I’m pretty sure next month’s screening of Father Was a Loafer (1915) will be the first time Alice Howell’s Cupie-doll face will hit the big screen at the Pordenone Silent film festival.
The Pordenone Silent Film Festival (or the Giornate del Cinema Muto) is the premier international silent film festival, and has been around since 1982. It is an annual gathering of fans, scholars and archivists in the town of Pordenone, in the Friuli region of Italy. There is live musical accompaniment for every screening, performed and either improvised or pre-composed by a stable of many of the world’s best film composers and accompanists, and there’s everything from a solo piano to full orchestra.
For this year’s festival my friends Steve Massa and Uli Ruedel have curated a series of programs that are, as the kids say today, Chaplin-adjacent. The series is called “Six Degrees of Chaplin” and it showcases films starring a variety of comedians who were Chaplin impersonators, Chaplin-inspired, or were Charlie’s half-brother Sydney.
One of the comedians featured is a man named Billie Ritchie, who was part of the Fred Karno Company, England’s top physical comedy troupe in the early 20th century. Ritchie’s fellow Karno-ites include Charlie Chaplin, Stan Jefferson (better known to you as Stan Laurel), Jimmy Aubrey, Billie Reeves, Syd Chaplin, Eric Campbell, Albert, Austin, etc. Although Ritchie is often referred to as a Chaplin imitator, to me he is more of a fellow Karno troupe member who was wearing the same costume that Chaplin did. And I have a suspicion that this get-up was for a stock character that different comedians in the company did different things with and brought their own take to. Chaplin and Ritchie wore almost the exact same costume and mustache, but Ritchie found disgruntlement and despicableness where Charlie leaned into joy and, gradually sweetness.
In 2018, I Kickstarted and produced a two disc DVD set of comedy shorts starring Alice Howell, which Steve co-curated with me and which was released on my Undercrank Productions as a 2-disc set.. Howell starred in comedy shorts from 1915 to 1925, starting out at Keystone, then moving over to L-KO, then to Century Comedies (a unit formed for her by the Stern Brothers), and then winding up at Universal. One of the shorts on our DVD set is from her L-KO period. Billie Ritchie is the star of the short, but Alice – both as a screen clown and in her character – gives Ritchie a run for his money in terms of physical comedy business.
On Monday October 6 at 11:30am GCM festival-goers will be treated to Father Was a Loafer (1915) starring Billy Ritchie and Alice Howell and directed by Henry Lehrman, as part of one of Steve and Uli’s “Six Degrees” selections. The film is one of the highlights of our Alice Howell DVD set, and Undercrank Productions has provided 2K DCP of the restoration we did for the Pordenone festival screening.
The film element is a 35mm in the collection of the Library of Congress, a print they’d purchased from the British Film Institute (BFI). Thad Komorowski of Cineaste Restoration did the digital restoration work on it, and Sydney Perkins recreated authentic L-KO titles, working from the foreign language ones that survived in the BFI’s print. If you backed our project, you can take satisfaction in knowing that something you helped fund in being produced for home video is now hitting the big screen at the Giornate Del Cinema Muto. I’m sure this is going to put a smile on the faces of many Alice Howell fans, not the least of which is her grandson, George Stevens, Jr., founder of the American Film Institute and creator of the AFI Life Achievement Award and the Kennedy Center Honors.
Our Alice Howell DVD set is available through most online retailers, such as DeepDiscount, Movies Unlimited, Critics’ Choice, Amazon, and Wow HD (for international fans). Click or tap the DVD cover image below for buying links.
