Shorts (1923-1929)

During our second week of shorts from the 1920s, we watched a Chaplin film, an experimental French film, three Disney shorts, and two silent shorts from Laurel and Hardy.

In The Pilgrim (1923) -- which at 47 minutes I've rather arbitrarily classed as a short -- Chaplin plays an ex-convict who disguises himself as a priest, and is taken in by a community who mistakes him for another priest. This is complicated by the fact that one of his friends from prison is in the same town and recognizes him. Chaplin reliably plays his normal persona, and has many of his typical cast-mates present: Edna Purviance, Mack Swain, and his brother Sydney Chaplin. Like many of his films, it's divided into a sequence of set pieces, but it's one of his more muted outings -- comedically, visually, and from a story perspective.

Ménilmontant (1926) came in a DVD set called "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s," an imposing title. The film itself is relatively accessible though, its most "experimental" feature being its lack of title cards. This makes it occasionally opaque; however we have seen a number of commercial films that used few or no title cards (including notably 1924's The Last Laugh.) It tells the story of two sisters played by Nadia Sibirskaia and Yolande Beaulieu, who are orphaned early in the film, and their subsequent lives in the city. It was written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, a Russian working in France. The film begins and ends with violence, a jarring framing device -- though what occurs during the main body of the movie could potentially have worked independently. In addition to the lack of title cards, another technique which felt innovative was the use of a few striking images of characters fading in and out, showing elapsed time. I expect there are earlier precedents for this, but it was used effectively, and was less clichéd than showing clock hands turning, or using more conventional cuts.

Steamboat Willie (1928) is the most iconic short that we watched during this session, having introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and having been excerpted and parodied extensively. The short's events are fairly random, but the through-line is Mickey, Minnie, and Pete traveling on a boat, making music using various on-board animals. Although this film has synced sound, there is little if any dialog; the sound is confined mostly to music tracking the on-screen action, with some additional interspersed muttering. I should remark, too, that the gracious and thoughtful Mickey Mouse of which I got a lifetime's supply on the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse animated TV show when the kids were growing up -- had not yet emerged. This Mickey Mouse is rather less benevolent, particularly to the other animals that don't seem to have been granted Mickey's mysterious ability for abstract thought.

That carries through to Plane Crazy (1928) in which Mickey builds a plane, looking with admiration at an image of Lindbergh (before he became disillusioned by Lindbergh's politics during WWII.) In his drive to become an aviator, he again uses animals in various cavalier ways. At one point, while airborne, Mickey terrifies Minnie by recklessly steering the plane in an attempt to get her to consent to a kiss. When she still refuses, he kisses her anyway, and in response she jumps out of the plane. Dark stuff. As with the previous film, there's very little dialog; I believe Minnie says "Who me?" at one point.

The third Disney film The Skeleton Dance (1929) doesn't feature any of Disney's famous characters, but is pretty well described by its title, and is basically five and half minutes of skeletons dancing around and making music -- as well as some black cats and owls.

It's hard to judge how innovative or impactful any of these Disney films were at the time. It's certainly true that we haven't seen anything like them previously in this project, and that within a few years Mickey Mouse had attained an iconic status that persists to this day. But it is also true that we didn't find any of these cartoons particularly funny. This may in part because we were brought up with their superior successors, including the Looney Tunes cartoons that became popular in the next decade -- but I find it hard to believe that even by the standards of the time a lot of the gags in these shorts weren't a bit limp and repetitive.

Along similar lines, Big Business (1929) was the first of two Laurel and Hardy shorts we saw, both silent, and although Laurel and Hardy became more famous in the sound era, their act, with its barbed friendship, already appeared to be largely in place. It involves them as two traveling salesman -- selling Christmas trees -- and particularly their feud with a hostile customer, played by James Finlayson. This particular short was not on the same level as the canonical silent comedians that we saw last week, with much less visual imagination, but it did have a certain sense of escalating destructiveness which was well-executed.

The second short of theirs that we watched -- Liberty (1929) -- was not quite as focused. They play prison escapees, and a huge chunk of the film involves them trying to rectify having earlier put on each other's pants. Also a live crab somehow winds up in one of the pairs of pants. This is all exactly as clever and high-brow as it sounds. James Finlayson from Big Business shows up again, as the owner or employee of a music store outside of which Laurel and Hardy wreak havoc. Eventually they end up on supposedly elevated girders of an in-construction building -- a situation both contrived and derivative, echoing the last week's Harold Lloyd short Never Weaken, except a decade later. However, on the plus side, and in a bit of continuity from Ménilmontant, this short has very few title cards -- and the ones that it does have could easily have been eliminated (e.g. "What did you do that for?")

That completes our sampling of short films from the 1920s, and our survey of the 1920s in general. I plan to summarize that experience in another post at some point, but next week we're moving on the 1930s with our first feature from 1930, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers.