The Silents Come to Kenyon Hall

West Seattle’s Kenyon Hall will present two nights of silent films this Wednesday and Thursday, featuring the musical accompaniment of Donald Sosin, who last performed in Seattle for SIFF 2006. Wednesdays program includes two Hal Roach comedies, Pass the Gravy (1928) and Laurel and Hardy in Big Business (1929), followed by Buster Keaton in Cops (1922) and Charlie Chaplin in One A.M. (1916).

One A.M. (1916)

"The happiest days of my life."

The fourth of twelve films Charles Chaplin produced under contract to the Mutual Film Corporation, One A.M. (1916) is most significantly remembered as the first and only time Chaplin appeared entirely alone for most of the picture. Albert Austin is seen as a Taxi Driver in the opening seconds. It is also the only film in an otherwise unbroken string of thirty-five without Edna Purviance. From his second film with Essanay, including all Chaplin’s films at Mutual and First National, Edna was always there. Had she been written into One A.M., Edna would have likely hit Charlie on the head with a frying pan or turned him out for coming home drunk. As a tuxedoed gentleman, Charlie arrives at his doorstep by taxi and engages in an exhibition of alcoholic gymnastics with his house. He slides across the floor on small rugs, something he would repeat later using roller skates in The Rink (1916), and scales a large hat rack to the second floor when he is unable to climb the stairs. At one point Charlie finds himself running atop a large spinning table, later battles an uncooperative Murphy bed and finally ends up sleeping in the bathtub. Chaplin somehow transforms twenty minutes of a drunk in an empty house into comic brilliance.

Cops (1922)

"Get some cops to protect our policemen!"

Cops is a symphony of misunderstanding, beginning with a stolen wallet and ending with a thousand men in blue chasing Buster through the streets. In between, he makes off with a wagonload of furniture he has unknowingly stolen, pulled by a crazy old horse with false teeth. Keaton ends up bombing a police parade and the chase is on! He finds himself riding an enormous teeter-totter then snatching hold of a passing car to make his escape. Virginia Fox, a Keaton favorite, proclaims "I won't marry you until you become a big business man." The con man, played by Steve Murphy, was also featured as a pickpocket in Chaplin's "The Circus" six years later. And who is this oddly familiar old dog macking down on Buster's hand?

Big Business (1929)

Only Stan and Ollie would try to sell Christmas trees door-to-door in sunny California. Their failure is of course inevitable, as is the total havoc they wreak on one unfortunate homeowner with the nerve to rile them up! By the time a cop arrives, the house and their truck are all but demolished as a crowd of neighbors stands in the street watching. Stan pitches various breakable objects out the window to a batting Ollie on the lawn, while the homeowner wrestles on the ground with a Christmas tree and the cop observes unnoticed.
Years later, Hal Roach claimed when he arrived on the set late in the day, the cast and crew had destroyed the house next to the one he purchased for the film!

Next …

D. W. Griffith, and the Yiddish Silents.