In the early days, film's ability to capture a choice performance through trial and repetition, naturally made it slapstick's fiefdom. The cinema's first comic superstar, France's Max Linder, is who determined that the dancing gymnastics of the Music Hall were too trite and predictable for film. Repeated viewings of a practiced tumbler simply grew stale. A new body language was needed, directed past the camera's eye to the audience, but yet un-telegraphed.
A movie camera, unable to redirect its own attention, had to be esoterically drawn into the action by the performer in front of the lens. Linder deduced – astutely – that audiences watched stage-shows with acquired expectations; acrobats were present to be acrobatic, jugglers to juggle, dancers to dance. But action on film, audiences witnessed viscerally, as if driving cautiously down an unfamiliar street.
The motion picture's power lay in its connectedness to the viewer's emotions, not his expectations. He so began to augment gags with a "raison de vivre," rather than merely include them ad hoc, for their own sake. Every varied bumble, pratfall and exaggeration suddenly each played a role toward advancing a plot. It was the spawn of cinematic comic-pathos.
Linder's experimentation came to full artistic fruition in the hands of Chaplin, who only much later acknowledged the influence of his French predecessor.
Buster Keaton, despite growing up as part of the most violent attraction in Vaudeville – The Three Keatons – also had a mentor he'd credit copiously throughout his life: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Though Buster had achieved leading-role stardom on Broadway – which he abandoned for the call of fledgling Hollywood – he began his film career as Fatty's protégé.
Arbuckle, despite a rotund physique that undoubtably increased his risk of injury, had a commanding confidence, and a remarkable awareness of his own body. Pain-promising trips like a 15-foot drop through a flimsy rooftop, onto a bare metal spring bed frame, did not intimidate him. His unique size and shape made him near-impossible to find stunt-doubles for, anyway. He took in passing the potentially gory aspect of screen comedy... and passed that fearless enthusiasm on to Buster.
A typical Arbuckle stunt might be a "casual" leap onto a moving boxcar, then lighting a cigar by striking his match against another boxcar on a parallel track, going the opposite direction – all in one fluid motion, with no regard upon his cherubic face for the peril. A mere inch of miscalculation might result in a ragged, bloody stump on the end of Fatty's wrist; sure death out in a desolate railroad yard, miles from medical help. When Arbuckle faced a gag that gave even him pause, he'd suit up Buster in a padded shirt and trousers, and film it in longshot!
Buster absorbed everything taught him, and then got from Fatty a favor that was transformational. Arbuckle – his own producer and contractual "owner" of his films – gifted one of his movie cameras to Keaton, to be dissected, studied, and demystified to satisfaction. Keaton would merge his mastery of physical comedy with his acquired expertise of the camera's inner workings, and create comedies that were artistic revelations.
Chaplin too played with the camera's unique ability to misrepresent reality, but in ways more theatrical.
LET'S SEE THAT AGAIN...
One particular film, "Behind The Screen" (1916), stands out as a remarkable piece of discretely executed magic.
For a running-gag, Charlie repeatedly passes through an open door to be a hair's width from a falling axe – which sticks into the wooden floor at his feet, in disturbing proof of its realness. Further, in one instance he stops in his tracks upon what appears the doom-spot, so that the axe all but shaves off a microscopic layer of skin. The axe is wielded by a huge man waiting in ambush beyond the doorframe, who cannot possibly see Charlie's approach in order to gauge the swing.
This work fascinated film buffs for decades with its apparent painstaking composition and – no pun intended – execution. Did Charlie have someone offscreen, stage-directing him within a whisker-width of death's embrace? Was the huge ruffian possessed of preternatural timing in tune with Charlie's? Was Chaplin himself merely super-imposed into the scene with a surgeon's precision in the editing room?
There were over a dozen takes. In each, the axe misses Chaplin by a maiden's sigh. He doesn't so much as flinch. The first usable take would have been quite enough for any other actor, yet Charlie apparently needed several do-overs to "perfect" the gag, as if with a deathwish. And then made it a running-gag yet, with building nuance.
Found in Chaplin's archives, one specific outtake from this film revealed the secret. In the discarded shot, Charlie spies a hat on the floor, and flips it with the toe of his shoe, neatly up onto his head – a Vaudeville-101 stage trick. Only the hat comes to rest at the exact moment the axe misses Charlie's skull. Something seems odd.
The shot was keenly analyzed for the 1983 British television documentary "Unknown Chaplin," which sought what might be revealed about the master comedian by a study of his unused footage. Chaplin famously hoarded his mistakes, untrusting of even the studio incinerator after the completion of a production.
Rewinding the shot suddenly gave it a "natural" quality. In fact, it appeared a degree more fluid when spooled in reverse. That was Chaplin's "special effect." He'd rehearsed himself and his fellow actors to perform their actions backward, while the camera cranked forward... he then reversed the footage onto the moviola (the device with which film was edited in that very pre-digital era). When played forward, the scene projected in true reverse, which made the backward pantomime appear as – slightly awkward – forward motion.
The axeman wasn't clairvoyantly clocking Chaplin's entrance. The axe was swung upward, just before Charlie passed, backing through the door, to disappear beyond.
The hat trick had clued the documentarians. Played forward, to show the actors intentionally backward-reeling their movements, the axeman knocks the hat from Charlie's head. It tumbles to the floor. Charlie, thinking literally on his feet mid-take, catches the hat's rim with his toe – trusting that it would appear as a kick upward instead of a downward follow-through.
It still didn't look right in the editing room to Chaplin, so he shelved it, to be rediscovered 73 years later.
It only added to Chaplin's legend – for it also revealed the extent of his perfectionism. He'd worked out how to double-take, to react in his established Chaplinesque fashion, and time the comedy's perfect pay-off moment... backward.
While lessers, like Sennett's Fun Factory stunt comedians, merely pushed their athleticism to its limits for "bigger" laughs, Charlie Chaplin was applying scientific method to slapstick. It was a level above even "Keatonesque," for it was that, and "Chaplinesque" as well.
THE FRENCHMAN
Two world wars would pass before another comedian would have the artistic leverage to take even Chaplin's methods to a new level, by seemingly pulling them back to their roots.
Jacques Tati was France's greatest gift to comedy cinema, surpassing even Linder. His approach to slapstick – but one element in the repertoire of his iconic character Mr. Hulot – was to use it only when most poetically relevant. And even then, he served it like a thin, demure slice of pastry upon a lace doily.
Tati had experimented with broad slapstick in his earliest short films, but found it dissatisfying. He commenced to reinvent it, to in effect, send it to Charm School.
Tati's thin-brimmed hats and willowy long smoking pipe made him a funhouse mirror image of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb – and never was there a more strange yet apt metaphor. Not before or since, was there an equal of Jacques Tati; a lanky, childlike prince of innocence, on the order of Stan Laurel fed a diet of Wheaties and protein shakes – who also just happened to be a blithely oblivious Destroyer of Worlds.
Remarkable is Tati's perch in the cinema clown pantheon, considering his rather lean filmography. Only a cool half-dozen films represent Tati's presence in movie history – compared to the respective hundreds of works left by each of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Film critics have long held his 1953 outing "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" as his definitive work. Perhaps, but his 1958 film "Mon Onclé" has survived as his most comedically satisfying. A subtle response to Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936), it is a literal tour de force of everything magical, endearing and hilarious about Tati's genius.
"Mon Onclé" ("My Uncle") is the film that both Chaplin and Keaton witnessed, and proclaimed Tati their muse's heir. Tati spends most of the film channeling both ascended masters simultaneously.
Mr. Hulot, all but mute, is a gentle soul who accepts the world as he finds it (Chaplin), and whose comedic adventure derives from his well-meaning misinterpretation of life's machinations (Keaton).
Tati's "polite" slapstick often straddles the line into sight-gag.
In "Holiday," aboard a swiveling chair in a hotel cardroom, embroiled in a game and concentrating on the hand dealt him, Hulot is unaware that he has spun around to face an opposing table. Focused laser-like on his cards, he plays one in the wrong pot with such conviction that his flinging arm spins him back around to the proper table.
He looks up to discover the card he just cast has disappeared into the ether... meanwhile behind him, the other game has gone to hell, tempers flaring, at the appearance of a sudden mystery bet.
"Holiday's" signature sight-gag finds Hulot canoeing on the bay, and in a longshot, his canoe breaks in half – the two ends bend upward to devour him like the jaws of a prehistoric leviathan.
In "Onclé" Hulot stands motionless at the curb, waiting to walk his nephew home from school. He holds his umbrella unnaturally pointed outward. A slowly passing motorist sees the umbrella and assumes he is being alerted to a problem with his tire. Craning to get a better look, he slams into the car ahead of him. Hulot strolls blissfully away to greet the nephew, the motorist is left with jaw hanging.
Hulot was every bit the schlemiel as Jerry Lewis's kid, only a universe away from Yankee buffoonery. Tati's power was his effortless ability to inject complete innocence into a scene – like a heat-seeking missile that destroys its target utterly yet without awareness. Tati's target was usually life's absurdity and self-importance. "Mon Onclé," a young boy's adventures in the company of a lovably eccentric relative, is Tati's well-camouflaged manifesto against society's dehumanized addiction to progress. Much of its humor spawns from the disconnected antics of the boy's parents; their world handed over completely to "futuristic" time-saving gadgetry, they are in fact comically enslaved to their hi-tech toys.
This was 1958... a half-century before the my-phone-is-my-god generation.
It's nearly impossible to describe Tati's slapstick without discussing its cerebral – possibly even spiritual – implications. He may possibly have been the next evolutionary step past Chaplin, but history never officially bestowed the title upon him.
Like Chaplin and Keaton before, and concurrently Jerry Lewis, Tati's perfectionism was the true star. One of his later – lesser regarded – films, "Playtime" (1967), may represent one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of France, despite itself.
Twenty years past World War II, France was still shaking itself free of the social and emotional debris of Nazi occupation. Paris was hardly yet the sparkling metropolis that is shown onscreen in "Playtime." The gleaming silvery cityscape was entirely a gigantic film set, constructed specifically for Tati's motion picture. After production wrapped, the "highrises" were not demolished, but left in place, converted into actual offices and business fronts.
Not constructed for permanence, they deteriorated quickly, but as they did, were replaced with more solid structures that maintained a similar ambiance.
Jacques Tati, in filming "Playtime" with an auteur's obsession, tangentially helped spawn modern Paris.
FROM TRAMPS TO BEANS
But even Tati has a post-modern successor, who demonstrated and proved it in a film so Tatian, it is an indirect remake. "Mr. Bean's Holiday," (2007) starring Rowan Atkinson as the character he perfected on British television, echoes Mr. Hulot so perfectly that he mirrors the Chaplin/Keaton remix while even adding an indirect tribute to "Mon Onclé."
"Mr. Bean" is the current face of slapstick in the tradition of the classic cinema clowns. He is a walking rotoscope containing flashes of Chaplin, Keaton, Stan Laurel, Jerry Lewis, and Tati. The gelling agent is Atkinson himself – his own aura also distantly routes the journey through territory owned by the Goons, and the Monty Python troupe.
Like Larry Semon and Don Knotts, his natural features lend themselves to a comic persona. Atkinson looks like Dr. Suess drew him.
If Atkinson never makes another Mr. Bean film, "Bean's Holiday" is a magnificent stopping point; the character's crescendo appearance. The most blatant homages in the film seem a nod to Tati – such as Bean hitching a ride on a passing vehicle to launch his bicycle past a power-peddling cadre of racers, jing-jingling his bell at them as he wistfully leaves them in the dust.
Like Hulot, Bean's WMD is toxic innocence. Though occasionally giving in to bratty mischief, his heart is plagued by the need to correct the chaos wrought by his miscalculations. His comically over-thought solutions – the classic method of the great clowns – are a joy to watch, and rewatch.
Mr. Bean – and Rowan Atkinson – are material enough for a separate blog, and that's where we'll conclude this one.
Slapstick was the original screen comedy. It birthed the classic icons, who evolved the art at the cost of their bodies. The sound era pulled movie comedy into calmer waters, but a century later slapstick can still draw a belly laugh, or punctuate verbal humor in ways unexpected. Men seem to still possess a gene of unabashed love for this old art. Women roll their eyes like frustrated mothers at its childish pointlessness – while turning aside to sneak giggly snorts.
It was a language. Comedians who, in some cases, could not deliver punchlines onstage particularly well – like Keaton – somehow were beyond fluent with the erudition of precisely when to double-take, pause, slow-burn or time a fall.
Because the sublime antics of the Old Guard are ancient upon gray celluloid, many modern comedians consider themselves masters as well, but many of them have yet to display proof – though it's not for a lack of trying.
