An Unscheduled Stop ...

Sound, Comedy and the Silent Argument

What was the impact of synchronized sound on motion pictures? In their infancy, any offering would attract a paying audience. As the novelty wore off, presentations increased in length and complexity. The artificial flamboyance of stage performance transformed into the subtle realism of film acting. Storefront Nickelodeons were replaced by cavernous monuments with crystal chandeliers. Musical accompaniment was added, and simple piano grew into full orchestra, or spectacular theater organ. The ability of projected images to express humanity as entertainment, had become a globally shared experience.
Film is a work in progress. In an age of geosynchronous satellite transmissions and digital projection, it remains in transition. For ten dollars or a dime, moviegoers have always expected something new and different at every show. In his guide to the study of silent film, Burning Passions (Una Passione infiammabile), Cherchi Usai describes its finite existence. "From being an art of abstraction, displaying a problematic coexistence between the image and the written word, cinema became the mouthpiece of an ambiguous, subtle mimesis, which could redefine and shape the nature of the collective imagination."
The great performers of the silent era exploited this abstraction, and the borderless vocabulary of their visual narrative.
Almost none of the great comics survived into sound with any appreciable success. Pantomime was key to Chaplin’s brilliance. He knew seventy percent of his audience would be lost with sound. By the end of Hollywood’s silent era, his costly, impractical creative process had evolved from production of weekly one-reel shorts to one dazzling and intricate feature every few years. His first "talkie" wasn’t released until 1940.

Arbuckle might have survived sound. Like many stars whose careers were supposedly ruined by it, he may have simply retired, and like Chaplin, he had a pleasant, well-suited speaking voice. Mable Normand, the (seldom acknowledged) greatest comedienne of the silent era was a distant memory by its end. Buster Keaton embraced the new technology but chose a path of professional disintegration well before his first sound film. Laurel and Hardy made the easiest transition. Their humor was not lost, and in some ways, sound may have helped their later work.
Obliged to change with technology or lose business, comedy in film lost its place after sound, and never recovered.

Movie Crazy (1932)

Monday May 14, 7:00pm, The Paramount Theater

A bumbling oaf goes to Hollywood in search of stardom. Wreaking havoc along the way, he falls in love with a beautiful starlet and ass-backwards into a contract.
The sound films of Harold Lloyd are of interest when viewed in the context of his entire career. They are of little importance by themselves, and well illustrate the deconstruction of visual narrative by the introduction of sound. What succeeds in Movie Crazy (1932) has little dependence on sound. Lloyd’s character is introduced with two entirely visual gags, typical of his earlier work. He appears to be riding in an open car, which pulls away to reveal he is actually peddling a bicycle. As he turns up his driveway, he rescues a duckling he hears down a hole, using water from a garden hose. Sound of the trapped duckling would have worked perfectly as an intertitle. A running gag with a straw boater and an ornery producer is purely visual. Another running gag is the accidental destruction of numerous glass office doors, straight out of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928).
The exuberant youth living with his parents had become a stretch for an older Lloyd. This was only magnified by the spoken word. Add to the mix a profusion of bad, and now very dated, dialog (light years from H. M. "Beany" Walker’s clever intertitles), the limitations of early sound technology and the distracting, self-conscious camera work it caused, and the magic was more or less gone.

On the other hand, when was the last time a talkie was shown at The Paramount, outside of SIFF? Inclusion of this film adds depth and contrast to a retrospective of Lloyd’s career and cultivates an appreciation of his silent masterworks.

Seattle Theater Group, The Paramount Theater and Trader Joe’s present,
The Harold Lloyd Retrospective: five nights and nine films from the legend of Silent Era comedy. April 30th - May 25th
The Puget Sound Theater Organ Society will provide music before and after this film on the Paramount’s original 4/20 Publix 1 Wurlitzer