Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hawks Triple Bill

When I was very young I was never as excited by films as I was by going to the theatre - it wasn't until my teens that I started geeking out on films.  The only only exception to that is Buster Keaton, I watched anything and everything by that man. The fact that he directed and wrote and stared in his films was one thing. But that he did his own stunts -  that made him a God in my five-year-old eyes.

Well, it's Friday and with all this talk of the wonders of the web, new techology and copyright issues it's easy to forget what it's all about. Thanks to the wonders of public domain (and a certain video service) here on Netribution are three comic delights: Charlie Chaplins' masterpiece (and final film) Modern Times, Howard Hawks' hilarious His Girl Friday (tears were coming out of my nose when I first watched this at the NFT) and of course Buster Keaton - with a selecton of shorts.

So please sit back, have your Excel spreadsheet on standby for when your boss passes, and enjoy.

To view any of these full screen, or to download them - click the button at the bottom to go to Google's site and then the button at the bottom right hand corner of their viewer.

Modern Times 

{google}1810303024652738405{/google}

Modern Times is a 1936 film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie stars Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Stanley Sandford and Chester Conklin. It was written and directed by Chaplin.

The factory where the Tramp works has a futuristic look and may have been influenced by Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The factory was equipped with two-way Big Brother-like screens; remarkably Chaplin’s movie was released 13 years before George Orwell’s famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The film also bore some similarities to a 1931 René Clair film called À nous la liberté (Freedom for Us) -- such as the conveyor belt gags. This resulted in a controversy which lasted around a decade; Chaplin maintaining that he had never seen the film, as did everyone else at the studio. René Clair refused to take part in the case, always maintaining that they were all in debt to Chaplin. In the end the issue ended with an out-of-court settlement. A speculation over this case was that it was a conspiracy from Nazi-Germany to discredit Chaplin; À Nous la Liberté's production company, Tobis, was German. It is notable that the settlement was reached only after the end of World War II.

Modern Times was one of the last silent films made, although it does include sound effects, music, singers, and voices coming from radios and loudspeakers. Towards the end of the film the Little Tramp's voice is heard for the first time as he ad-libs pseudo-French and Italian gibberish to the tune of Léo Daniderff's popular song, Je cherche après Titine.

Most of the film was shot at "silent speed", 18 frames per second, which when projected at "sound speed", 24 frames per second, makes the slapstick action appear even more frenetic. Chaplin created this effect deliberately.

In one memorable scene, Chaplin's character looks for a bolt to tighten while he is being pulled through the gears of an enormous machine. This scene is symbolic of Chaplin being the film going through the projector. Another has the Tramp picking up a presumably red warning flag that has fallen off the back of a truck carrying an over-length load, and waving it to attract the driver's attention. He fails to notice that a parade of labor protesters, ostensibly communists attracted to the red flag, have come up behind him. When the police break up the protest they arrest the flag-waving Tramp assuming him to be the protest leader.

The music score was composed by Chaplin himself. The romance theme was later given words and became better known as the song "Smile" ("Smile though your heart is breaking...") and covered by such artists as Judy Garland, Liberace, Nat King Cole and Michael Jackson

(from Wikipedia)

His Girl Friday 

{google}6759515366249007357{/google}

His Girl Friday is a 1940 screwball comedy, a remake of the 1931 film The Front Page, itself an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of their play of the same name. One major alteration was made for this incarnation: the character of Hildy Johnson was changed from a man to a woman, putting a different spin on the story.

His Girl Friday was directed by Howard Hawks and is noted for the rapidfire wit and extremely fast pace of the dialogue.

The film is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #19 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Laughs, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Trivia

Some memorable moments incorporate real life references: Walter tells Ralph Bellamy's character that he looks a lot like an actor...Ralph Bellamy. Later, Walter notes that the last person who crossed him and lived to regret it was Archie Leach – Grant's real name.

The film was originally supposed to be a straightforward retelling of The Front Page -- i.e. the editor and reporter being both men. However, while conducting auditions for the film, Howard Hawks' secretary read Hildy Johnson's lines. Hawks liked the way the dialogue sounded coming from a woman, and the script was rewritten to make Hildy female (and the ex-wife of Walter).

(from Wikipedia)

 Buster Keaton Shorts

Sadly The General and The Navigator are not in Public Domain, but a number of his shorts (and lots of his features) are.

{google}1270062857037661973{/google} 

Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966), always known as Buster Keaton, was a popular and influential American silent-film comic actor and filmmaker. His trademark was physical comedy with a stoic, deadpan expression on his face, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". His work as a performer and director is widely regarded to be some of the most innovative and important work in the history of cinema.

A 2002 world-wide poll by Sight and Sound ranked Keaton's The General as the 15th best film of all time. Three other Keaton films received votes in the survey: Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr., and The Navigator. 

Early life in vaudeville

Keaton was born into the world of vaudeville. His father, Joseph Hallie Keaton, a native of Vigo County, Indiana known in the show business world as Joe Keaton, and Harry Houdini owned a travelling show called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, which performed on stage and sold patent medicine on the side. Keaton was born in Piqua (PICK-way), Kansas, the small town where his mother, Myra Edith Cutler, happened to go into labor.

At the age of three, he began performing with his parents as The Three Keatons; the storyline of the act was how to raise a small child. Myra played the saxophone to one side while Joe and Buster performed on center stage. Buster would goad Joe by disobeying him, and Joe would respond by throwing Buster against the scenery, into the orchestra pit, or even into the audience. The act evolved as Buster learned to take trick falls safely. He was rarely injured or bruised on stage. Nevertheless, this knockabout style of comedy led to accusations of child abuse. Decades later, Keaton said that he was never abused by his father and that the falls and physical comedy were a matter of proper technical execution. In fact, Buster would have so much fun, he would begin laughing as his father threw him across the stage. This drew fewer laughs from the audience, so Buster adopted his famous dead-pan expression whenever he was working.

The act ran up against laws banning child performers in vaudeville. When one official saw Buster in full costume and make-up, he asked a stage-hand how old that performer was. The stage-hand shrugged and pointed to Buster's mother. "I don't know," he said, "ask his wife!" Despite tangles with the law and a disastrous tour of the English Music Halls, Buster was a rising star in the theater, so much so that even when Myra and Joe tried to introduce Buster's siblings into the act, Buster remained the central attraction.

By the time Buster was 21, Joe's alcoholism threatened the reputation of the family act, so Buster and Myra left Joe in Los Angeles. Myra returned to their summer home in Muskegon, Michigan while Buster travelled to New York, where his performing career moved from vaudeville to film.

Silent film era

In February 1917 Keaton met Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York City, where Arbuckle was under contract to Joseph M. Schenck. He was hired as a co-star and gag-man. Keaton later claimed that he was soon Arbuckle's second director and his entire gag department. Keaton and Arbuckle became close friends, a bond that would never break, even after Arbuckle was embroiled in the scandal that cost him his career and his personal life.

After Keaton's successful work with Arbuckle, Schenck gave him his own production unit, The Keaton Studio. He made a series of two-reel comedies, including One Week (1920), Cops (1922), The Electric House (1922), and The Playhouse (1921). Based on the success of these shorts, he graduated to full-length features. These films made Keaton one of the most famous comedians in the world. At the time, he was perhaps the third most popular comedian in America behind Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.

His most enduring feature-length films include Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Cameraman (1928), Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), and The General (1927). The last film, set during the American Civil War, is considered his masterpiece, combining physical comedy with Keaton's love for trains. Unfortunately, many of his most acclaimed films performed poorly at the box office due to their sophistication—audiences had a difficult time seeing Buster as a cinematic artist of considerable ambition.

(from Wikipedia) 

and if you're still watching and reading, here's an extra one, Keaton's One Week, where he has to build a house in - you guessed it - a week.

{google}3147358394537366471{/google}