Nothing of the sort operated in the far better (feature film) comedies which Douglas Fairbanks made when he was with Fine Arts. To suit his physique, they were almost all adventurous; they were always entertaining. Flirting With Fate[3] presented a young man who had decided to die and gave “Automatic Joe,” a gunman, his last fifty dollars to “bump him off” unexpectedly. Once the agreement was made, the tide of fortune turned for the young man, and, desiring earnestly to live, he felt the paid hand of the assassin always upon his shoulder. At the same time the gunman had reformed; his one object was to return the unearned fifty dollars. And the cross-purposes, the chase and flight, were within short distance of high farce. The comedies of Charles Ray were also unpretentious, and also used the camera. These and others were always perfectly decent; but none of them was refined.
And there, essentially, we are back at slap-stick; for the refined comedy was pretentious, and what is pretentious is vulgar in any definition of the word; while slap-stick never pretended to be anything but itself and could be disgusting or tasteless or dull, but it could not be vulgar. I consider vulgar the thing which offends against the canons of taste accepted by honest people, not by imitative people, not by snobs. It is equally bad taste, presumably, to throw custard pies and to commit adultery; but it is not bad taste to speak of these things. What is intolerable only is the pretense, and it was against pretentiousness that the slap-stick comedy had its hardest fight. It showed a man sitting down on a lighted gas stove, and it did not hesitate to disclose the underwear charred at the buttocks which were the logical consequence of the action. There was never the slightest suggestion of sexual indecency, or of moral turpitude, in the Keystones; there was a fuller and freer use of gesture—gesture with all parts of the human frame—than we are accustomed to. The laughter they evoked was broad and long; it was thoracic, abdominal; it shook us because it was really the earth trembling beneath our feet. The animal frankness and health of these pictures constituted the ground of their offense. And something more.
For the Keystone offended our sense of security in dull and business-like lives. Few of us imagined ourselves in the frenzy of action which they set before us; none of us remained unmoved at the freedom of fancy, the wildness of imagination, the roaring, destructive, careless energy which it set loose. It was an ecstasy of comic life, and in our unecstatic lives we fled from it to polite comedy, telling ourselves that what we had seen was ugly and displeasing. Often it was. I am stating the case for slap-stick, but I do not wish to make myself responsible for the millions of feet of stupidity and ugliness which have been released as comic films. I have seen Ham and Bud and the imitators of Charlie Chaplin; I have seen an egg splattered over a man’s face with such a degree of nauseous ugliness that it seemed I could never see a comic again. But as like as not, on the same bill was the James Young screen version of The Devil with George Arliss, or Geraldine Farrar in Carmen, or the “‘Affairs of’ Anatol.” And when people who have seen these “artistic” films, or the barber-shop scene in a Hitchcock revue or Eddie Cantor in a dentist’s chair, exclaim (falsely) that moving-picture comedians do nothing but throw pies, I am moved to wonder what on earth they are expected to throw. They are using the eternal materials of their art, precisely as Aristophanes used them and Rabelais, with already far too many concessions to a debased and cowardly and artificial taste. At the two extremes simple and sophisticated people have looked directly at the slap-stick screen and loved it for itself alone; in between are the people who can see nothing without the lorgnettes of prejudice provided by fashion and gentility. The simple ones discovered and prospered the slap-stick screen long before the sophisticated were aware of its existence; they took it for what it was and cared nothing for the fact that it was made by inartistic people and shown in reeking rooms for a nickel. For long the poison of culture was powerless to enter; but not long enough.
I feel moderately certain that the slap-stick comedy is a good thing for America to have; yet, being neither an apostle of pagan joy nor a reformer, I have to put my plea for slap-stick on personal grounds. It has given me immeasurable entertainment and I would like to see it saved; I would like to see a bit more of its impromptus, its unpremeditated laughter; I would like to do something to banish the bleak refinement which is setting in upon it.
Seven years ago, in an imaginary conversation, I made Mr David Wark Griffith announce that he would produce Helen of Troy, and I made him defend the Keystone comedy. It seemed to me then as now that there is nothing incongruous in these subjects; properly made, they would be equally unrefined, but Helen of Troy, being in the grand manner, would be called “artistic.” Mr Griffith has not made Helen of Troy, and the pre-eminent right to make it has passed from his hands. The Keystone, with its variations, needs still an authoritative defender and an authoritative critic. It is one of the few places where the genteel tradition does not operate, where fantasy is liberated, where imagination is still riotous and healthy. In its economy and precision are two qualities of artistic presentation; it uses still everything commonest and simplest and nearest to hand; in terror of gentility, it has refrained from using the broad farces of literature—Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière—as material; it could become happily sophisticated, without being cultured. But there is no fault inherent in its nature, and its virtues are exceptional. For us to appreciate slap-stick may require a revolution in our way of looking at the arts; having taken thought on how we now look at the arts, I suggest that the revolution is not entirely undesirable.
An Imaginary
Conversation
AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION
The theatre of Dionysos. A great crowd is just leaving the amphitheatre and as the attendants roll back the heavy awnings and unleash the tent-poles, the moon, which has been excluded for the performance, begins to filter in, and presently the stone begins to throw off faint shimmers, and dark shadows fall across the stage. The builded temple, which has been screened, is now revealed, and its colours glow again, albeit in shades not known to the light of day. The porticos of temples look down upon the theatre, and olive trees stand dark and beautiful on the hills. From afar the bustle of the town dies away, and, perhaps, in a moment of unutterable stillness, the murmur of the many-sounding sea can be heard.