by Ellen Dawson
(1923), perhaps the most notorious of Lloyd’s feature film showcases in the decade to come. Known above all as a hard-working professional, Lloyd’s capacious production schedule as “the glasses character” would tally, by the end of the 1920s, at least eighty shorts and twelve features, all of which revel in Lloyd’s remarkable capacity for “thrill” gags, enthusiastic derring-do, and unadulterated optimism.
The deft physical coordination required of comic stars in the 1910s and 1920s was second nature to Buster Keaton, born Joseph Frank Keaton in
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1895 in Pisqua, Kansas. Unlike Lloyd, Keaton was not a true midwesterner.
His parents were traveling vaudeville performers and “Buster” joined their act at the age of five, rapidly becoming the star attraction of the “Three Keatons” in a series of skits primarily based on mimicry and physical knockabout. It is well known that his father, Joe Keaton, often hurled his young son into the stage backdrop for the show’s climactic finale in those early years; by the time he was eight, Buster’s spectacular leaps and violent falls formed the centerpiece of the family’s program. The extraordinary physical grace exhibited by the child undoubtedly astonished audiences. The child, in turn, was astounded by the sleight-of-hand physical feats performed by his family’s friend Harry Houdini. “No one, by the by, ever worked harder than I did to figure out Houdini’s tricks,” he later wrote. “I watched him like a hawk every chance I got. I studied his act from all parts of the theatre. . . .
I even climbed high up in the flies so I could look straight down on him as he worked” (Keaton 51). Although Keaton never did figure out those tricks, he learned a great deal about the art of exposure from the magician whose famous stunts began by revealing to the audience the foolproof function of every handcuff, manacle, trunk, iron chest, tank, and so on—before performing, in bathing suit or loincloth, a miraculously daring escape. Notwithstanding his debts to early family “training” and Houdini’s influence, it was under the ample wing of director and star Roscoe Arbuckle that Keaton made his film debut, appearing in two-reel productions such as The Bell Boy (1918), The Garage (1918), and The Cook (1918). The ever-generous Arbuckle also taught Keaton the workings of the camera as well as the industry. “I could not have found a better-natured man to teach me the movie business,” Keaton later recalled, “or a more knowledgeable one” (95). Keaton would ultimately “expose” the magic of cinema in modern masterpieces such as Sherlock Jr. (1924) and reveal his physical dexterity and mechanical genius in feature film vehicles such as The Navigator (1924), The General (1926), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), among others, where his narrow escapes from disaster generated astonishment from even the most jaded of jazz age audiences.
It is hardly coincidental that the ever-serious “Stone-Face” Keaton and the ever-earnest Harold Lloyd assumed pride of place in the 1920s as their comic counterparts, Arbuckle and Normand, suffered scandal’s aftershocks.
It may very well be that “the silent-comedy studio was about the best training school the movies have ever known,” as James Agee reflected in the late 1940s, and not simply for producing the likes of Lloyd and Keaton.
Rather, “some of the major stars of the twenties and since . . . also got their start in silent comedy” (“Comedy’s” 17), a lengthy roster including talented
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directors such as Leo McCarey, George Stevens, and Frank Capra, as well as later stars such as Phyllis Haver and Carole Lombard. Nor should we overlook Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery, whose careers began almost simultaneously at the Essanay Company in 1914 and where Beery earned some notoriety cross-dressing as a Swedish maid named “Sweedie.” Among the fourteen “Sweedie” films that featured a capering Beery in 1914 was Sweedie Goes to College, in which Swanson plays a debutante in a girl’s dor-mitory opposite Beery’s burly Swedish maid. The two worked together again at Keystone, flanking “Teddy,” the company’s star dog, in two-reel farces such as Teddy at the Throttle (1917). Beery would perform in over forty more films in the 1910s alone, and in the early 1920s he began working alongside the likes of Douglas Fairbanks in Mollycoddle (1920) and Robin Hood (1922) as well as Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). But Beery’s ascension to the giddier heights of stardom was a slow and laborious one, perhaps not fully achieved until he played opposite Marie Dressler in the acclaimed wharf-side drama Min and Bill (1930). This may be the place to mention that Dressler, a well-known stage star in the early twentieth century, also made her film debut at Keystone in 1914, playing opposite Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand in Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914).
While Dressler and Beery initially embraced, with varying degrees of intensity, their comic personae, Swanson emphatically did not. “I hated comedy, because I thought it was ruining my chance for dramatic parts,”
the actress explained in later interviews. “I didn’t realize that comedy is the highest expression of the theatrical art and the best training in the world for other roles. . . . Comedy makes you think faster, and after Keystone I was a human lighting conductor” (Basinger 207). It took more than a flash of light for Swanson to assume her dramatic persona, which she reportedly modeled after the emerging Norma Talmadge when Swanson moved to Triangle Studios in 1918. Her first Triangle film, Society for Sale (1918), directed by Frank Borzage and co-starring William Desmond, undoubtedly enabled this onscreen identity. But it wasn’t until she appeared in Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), the first of six films she would make with director Cecil B.
DeMille, that the Swanson “star” identity illuminated the screen: sophisticated, elegant, fashionable, and far from naïve.
With the benefit of hindsight, it might seem that Swanson’s woman-of-the-world persona was a bit risky (if not simply too risqué) for an industry staving off the sour effects of scandal. But if we emphasize the “worldliness”
of such an identity, we uncover a star-making strategy inaugurated in the early 1920s through which stars such as Pola Negri and Emil Jannings
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“winged in” from Europe, bringing with them the cultural and artistic cachet associated with the German film industry in the late 1910s. Then again, such artistry could be associated more specifically with the keen eye of director Ernst Lubitsch, whose credits in Germany included (among many others) the elegant Madame Dubarry (1919), which co-starred Negri and Jannings. Lubitsch, too, would be courted (and imported) by the American film industry in the early 1920s, and his subtle comic genius—the famous “Lubitsch touch”—created delicious social satires such as The Marriage Circle (1924), featuring Marie Prevost, Adolphe Menjou, Creighton Hale, and Florence Vidor.
Each of these actors had developed something of a public presence in the 1910s. Hale notoriously performed as Pearl White’s co-star in serials such as The Exploits of Elaine (1914) and The Iron Claw (1916), while Vidor played opposite Sessue Hayakawa in The Hidden Pearls (1918). Menjou had less luck initially, although he climbed from uncredited bit parts opposite Douglas Fairbanks in Manhattan Madness (1916) to the status of a secondary character opposite Norma Talmadge in The Moth (1917). His greater celebrity status would rise after The Marriage Circle as he became known as a dapper gentleman of generalized European descent. While Marie Prevost was never destined for superstardom, she may be the most exemplary figure for the story I am telling, precisely because her career began in 1915 as one of those madcap Keystone clowns. She initially appeared in shorts such as Those Bitter Sweets (1915) and Better Late than Never (1916) before relocating in tandem with her Keystone supervisor to the “Mack Sennett Comedy Company.”
There she frolicked in crowd pleasers such as Her Screen Idol (1918) with an array of popular clowns, including Ford Sterling, Louise Fazenda, Edgar Kennedy, Ben Turpin, and—last but not least—Teddy, the dog.
Memories of cinema and stardom in the 1920s today are often routed through Billy
Wilder’s darkly ironic Sunset Blvd. (1950), in which the aging film star Norma Desmond, played to the hilt by Gloria Swanson, recalls a time when “we didn’t need dialogue; we had faces.” This much is true.
Often understood as the site of emotional expressivity, the image of the human face can incite a peculiarly intense desire, a hunger or craving inextricable from the historical origins and evolution of silent-era stardom. But those stars emerging from the 1910s also recall a history of disquieted faces—the very countenance of fans that chuckled, snorted, and sometimes convulsed, lips twitching as they grinned in the flickering light.
W O R K S C I T E D
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