A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927)

Here’s a trifle, you might even consider it an inside joke, from those merry pranksters in the Soviet Union. 

In 1926, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, as part of publicity tour of Europe, paid a visit to Moscow, where they were mobbed with the same degree of enthusiasm with which their personal appearances were met at home. They, along with Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, and, of all people, Pearl White, were among Russia’s favorite American performers. In fact, from 1922 to1928, 43.7% of all movies shown in the Soviet Union were from America.

During their visit, the Yanks were approached with an idea for a locally produced film and the idea struck them as being funny and novel. The picture became A Kiss From Mary Pickford.

Goga Palkin (Igor Ilyinsky) is an usher in a movie theater who is in love with Dusya Galkina (Anel Sudakevich), a student actor who considers herself in training to become a movie star. He pines for her every minute but she will have nothing to do with him until he becomes a star, too.

So Goga practices swashbuckling in the Fairbanks manner and even tries wearing a mask, ala Zorro. At one point, using a cane for a sword, he drives his blade through a wall and it stops just short of stabbing a young woman in the nose. “Be calm,” he tells her. “We must all suffer for the sake of art.”

He then endures a series of absurd tests to discern his “professional fitness” for a job as a stunt man. The doctors (?) professors (?) administering the test looked they leaked out of a German Expressionist film.

At the studio, the director decides to turn Goga into “the Russian Douglas Fairbanks,” and while he tries to convince his stunt man that he can make the change, Fairbanks and Pickford come to the studio. Film from their 1926 visit is inserted into our movie, with their foreknowledge, and they look like they’re really enjoying themselves. 

Mary sees Goga and thinks he’s amusing. To please her local fans, she offers to play a love scene with the Russian Fairbanks, ending it with a chaste kiss on his cheek.

Now Goga is a star and Dusya falls for him. Unfortunately, so does everyone else and his life becomes a chase around the film lot until Dusya finally scrapes away Mary’s lipstick.

The film was directed by Sergei Komarov and co-written by Komarov and Vadim Shershenevich. Komarov also served as cinematographer.

Maybe the sarcasm above relating to a perceived lack of humor in official Sovietdom—it’s that wholesale slaughter of the imperial family and their servants thing—is misplaced. Marina L. Levitina, an expert on Soviet cinema, writes:  “In the early twentieth century, there existed a certain perception in the Russian popular imagination of a new, modern set of qualities, which included some of the same human traits that earlier impressed the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville in Americans. Among these traits were efficiency, physical fitness, optimism, and the frontiersman’s adventurous, pioneering spirit. After 1917, these traits were praised as new exemplary qualities that citizens of the young Soviet state needed to acquire.

Contemporary Soviet descriptions of Fairbanks emphasize his ability to make the viewers laugh: ‘Humour is an ever-present part of his pictures. Laughter, healthy and good laughter, traverses all his films as a kind of a central line,’ writes Ter-Oganesov in Kino-zhurnal.”

You frequently see reference to Hollywood being America’s good-will ambassador to the world. And at times, it really is.

A Cure For Pokeritis (1912)

I suspect that the very first joke about marriage went like this: Two cavemen met one day and the first one said, “Who was that giant ground sloth I saw you with last night?” and the second one answered “That was no giant ground sloth; that was my wife.”

Well, it used to slay the boys at Lascaux.

The movies have provided a means of relating the marriage joke from the earliest days of fictional one-reelers. The image of wife-dom usually suffered most through these quick anecdotes, which is only to be expected since men were telling the stories. The onscreen husbands, played by almost every silent and pre-code talking comedian at one time or another, were just regular guys looking for a little extra-curricular fun. Their wives were the spoil sports, taking the idea of being civilizing influences way too seriously.

The screen’s first comedy team specialized in these mini-situation comedies. John Bunny and Flora Finch made something like 100 shorts for Vitagraph between 1910 and Bunny’s death in 1915. Only a handful of these pictures survive. They weren’t all domestic comedies but that genre dominated their output with titles like And His Wife Came Back, Mr. Bunnyhug Buys a Hat for His Wife, Thou Shalt Not Covet, and Which Way Did He Go? (in which Bunny’s character is named “Mr. Henpecko”).

Bunny, a native New Yorker, was short and heavy while London-born Finch was tall and thin. After Bunny’s death, Finch stayed in movies—her last role being an uncredited bit in The Women (1939) before her passing in 1940—but she never again achieved anything like the popularity she’d garnered as Bunny’s screen wife. Her post-Bunny comic chops are on display as Aunt Susan in Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary (1927).

Bunny and Finch mark a good place to start looking at the marriage joke in early films because in at least one way they lived the joke themselves: they weren’t really man and wife, but they hated each other anyway.

In the best known of their few surviving one-reelers, A Cure For Pokeritis, they are George and Mary Brown. George enjoys a weekly night out with the boys for a poker session. Their meeting place is the clichéd masculine den of impropriety: guys are sitting at tables shuffling and dealing, their shirt sleeves rolled up and ties loosened. Many wear eye shades; cigars and cigarettes are plentiful. All the place lacks are a pool table and a sinister coachman to be Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island.

George consistently loses at cards. This night, he even has to borrow trolley fare home. He staggers in late, disheveled and looking like he’s on the far side of a two-week drunk. Mary is sitting up waiting for him, growing angrier each minute she’s forced to wait. He arrives and swears contrition. He’ll never play poker again.

A week later, one of his friends comes up with a plot. George will pretend to join a lodge called “Sons of the Morning” that meets every Wednesday night. Mary believes him—not the first mistake she’s made in this marriage, including answering “I do.” The scheme would work well if George didn’t talk in his sleep. We are to assume that a) he’s never done this before, b) Mary has never noticed it before, or c) we’re not to think about it.

At this point, the second familiar element of the marriage joke becomes apparent: the wife’s relative. Be they lazy, inept, greedy, vice-ridden, unemployable, smarmy, or just plain stupid, wifey’s relations are the stuff of domestic misery. In this case, the bane is Cousin Freddie, a dandified wuss who flutters his hands and rolls his eyes as Mary fills him in on George’s skullduggery. To make all husbands in the audience like this guy even less, he enlists the aid of his Bible class in spying on George. How much less of a real man can you be than a Bible study participant?

The dénouement arrives after heaping helpings of deceit, disguise and distrust. Apparently George has learned the lesson Mary set out for him. All will end well with George and Mary embracing. What hubby doesn’t know is that Mary is responsible for breaking up his poker gang by uncovering his deception and then going him one better. Each of them is a trickster and neither really has any reason to believe the other. The loving clinch at the end is merely convention. We all know that if George can come up with another trick, he’ll use it to reorganize his poker night.

We’re also left to ponder this question: why does Mary go to such lengths to break up George’s fun? Yes, he loses every week but we see nothing that indicates his poker losses are doing anything to undermine the Browns’ financial stability. He’s not stealing to cover his debts. He’s not contemplating taking any winnings to run off with the office steno girl. The missus seems to want to put a halt to his night out just because it is his night out. Maybe she wants to make the emasculation complete by having him take up studying the good book, like Cousin Freddie.

Just as with a stand-up joke, there is no back story to this little movie. Mary does what she does because it is in the nature of wives to prevent their husbands from having any fun that doesn’t include them—which from the male point of view is no fun at all.

Tarzan of the Apes (1918)

I was right there for the big Edgar Rice Burroughs boom of the early 1960s. When I was 13 years old, no one could have convinced me that ERB wasn’t America’s greatest writer. And when the movies were in their adolescence, Burroughs first came to the screen in Tarzan of the Apes, directed by Scott Sidney, who directed 69 films before his death in 1928. No, you’ve never heard of any of the others.

The fact that you have heard of #33 on the list owes everything to its source novel and little to Sidney’s skill. If ever a director made a negligible contribution to a finished product, this is that director and this is that product. The film’s only memorable visuals are several shots in silhouette, presenting the central images as it they were interior illustrations from one of the pulp fiction magazines in which the Tarzan stories were first published. Other than that, the pictures are mostly dull, static medium shots, the acting is bombastic, and the plot has been stripped of any psychological interest it might have contained.

John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (True Boardman) sails to Africa to put a stop to the Arab slave trade there. Accompanying him is his wife Alice (Kathleen Kirkham). A mutiny occurs on their ship and the two passengers are set ashore on a jungle coast. One of the sailors, Binns (George B. French) argues with the mutineers for their safety, but he is ignored and later returns to England.

Lord and Lady Greystoke build a small cabin but they soon succumb to the rigors of their castaway status. Alice dies in childbirth and not long later John follows her. Not in childbirth, of course. In death.

In a cross story, Kala, the great ape, loses her child. She hears the young Greystoke heir crying for food. Curious, Kala enters the hut and, seeing the helpless human baby, exchanges the corpse of her own infant for the human. Named Tarzan by his adopted family of apes, the boy has no idea that he is any different from his primate clan until as a boy he sees his reflection in a pool of water.

Here it’s time to pause and point something out to the movie trivia buffs. Elmo Lincoln, who plays the adult Tarzan in this picture, is not the first actor to essay the role. The boy actor who portrays the young ape man is Gordon Griffith and he is actually the first screen Tarzan. He’s also a more energetic and convincing than Lincoln. Keep his name in mind and you can win some bar bets with it.

So Tarzan finds the ruined hut of his parents, with its picture books and, more importantly, a knife. He discovers the use this tool has and suddenly he is as dangerous as any of his primate fellows.

Back in England, the guilt-heavy Binns convinces a group of Greystoke’s relatives and a party of scientists to travel to Africa on a rescue mission. Remarkably enough, they land on the coast just where John and Alice had been abandoned and find the cabin. One of the group, Greystoke’s nephew (Colin Kenny) proposes to the young woman Jane Porter (Enid Markey), but she rejects his affections. In a rage, he makes to attack her. The adult Tarzan reaches through the cabin’s window, grabs the young man, and shakes him.

As if the tale up to this point hasn’t been melodramatic enough, the movie explodes from here like a bombshell packed with implausibilities. They are all pure Burroughs, but reading them doesn’t create the same urge to head-scratch and grin stupidly as the seeing them enacted by third-rate thespians. Binns is captured by Arab slave traders, and escapes, and teaches Tarzan the basics of readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic. Jane is captured by the local native tribe, the leader of which smiles like Gene Simmons and has to be taught his place by the White Lord of the Jungle. Jane is rescued but then is just as terrified by the hulking Tarzan as she has been by everything else that crawls, growls, flies, swims, bites, or has rape on its mind.

She will come to appreciate Tarzan’s manly and noble qualities, of course. “His great love’s courage shielded her from all harm,” a title card reads. Yeah, that and his knife. Lincoln actually killed a lion when it got a little too rambunctious during one of the wrestling scenes. The producers had it stuffed and it made the publicity tour.

All this jungle jive comes from Burroughs’ novel, there’s no denying that. ERB’s imagination always operated at the most elementary level. Hell, the man died in 1950 while reading a comic book in bed. But one approaches a Burroughs book—at least, one does the second time—with an expectation of the wildest kind of escape-and-capture pop fiction. The author’s magic lay in the fact that he could make the most absurd fantasy seem possible for the length of time it takes to read the book.

Movies can do the very same thing, but this Tarzan of the Apes doesn’t pull it off. Everything about it is pedestrian at best. If it had been made 20 years later, you’d swear it had been cobbled together from bits and pieces of other movies. There is no cohesion.

You can overlook the guys from the New Orleans Athletic Club who donned grotesquely inadequate ape costumes to play the tribe of Kala, knowing that nothing else could have been done in 1918. But Lincoln doesn’t look right. Hell, he’s not even tanned. (Truly frightening is the report that Clark Gable was considered for the part for the 1932 version that eventually starred Johnny Weissmuller. Gable was deemed too unknown. Whew. Hollywood.)

Tarzan of the Apes should be seen by fans of the character and lovers of silent movies, but be warned that it is impossible to take it seriously. One always hopes that a silent film can be approached in the spirit of its times and enjoyed as more modern pictures are, but this one, unfortunately, will only generate condescending laughter. Too bad. That magnificent pop genius Edgar Rice Burroughs deserves a better adaptation. Thank goodness he later received it.

Kid Boots (1926)

If you don’t know Eddie Cantor, you should. He has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—one for films, one for television, and one for radio. He also was a huge stage star (vaudeville, reviews and Broadway musicals) and wrote several books. And then, in his spare time, he created and named The March of Dimes when he asked his radio listeners to send a dime to President Roosevelt for polio research (FDR received nearly three million dimes), and he co-wrote the song “Merrily We Roll Along”(“Merrily we roll along, my honey and me. Verily there’s no one half as happy as we”), which became the theme for Warner Bros.’ Merrie Melodies.

I wish we could devote more time to his career here but he came late to movies, making only two silents, Kid Boots and Special Delivery. Kid Boots was sort-of based on the Broadway musical of the same name, but the two entertainments are more distant cousins than kissing kin.

In the film, Cantor is Sam Boots, nicknamed Kid. He’s a salesman in a tailor’s shop who’s just been fired when a muscular and unpleasant customer comes in to buy a suit. In an attempt to save his job, Sam cons him into taking one that doesn’t fit and makes the guy look ridiculous. Fleeing from the angry man (Malcolm Waite), Sam runs into the guy’s girlfriend (Clara Bow): “Clara McCoy,” the titles tell us “responsible for many accidents by making men look where they’re not going.” She is “a girl with Missouri legs—the kind that have to be shown.”

Sam then bumps into Tom Sterling (Lawrence Gray), an amiable man about town whose divorce from Carmen, a woman who no longer loves him (Natalie Kingston) is stalled because he is due to inherit three million dollars. Sam and Tom become pals, and when Tom escapes from the city to hide out at a resort, masquerading as a golf pro, Sam tags along as caddy. 

And what would a romantic farce be if Tom didn’t meet a lovely young woman to fall in love with (Billie Dove), while the resort's swimming instructors turn out to be Clara and the infuriated customer from the tailor’s shop, whose sole ambition seems to be pounding Sam into a lump. Cantor was short and slight, almost delicate looking, but his looks belie a surprising athleticism. In fact, during a scene in which his rival crashes him around (supposedly a massage), Cantor displays his physicality and ability to get laughs using his body as a prop.

  

Bow and Dove fill the standard girlfriend rolls, but Bow works especially well with Cantor. Waite doesn’t get to do much but be a bully while the real villainy is carried out by Carmen, the duplicitous divorcee-to-be.

Directed by Frank Tuttle and produced by Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky for Paramount, the picture is swift and funny with a race to the altar finale that’s among the best of ‘em.

The Nickel-Hopper (1926)

Some actresses, you have to warm up to; some you fall in love with at first sight. Mabel Normand is of the latter persuasion. With her trim figure, big, open smile and bedroom eyes, the 5’ 1” bundle of energy could light up a comic scene brighter than a pair of klieg lights. 

By 1926 Normand's career was winding down. After The Nickel-Hopper she would make only three more shorts, all in 1927. She died in 1930 due to recurring tuberculosis. She wasn’t Hollywood’s purist soul. When asked by a family magazine if she had any hobbies, she replied, “I don't know. Say anything you like, but don't say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.” (Note that she and Pickford were pals and her response was a gag, except for the getting drunk part.)

The Nickel-Hopper is not one of her best films. You have to go back to her co-starring bits with Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle, or starring features like Mickey and The Extra-Girl for Normand at her best, but Nickel-Hopper has some interesting qualities of its own.

The story is basic. Normand is Paddy, the Nickel Hopper. She works nights at the “Happy Hour Dancing Academy,” which would be a dime-a-dance hall except the dances cost five cents. Deposit your nickel and a dance comes out in the form of one of the girls who are, figuratively, nickel hoppers. Paddy “gets 2.5 cents a dance—and can do 105 dances a night—if her feet hold out.” It ain’t easy. As the band’s drummer calls out, “Choose your opponent for the next dance.”

The dance floor comedy comes from Paddy’s reactions to a multitude of partners—their sizes, shapes, terpsichorean ability, and degree of boisterousness. 

One of these dance hall wolves gets too fresh and she brushes him off. Outside after work, he causes her to miss the last bus home, but offers her a ride in his limousine. A passing woman threatens him: “You oughtta be ashamed! If I wasn’t a lady I’d belt y’ in the beezer, y’ big bo-hunk!” Paddy finally gets rid of him by asking him for a ten dollar bill. He leeringly hands it over and she drops it into the alms cup of a blind beggar. When the wolf furiously tries to retrieve it, Paddy calls a cop who only sees a big guy trying to steal from a blind man. Paddy is a clever girl.

At home, we find that Paddy’s family is made up of a hard working laundress mother, a sassy younger brother, and a lazy, egotistical and domineering father who runs off every fella who displays an interest in his daughter. When she blows up at him, Pop threatens to leave, an announcement to which brother says, “Aw hell, let him go!”

True love finally comes her way, and in his attempt to foil it Pop gets his come-uppance. There’s really a lot going on in thirty minutes.

The picture was directed by F. Richard Jones and was written by Frank Butler (who would later write three of the Hope/Crosby Road Pictures), Hal Roach, and Stan Laurel. The titles were written by the invaluable H.M. “Beanie” Walker.

Another great pleasure come from the presence of three uncredited actors. James Finlayson, that wonderful Scots character actor with bald pate, squinty eyes and delightfully fake walrus moustache (memorably seen in battle with Laurel and Hardy in numerous shorts and features) is a householder important to the last part of the film. The hot drummer, flailing away like a Jazz Age Keith Moon, is Oliver Hardy.

And most surprisingly of all, Boris Karloff is the dance hall masher who tries to reclaim his ten dollars from the blind man. After a lifetime of seeing Karloff play maniacs and monsters, it’s a hoot to see him not as a full-fledged villain, but just as a jerk.