Mr. Flip (1909)

May 12, 1909—perhaps the most significant date in the history of American motion pictures. Well, comedy pictures, anyway. Okay, silent comedy. Silent slapstick comedy.

What happened? And how long can I stretch the suspense? Not much longer. I sense some annoyance in you already.

May 12, 1909, was the release date of a farce called Mr. Flip, which starred the gentleman pictured above, Ben Turpin. It was directed by Gilbert M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson and produced by The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company.

Star Turpin wasn’t yet the household name he would be a decade later with his one and two reel send-ups of feature dramas for Mac Sennett (The Shriek of Araby, Uncle Tom Without a Cabin, etc.) A former tramp and burlesque comic, the 40-year old Turpin would become famous for his permanently crossed eyes and walrus mustache. Mr. Flip was his 14th film and one of 11 he made in 1909.

And the four minute film is important because … ? Well, see for yourself.

Mr. Flip is one of those aggravating men who think they are far more charming that the law should allow. He flows from scene to scene wearing a snappy boater, high collar, oversized boutonneire, and Groucho-esque mustache. He can’t keep his hands off any woman he meets, constantly tapping their shoulders as if in an everlasting game of tag. Sometimes, he even moves in for a cuddle or a kiss.

His first victim is a lady store clerk. He sees her, tips his hat, and immediately begins to harass her. She is finally rescued by a male employee who swoops through pushing a dolly, with which he scoops up the offending Flip and carts him away. Yes, this is the first movie in which someone is Flipped off, but there’s more to it than that.

The would-be ladies’ man then visists a manicurist and gives her the same treatment. This time, when she stands up, he does likewise and leaning over the table, clasps her in an uninvited embrace and starts kissing her. While he is upright, the second manicurist forces some pointed scissors up through the came seat of his chair, and when he goes to sit down he receives a butt-punture. He rushes away leaving the two women in gales of laughter.

Next, he torments a telephone operator. When she reacts in anger, he tries to sooth her by stepping away and into a phone booth. Notice the gaff when at one point his elbow passes through the glassless window in the booth’s door. To get her revenge, the operator begins pushing a button under her console, apparently sending electrical shocks into Flip.

The fourth victim is a lady barber, who receives the same business as have the first three women. She finally gets a sister-barber to hold Flip in his chair while his face is covered in lather and soapy brushes are shoved into his mouth.

The penultimate gal to suffer through Flip’s caveman act is a lady bartender. She and the other distaff gin slinger on duty, along with a male toper standing by, spritz Flip with seltzer and chase him away.

By now, Mr. Flip has become an unexpectedly strong feminist statement. Women are store clerks, barbers and bartenders, occupations many of us today would not have considered employments for Edwardian ladies. Seeing them outwit and conquer their harasser, usually without male assistance, is also surprising. Even when men step in to help, it isn’t because the women appear to need them.

Flip’s last stop of the day is a lunch counter, where the counter girl reacts to him as if he were an octopus. Finally, she reaches down and picks up—

Do you see it coming?

—a pie which she pushes and grinds into his face.

And that is the first pie-in-the-face gag in American silent film slapstick.

Salud!

Putting Pants on Philip (1927)

The first dialogue card in Putting Pants on Philip informs us that we are about to see “The story of a Scotch lad who came to America to hunt for a Columbian half-dollar -- his grandfather lost it in 1893,” but that’s not what the film is really about. Yes, Stan Laurel is Philip, fresh off the ship from Scotland, but the printed narration is a diversion. The real joke is Philip’s kilt. You’ll be relieved to know that he does sport underwear beneath. We know because at one point, he loses them.

This two-reel farce has frequently been billed as the first Laurel and Hardy picture, but that’s misleading, too. They’d appeared in over a dozen shorts together by the time this one was shot. If anything, PPOP is the first time they were beginning to develop the characters we know as The Boys. We see the famous nitwit duo here only in flashes. There are times when we can actually see them thinking. Stanley is much more aggressive in the film, and Ollie is more dapper and capable of living in the real world.

But is this the real world? The street scenes, of which there are plenty, look like a mid-sized, middle class area of Los Angeles or one of its near neighbors, but if Philip has just arrived by ocean liner from Scotland, he wouldn’t be docking on the west coast.

Of course, no subliminal message was intended by the filmmakers--it’s just the usual marriage of convenience and economics—but it presages the moments of mini-surrealism for which Laurel’s gags would become famous.

We open on the Hon. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Hardy), who is waiting on the docks to meet his sister’s son, Philip, arriving from Scotland. We see that sis has sent a letter by way of introduction and she warns her brother (hereafter called Hardy because if I have to type Mumblethunder too many times I may just forget the whole thing) that Philip (Laurel) has but one weakness—women.

Philip disembarks with another Scotsman, and the ship's doctor (an uncredited Sam Lufkin) insists on giving him a quick physical. As the doc probes and gropes him and tries to search his hair for lice or worms, the crowd on the pier begins giggling. This crowd includes Hardy who, despite the fact that he knows he’s meeting a Scot and Laurel is wearing a kilt, pities the poor sucker who's stuck with meeting his nitwit. Ollie's slow realization who the sucker is, is vintage Oliver Hardy.

Other than the kilt, there is no joke in their appearance. Hardy is in a natty sports coat and boater. Laurel is wearing a tam, but both of them have clothes that are clean and well-fitted, unlike the tight suits that Hardy will later adopt.

Pulling his nephew away from the chortling crowd, Hardy asks Laurel what he wants to do, when SHE (Dorothy Coburn, uncredited) walks by—and She is a leggy flapper with bobbed hair and a pert attitude. Laurel, instantly smitten, delivers the first of many scissor-jumps and Hardy has to grab him to keep him from pursuing her.

Walking down the street, Hardy insists that Laurel stays several steps behind him as he is an influential citizen and he doesn't want anyone to see him strolling along with a man in what looks like a dress. Every time Laurel catches up to him, he links arms with his uncle and the following crowd erupts in laughter. When Hardy asks a cop for help in keeping the crowd from ridiculing them, the cop laughs, too.

Then She passes by again, up jumps Laurel, and the chase is on. This time it ends with a slightly larger crowd gathered in the middle of the street.

Hardy drags Philip away again, and as Laurel walks over an air vent in the sidewalk, his kilt flies up (a la Monroe in The Seven Year Itch). This happens a couple of times before Hardy moves him away from the vent. Laurel then decides to take a sniff of snuff and when he sneezes, his drawers, unnoticed by anyone, fall down. Cut to the crowd. We can't see what happens to Laurel and his kilt, but several women pass out or move away in horror. Note that this action takes place in front of what I assume is a pub called "The Pink Pup." The boys could be risqué when it suited them. And it suited them more often than you may remember.

A passing stranger retrieves Laurel’s underwear—how times have changed—She returns, another scissor jump, more pursuit.

Hardy has had enough and he takes Laurel to a tailor to get him fitted for trousers. There is some foolery with measuring the inseam, with Laurel's reactions becoming more exaggerated each time. As the tailor (Harvey Clark, uncredited) becomes more and more frustrated, Hardy offers to help. Eventually, all three of them wind up rolling around on the floor.

Getting serious, Hardy removes his coat and follows Laurel through some curtains hanging in a doorway. He chases Laurel back and forth, the doorway being used as a frame for their action. Finally, Hardy emerges disheveled. His vest is pulled up and he has to straighten it.

Then Laurel emerges, also mussed up. His tie is loosened. Here Laurel indulges in some superb silent face acting. You can see his despair as his uncle has "undone" him. He has been seduced and betrayed. Laurel sits on a chair screen left, and Hardy stands beside him on his left. Their attitudes and expressions superbly parody melodrama of the she-is-more-to-be-pitied-than-censored variety.

The tailor brings them the pants, and Laurel goes into a dressing room to put them on. He sees HER legs pass by (he can see out a basement window at eye level), and he goes after her, still in kilt.

Once more, uncle, nephew and She end up together on the sidewalk. She has tried to slip unnoticed past the two men. She does get by them and when Laurel attempts pursuit once more, Hardy grabs him and, in an attempt to sooth his nephew's passion, asks him if he wants to meet the girl.

Yes.

Hardy strolls over to her as only he can stroll, and in that overly polite manner with which we will become familiar, is chatting her up when she thumps his nose and walks away. She marches to the place where the sidewalk meets the street at an intersection. There is a large puddle in the street. Laurel rushes over to her, takes off his kilt and spreads it over the puddle. "An old Scottish custom," he tells her. She makes a quick leap over the kilt and puddle and we cut to her on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. She performs a scissor-jump, and walks away laughing.

Hardy comes up to Laurel, chortling. When Laurel bends to pick up his kilt, Hardy stops him with one of his grandiose gestures and indicates that he will go first. "An old American custom," he says. When he steps on the kilt, we see that it covered a waist-deep pit and Hardy goes completely under before re-emerging, soaked to the skin top to bottom. As he stands in the pit, chastened, a crowd comes running over, this time to laugh at him.

He has become what he least wanted to become.

The film’s pace is brisk and the jokes run the gamut from the expected to the oddball. Clyde Bruckman directs with a sure hand. Now remembered only by aficionados of early comedy, Bruckman was once at the forefront of screen farce. He worked again with Laurel and Hardy on Battle of the Century, and with W.C. Fields on The Man on the Flying Trapeze and The Fatal Glass of Beer. He’s the credited co-director with Buster Keaton of The General, and he made three talkies with Harold Lloyd. The end was not kind. In 1955, after eating a restaurant meal that he couldn't pay for, he shot himself with a gun he’d borrowed from Keaton.

This film’s supervising director was Leo McCarey, who would win two directing Oscars. It was photographed by George Stevens, who would also go on to claim two Oscars for directing, and the intertitles were written by H.M. (Harley M. “Beany”) Walker, who wrote stories, titles and dialogue for 309 pictures.

Film historian William K. Everson once listed what each of the great movie clowns was best at, and he wrote that what The Boys did best was deliver more laughs per reel than anyone else. No sentimentalizing, no intellectualizing—just funny. This is where it started, folks. This one’ll kilt ya.

City Girl (1930)

                                      
                                                       
One of the least interesting (and most mainstream) of F.W. Murnau’s films is this one about a poor but honest wheat farmer from Minnesota who goes to the Big City (Chicago) to sell the family's wheat crop. Lem Tustine (Charles Farrell) has been inexplicably entrusted with this task by his father (David Torrence)—inexplicably because old man Tustine doesn’t think his son can do anything right. He’s instructed Lem to take nothing less than $1.15 a bushel, but while the young man is in Chicago the price of wheat drops and he accepts a price of $1.12.

To make him even more nervous on his return home, he’s bringing a bride with him. Kate (Mary Duncan) was a waitress in the diner Lem ate at; conversation led to flirtation. Kate hated the life she was living and longed for a romantic escape.

Murnau lets us know that the young woman is rushing from one frying pan into another. The farm house’s interior is just as empty and soulless as her Chicago room. 

Pa Torrence hates Kate on sight, believing her to be a gold digger. When he finds out about the drop in wheat prices, he gets even madder and determines to make her life a living hell.

When a monster storm from Canada approaches the farm, Torrence hires a group of harvesters to help bring in the crop. These roughnecks are not the finest examples of young American manhood and fire off a series of leering insults in the direction of the newlyweds. One of the men (Richard Alexander) tries to force Kate to run off with him. Lem sees Kate struggling with him and gets the wrong idea.

Will they save the wheat? Will Lem discover that Kate loves only him? Will old man Torrence realize what a gem Kate really is?

This is one of Murnau’s American films for Fox. The director is said to have walked away from the project before completion because William Fox insisted on changing the title from the original “Our Daily Bread,” which Murnau preferred over City Girl. Either is better than the title of the source material by Elliott Lester, The Mud Turtle. The script was by Marion Orth and Berthold Viertel. Ernest Palmer shot it with a minimum of Murnau’s patented camera movement.

Featured in the cast are Edith Yorke as Mrs. Tustine, Roscoe Ates, Jack Pennick, and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams. Baby boomers may remember star Charles Farrell as Gale Storm’s father in the early 1950s TV sitcom “My Little Margie.” Silent film buffs know him as Janet Gaynor’s co-star in a series of romances.

Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)

I was hoping for more from this picture, but that may be due to my age and background. Back in the early 1960’s I luxuriated in the pulp fiction revival brought about by the rediscovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (I still remember fondly the paintings by Roy Krenkel, Jr. and Frank Frazetta that adorned the covers of the Ace paperbacks I collected fervently. In fact, I’m looking at four of them now. But I digress.) After ERB made the scene, Robert E. Howard, Kenneth Robeson, Maxwell Grant, and other pulp magazine scribes returned, among them A. Merritt, and my favorite among the Merritt titles was the 1927 Seven Footprints to Satan. As much as I enjoyed it 50-odd years ago, I’ve haven’t reread it so I don’t know how the plot compares to that of the film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen, but the movie seems sillier than anything I would have liked as a 14 year old.

In the film, Jim (Creighton Hale) has inherited a fortune and wants to spend a good chunk of it exploring Africa. His girlfriend Eve (Thelma Todd) and his Uncle Joe (DeWitt Jennings) want him to stay home and do what sensible millionaires do—seek the Republican nomination for the presidency (joke), but he is determined to do the doctor-Livingston-I-presume thing.

The night before his departure, Jim and Eve are stolen away from a dinner party and taken to a mysterious mansion, the inhabitants of which are devil worshippers looking for a human offering to their deity, and Eve looks like she’ll fit the part perfectly. 

The couple is subjected to the usual run of old dark house gimmickry, including hidden rooms, sliding panels, disguised doors, threatening situations, and an assortment of Satanists so odd looking you’d think that Fellini was the casting director. (Character names include The Spider, The Old Witch, and The Dwarf.) It all wraps up in the kind of conclusion that makes genre film lovers want to put a boot through the screen.

 Hale is fine as the rich nerd who finds surprising heroism when he has to dig for it. The character is essentially the one he played in 1927’s The Cat and the Canary, a similar film. Thelma Todd is the delight of the cast, especially if you know her primarily from her talkies. She’s quite convincing as both bright girlfriend and terrified heroine. She’s slimmer than you’re used to her being and much prettier.

The rest of the cast includes Sheldon Lewis, William V. Mong, Nora Cecil, Kalla Pasha, Harry Tenbrook, Cissy Fitzgerald, Angelo Rossitto, and an uncredited Loretta Young as one of Satan’s victims.

The picture was shot by Sol Polito and edited by Frank Ware.

Seven Footprints to Satan is a moderately entertaining old dark house comedy/mystery, if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s far better than The Bat but nowhere as good as The Cat and the Canary. Perhaps the source novel isn’t as suspenseful as I remember. Perhaps Christensen’s witchcraft wasn’t as strong when he worked in America.

The House of Darkness (1913)

                                            This one-reel “shocker” was directed by D.W. Griffith from a scenario by Jere F. Looney and filmed by G.W. “Billy” Bitzer for the Biograph Company. Pretty good credentials, yes? Add to that the names of Lionel Barrymore and Lillian Gish in the cast and, even at its abbreviated running time, you’d expect to have a solid if unpretentious entertainment. And you do.

But there’s a sadness that underlies the film’s suspenseful little story. It’s the sadness that is the lives of the “unfortunate” patients who exist in mental hospitals.

We meet two such. A woman has lost a child in infancy. When the attendants come to take her away, she is holding an empty blanket as if it were a baby and swaying it in her arms. 

At the hospital, Griffith show us two scenes that will have meaning as the movie progresses. In one, an aggressive patient hears a nurse playing the piano (Lillian Gish) and the music hath charms to sooth the savage breast. We also see a nicely realistic moment as one of the doctors flirts with and then proposes to one of the nurses.

Soon the aggressive patient (Charles Hill Mailes) gets into another fight with a fellow unfortunate. As the guards try to return him to his room, he somehow locates a gun and escapes, moving toward the doctor’s house. How does he know where the doctor lives? This is no explained, but when he arrives there we see him hiding behind a tree on the left side of the screen. He then carefully slips toward us, moving carefully around the tree’s trunk. First we see part of his face peering around the wood, then half of his face, and then he moves toward the camera and glides past it, as if he were sneaking past our left shoulder. The moment will be familiar to anyone who has seen Griffith’s 1912 gangster picture, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, in which this shot was first used.

The Unfortunate peers through the window for a few moments watching the doctor’s wife (Claire McDowell) before he steps into the room and threatens her with the gun. Suspense builds as we’ve seen evidence of his violent temper and fear the worst. 

But before anything bad can happen, the wife piano plays the piano, the man calms down, the doctor (Lionel Barrymore) and the guards arrive, and the Unfortunate is returned to the hospital where, despite his violent escape, he is left free to roam the grounds and, supposedly, get into another fight.

Just a few years later and Barrymore would have played the Unfortunate and Gish the wife. Of course, a few years later and Griffith was no longer directing trifles like this. What we see is like a rehearsal for things to come.