider Air Racing cup.

Politically the world is an ugly place, and it is leading towards World War I. The Mexican Revolution happens, and results in the first ever air strike, directed against Pancho Villa.  In Turkey, there is a coup that puts the Ottoman Empire in charge.  Woodrow Wilson is President in the US, and ratifies the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution, establishing the Federal Income Tax.  In the Phillipines, US troops commit the Bud Bagsak massacre of approx. 2000 mostly unarmed Filipino “insurgents”.  In Panama, at last, with 55,000+ workers going like the blazes, the last levee is dynamited and the Panama canal is opened by President Wilson.

In film, Griffith finished his series of shorts for Biograph in New York City and left the company.  “Squaw Man” was released, regarded as the first Hollywood “Feature Length” Film.  Kinemacolor, the world’s first color photography system is invented and debuts.  On 12/29, Charlie Chaplin signs on to work for Mack Sennett studios.

In November, the Great Lakes Storm kills 250 people in the US and Ontario, Canada, and sinks 19 ships with 35ft waves and 90mph winds.  The worst disaster in Great Lakes history.

People needed a laugh, and a man named Mack Sennett was going to provide it.  On April 29, a film by Henry Lehrman was rolled out of Sennett’s studios, “The Bangville Police” the debut of “The Keystone Cops”, who would be joined very soon by the first giant of screen comedy, Fatty Arbuckle.  They would do dozens of films, and “slapstick” was brought from the musical hall theater and vaudeville circuit into movies.

Characterized by an EXTREMELY athletic, exaggeratedly animated, pantomime, slapstick was more clown than comedic.  In it’s infancy at the Sennett studios, it has one general subversive theme (as comedy requires), the mocking of authority, and then really a series of “sight gags”, as well as every transit movement littered with pratfalls and spinning, tractionless, high legged running.

The Bangville Police (1913) begins with a farm girl milking a cow and dreaming of a new calf.  “If we only hadda little calf daddy!” is the first intertitle.  The girl leaves and her father sneaks into the barn to plot with another man.  The girl returns and mistakes the silhouetted figures for burglars with ill intent.  She rushes inside the house, calls the police.  The Police are alerted by phone and awakened by pistol, a posse forms and some by foot and the chief by car (a car so rickety that it breaks down, fires off backfires that blow holes in the earth, and eventually it just blows up!) rush to the house.  The mother has come home and as she tries to enter, the girl, thinking she is a burglar slams the door on her, pushing her out on her kiester.  Now mother thinks the girl is a burglar and gets father with his pistol who pushes past the barricades the girl throws up on the door.  Once inside he shoots at her as she hides in the closet, she comes out and they realize the mistake.  The police show up and the “mistaken identity gag” is repeated.  Then, they all proceed to stalk the “burglars” to the barn where a new calf is discovered.  The chief is mad, everyone else is happy.

Aside from the car gags, this is, only a so-so effort.  The makeup is amazingly heavy, the pantomime is ridiculous, but it IS a start.  However, there is cross cutting from character to character, especially in phone conversations.  There is also the “run-into-camera/run-out-from-behind-camera” technique, and multiple story lines, in other words, parallel cutting. No jump cuts either, except from film defects.

The Speed Kings (1913) by Wilfrid Lucas, is a tale of jealousy and hysterics (in a medical sense I think!).  Papa and his darling daughter are at the auto races.  Papa likes Earl Cooper the Speed Demon, Mabel likes Teddy Tetzlaff the Speed King.  When Tetzlaff appears, Mabel runs to him and begins a very animated flirtation.  Papa decides to sabotage the car in reprisal. The Race happens, zoom, and papa gets in a fight with a track official over Mabels trackside flirtings.  Tetzlaff’s car fails and Cooper wins. Now Mabel likes Cooper best, until Papa offers her hand in marriage to him.  Then Mabel runs off with Tetzlaff, as papa pursues he once again gets in a brannigan with the track official, played by one Fatty Arbuckle, and it is really quite a brawl, Very Funny!

This is a very linear story, with no exceptional tricks, lots of racecars zooming by, into and out of the camera, some pans, and some tilts of the camera, pretty plain.  Really probably sold on the presence of the real life race car drivers.

Fatty joins the Force (1913) by George Nichols. Again, a Sennett film. The two great tastes are going to go great together, and they do.  We begin our story in the park with Fatty and his girl.  A cop sneers at them and looks down on Fatty, then goes and sits with a young attractive mother, and starts “making time with her”.  The kid walks along the edge of an artificial lake and falls in.  Fatty and his girl see this, and the girl physically pushes Fatty to the rescue, right into the lake!  The child turns out to be the Commisioners kid, so he makes Fatty the “hero” a cop.  As a cop, Fatty gets knocked out trying to break up a cop, then pelted with fruit, then a pie in the face from a kid. This COULD be the first EVER pie in the face.  To clean up, Fatty strips out of his uniform and swims in the lake, only to have his coat stolen and his clothes shredded by the rotten kids.  The coat is found and turned in, and the cops, thinking Fatty drowned, mourn heavily.  Fatty, meanwhile is running for cover in his shredded pants, and the cops, who are going through histrionics dragging the lake, sinking the boat, falling out, etc. mistake him for a crazy pervert and capture him.  He is dragged kicking and screaming to the station, where his grieving girl and angry chief throw him in jail.

This is actually a pretty good little flick, pretty funny, and sold almost totally by Arbuckle’s physical talents.  He takes a fall-neck-roll the same way Keaton (an Arbuckle protégé) later does, with legs straight up in the air, standing on neck cocked to the side.  Here again are multiple stories, cross cutting, and parallel editing.  The funeral and the pursuit of shredded clothes Fatty occurring at the same time.

Slapstick is born, and Fatty Arbuckle is fast becoming a HUGE star.  But at the end of the year, another light is lit, from “across the pond” comes Charles Chaplin, and nothing will ever be the same again.  And also coming from across the pond are the winds of the First World War.

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