Category: Silent Comedy Film History
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Revisiting the Films of John Bunny
John Bunny enjoyed a popularity in his day that has evaporated with time. To some extent that process began right at the end of his screen career. The mid-‘teens saw the rise of slapstick in the manic Keystone comedies and those of Charlie Chaplin and others. The polite social, situational comedies Bunny was making in…
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Let’s Hear It For Alice Howell
Mabel Normand had a head start. I’ll give you that. Her association with Mack Sennett and with Roscoe Arbuckle has put her name in the consciousness of those with only a passing awareness of silent film. The Jerry Herman musical “Mack and Mabel” didn’t hurt either. Alice Howell, on the other hand, has pretty much…
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Charley Chase Takes a Trip
The rehearsals and performance of my orchestral score for the Charley Chase short “Dog Shy” in February were probably the first time I’d watched the film several times in a while. My participation in the NYC Physical Comedy Lab in the time that has passed since the score premiered three years ago is probably why…
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Remembering Diana Serra Cary
I never got to meet Diana Serra Cary, but I did have a couple of phone conversations with her. This was while I was producing the DVD release of one of her feature films, The Family Secret (1925). She passed away this past Monday, February 24, and I wanted to share a couple things she…
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“Rediscovering Roscoe”: Arbuckle Made More Films Than You Think
We classic film fans typically own several “The Films of…” books that cover the careers of important stars or directors. Unavailable for our shelves has been a “films of” entry for one of the main comedians of the silent era who, like Chaplin and Keaton, was both star and director. This has now been corrected,…
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Douglas MacLean-Spotting Around the Ince Lot
Owners of Blackhawk Films 16mm and 8mm prints of “A Tour of the Thomas Ince Studios” probably had no idea why the smiling gentleman, seen racing to the studio in one segment, keeps popping up throughout the film. His is not a familiar face to silent film fans, so why all the cameos? Douglas MacLean…
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Enjoying Douglas MacLean – It’s Not Just Me
On Tuesday night I rolled the dice and presented yet another obscure, unknown silent comedy film I’d taken a liking to at a show I was accompanying. Sure, I liked the wacky adventures and Fairbanksian enthusiasm of Douglas MacLean in Bell Boy 13, but would the audience? It was very satisfying to me that within…
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Bob Hoskins and “Musty Suffer”
I first saw one of the “Mishaps of Musty Suffer” at the annual, now-defunct Slapsticon festival. I assumed it was another obscure comedy shorts series no one knew about. I found out later that some of these had aired on PBS in the early 1980s. Really? Out of all the public domain silent comedy one-reelers…
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Revisiting What Goes Last on a Laurel & Hardy Silents Show
Running a group of shorts in chronological order at a show isn’t always ideal. For a film class where you’re looking to present a segment of a body of one comedian’s work in the order in which is made, then perhaps yes. For a show, though, you want a progression. You can almost follow the…