An excerpt from my upcoming essay about early silent film comedy.
It's impossible to say with any certainty who invented the pie-in-the-face gag so much associated with silent film comedy. The pie itself was probably invented by the ancient Egyptians during the Neolithic Period, around 9500 B.C. and my best guess is that the first pie was thrown for laughs somewhere around 9500-and-ten-minutes B.C. The tomb of pharaoh Ramses II, who took power in 1304 B.C., included etchings of royal bakers preparing galettes, a thin-crusted pie stuffed with honey and nuts—maybe the first artistic representation of a pie in history.
Legend has it that Mabel Normand threw motion pictures' first pie, hitting an unsuspecting Roscoe Arbuckle in the short A Noise From The Deep (1913). The fact is though, it was the otherwise forgettable Mr. Flip (1909) starring veteran comic Ben Turpin that was the first film to feature an actor getting hit in the face with a pie. Famous for his crossed eyes and brush moustache, Turpin began his career in burlesque and vaudeville before making his film debut in 1907 at the Essanay Studios. Mr. Flip has all the appearances of being based on a stage routine Turpin had earlier perfected, leading me to believe that the pie-in-the-face gag was already an old one by the time it showed up on film.
Still, there are historians who insist Normand should get credit for throwing the first pie (as opposed to merely shoving it into the victim's face). Well, maybe. Even that much is hard to confirm. I've read that Normand in fact threw the first pie at a stagehand who had made a pass at her, and that the story has morphed over time into credit for inventing the thrown-pie gag. I've also read that it wasn't Normand who threw the pie at all but Arbuckle himself and that he hit co-star Nick Cogley. A copy of A Noise From The Deep resides in New York's Museum of Modern Art where it is screened periodically. If I ever see it, I'll let you know the scoop.
For those interested in the fine art of pie throwing, Buster Keaton described the process in some detail in an interview with Fletcher Markle in 1964:
"[N]umber one is we don't use a regular baker's pie," he told Markle, "and throwing the pie in a cardboard plate is no good because that plate flying off detracts. So, what we used to do is our prop man would get our baker—whoever is closest to the studio—to make pie crust, two of them, with nothing in them, and take just a little flour and water to make a paste, just enough to glue the two together. That was so that your fingers wouldn't go through the bottom of it. Now you fill it, about an inch, with just flour and water mixed, which clings like glue and stretches. Now, on top of it, if I'm going to hit somebody in dark clothes, a brunette, you put a lemon meringue type of topping on it and garnish with whipped cream, you see. When it was a light costume, a blond, something like that, you put in blueberry, and then enough whipped cream just to splatter.
"Then when you threw the pie, you shot put up to a distance of about eight feet. But from there on back, you brought that pie from here [points to shoulder] right overhand, 'cause with a little practice you can learn to make that pie come in this way [vertically] and not crossways." The better to maximize the splatter, he said.
Keaton was credited with once hitting a movie villain "plum in the pus" from a distance of twenty-seven feet.
The pie-in-the-face gag became passé around the same time comics such as Chaplin and Keaton began making feature films. "[T]he minute we got into features," Keaton said, "where an audience had to believe the story we were telling, we had to stop pie-throwing. There was never a pie thrown in any of our pictures once we started into features. No impossible gags were done."
The Three Stooges later revived the art of the pie fight in such shorts as In the Sweet Pie and Pie, and Mel Brooks staged one of the best known pie fights in Blazing Saddles. And then serious film fanatics are aware of the pie-fight-that-wasn't that was originally to end Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The fight was to have broken out in the war room and the sequence was filmed, but Kubrick later decided to delete it. If you look closely though you can still see the pies when the Russian ambassador partakes of the war room's lavish buffet.
Can you imagine what a distorted picture of film history we'd have if the only Bette Davis movies that survived were Satan Met A Lady and Wicked Stepmother—if, say, Jezebel and The Letter had disintegrated in the can and Now, Voyager and All About Eve existed as only a damaged print in an archive vault somewhere?
That's about where we stand with regard to Norma Talmadge and our understanding of the silent film era.
I was up at 3 o'clock this morning with what Winnie the Pooh would call a rumbly in my tumbly (well, more like mild nausea—I've been eating my own cooking again) and wound up chasing Norma Talmadge through the misty maze of time. I'm working on a side project I haven't quite decided whether to call the Silent Oscars, the Mythical Monkeys or the Alternate Katies which would go back and hand out awards to movies from 1915-1927, and anybody who's ever attempted to study silent movies eventually runs up against the woeful state of films from that era. Oscar-winning director and enthusiastic film preservationist Martin Scorsese estimates that 80% of all American movies from that period are permanently lost—and lord knows how many that have been found are impossible for an average guy like me to see.
That state of affairs is particularly egregious with regard to Norma Talmadge. She was as highly regarded in her day as Lillian Gish but was a great deal more popular—thus leading someone (I forget who) to compare her to Bette Davis—but the fact is, very little of her work is available, just three DVDs, mostly featuring work from the days before she was a star. I've seen enough of Kiki, a comedy from 1926 co-starring Ronald Colman, to think I'll risk buying it on DVD. It also includes something called Within The Law, a melodrama more typical of her silent work.
Her two most highly-regarded films were Smilin' Through (1922) and Secrets (1924). A single print of the former is housed at the Library of Congress; incomplete prints of the latter are floating around, with at least a third of the film presumed lost. Neither are available on DVD or video.
Of her two talkies, the less said the better. I've seen the first, New York Nights, and she's fine but the movie is an incoherent mess—like so many movies from 1929, the director was dead set on inserting lousy songs where they don't fit and the result is a movie with no pacing and an uncertain narrative.
Worse is her last film, Du Barry, Woman Of Passion, and to say it was a disaster is an understatement. Allegedly, it inspired Jean Hagan's character in Singin' In The Rain—you remember her, don't you, the beautiful silent star who makes a fool of herself every time she opens her mouth. Although Talmadge did not display the thick Brooklyn accent of legend, she was ill-equipped for the long, florid speeches of a stage-bound costume drama and the movie was a flop.
"Quit pressing your luck, baby," wrote her sister Constance, who had retired without ever attempting a sound picture. "The critics can't knock those trust funds Mama set up for us."
Talmadge was the eldest of three acting sisters, born into poverty in New Jersey. Her father left one Christmas morning never to return but her mother, the indomitable Peg Talmadge, moved the family to Brooklyn and pushed her daughters relentlessly, finally scoring film work for Norma at Vitagraph Studios in Flatbush by sneaking past the guard at the studio gates. Norma was just sixteen.
Talmadge made hundreds of shorts at Vitagraph but didn't achieve much notice until starring in a 1915 anti-German propaganda piece called The Battle Cry Of Peace. Peg, Norma and sisters Constance and Natalie, soon moved to California where they landed contracts with D.W. Griffith, then the biggest name in Hollywood. Constance wound up the star of Griffith's Intolerance, but Norma didn't really come into her own until she married producer Joseph Schenck, who later produced Buster Keaton's best work (sister Natalie, in fact, married Keaton). She and Schenck formed the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation and promptly began turning out high-quality hits.
By 1921, Talmadge was the most popular actress in America. In 1927, she started a lasting tradition when she accidentally stepped into wet cement in front of the newly-constructed Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
Talmadge's marriage to Schenck took an odd turn in 1926 when while filming a silent version of Camille she began an affair with co-star Gilbert Roland. Schenck refused Talmadge's request for a divorce (this was long before the no-fault divorce laws of today), but continued to cast the couple together to take advantage of their box office popularity. Not until Talmadge began an affair with comedian George Jessel in 1934 did Schenck finally relent.
Crippled by arthritis, Talmadge lived out her retirement in seclusion and died of pneumonia in 1957.
Postscript: A picture of sisters Constance and Norma Talmadge:
Anita is a nice, round 100 today. Well, she would be if she hadn't died at the age of 98. But like Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks, I'm sure she's still out there somewhere.
Tomorrow, I'll be back on the Greta Garbo kick. In the meantime, here's a repost of an essay I wrote about her some time ago, coupled with my favorite pictures of her.
I have to confess, before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of Anita Page, but now that I've seen half a dozen of her movies and read a bit about her, it's clear that she was just as cute as the proverbial bug's ear and no doubt somebody you would have been lucky to know. Certainly Herschel House must have thought so—the Navy pilot was married to her for fifty-four years, until his death in 1991.
Mostly Page played sweet innocents who found themselves in a melodramatic load of trouble (see, for example, Our Modern Maidens), but her turn in Our Dancing Daughters as a self-absorbed, gold-digging be-yotch who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her was unforgettable and should have presaged a longer career. Louis B. Mayer, a warped frustrated old man, saw to it that it didn't.
Well, you take what you can get.
Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie. None of this is meant to be taken seriously—just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.
What's not to like?
Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.
In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
"Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said years later. "I say that because I did the acting. Joan Crawford danced her way through it. I acted my way through it."
Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age flapper phenomenon. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever. Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.
Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was infatuated with the young actress.
"Are you starting to believe your own pub- licity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.
"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"
Our Dancing Daughters is one of those odd silent-sound hybrids of the very early sound era. Made not long after The Jazz Singer, the film has a soundtrack, including several prominently featured songs, but no dialogue, only title cards. I actually find this approach preferable to early talkies such as The Broadway Melody where, for example, Anita Page's dialogue competes with the rustling of her own dress.
Fortunately, sound technology improved rapidly over the course of a year.
MGM's The Broadway Melody, billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, was the top grossing movie of 1929 as well as the first sound picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, and further cemented sound's commercial future. The Broadway Melody was the top box office movie of 1929 and also featured "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."
Douglas Shearer out of necessity invented the concept of the "playback"—pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to—when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song. This technique became the industry standard for decades.
"I thought Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said later, "but Broadway Melody was Bessie Love's. I love good English, and I hated saying things like, 'Gee, ain't it elegant?' In my opinion, silents were much better than talkies. One thing you could have was mood music, which you could have playing throughout your scene to inspire you. The trouble with talkies was, they let you have the music, but they'd stop it when you had to talk, and that was always a let-down for me."
After The Broadway Melody, Page made two more movies with Joan Crawford, and appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable.
Her final movie for MGM was 1932's Prosperity, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. On the outs with studio head Louis B. Mayer after twice refusing to sleep with him (the second proposition made in the presence of Page's mother), Page served out the remaining years of her MGM contract on loan to poverty row studios, making such low-budget bombs as Jungle Bride and Hitch Hike To Heaven. It was an ignominious end for an actress who just a couple of years before had been second only to Greta Garbo as the studio's top draw.
Page left Hollywood and married Navy flyer Herschel House in January 1937. After his death, she began to make films again, mostly low-budget fare such as The Crawling Brain and Witchcraft XI. On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Page received a standing ovation at a special screening of The Broadway Melody. She was last surviving attendee of the first Oscar ceremony and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight.
So since for the 1932-33 awards year I'm using the expanded "Golden Globes" format (splitting up awards for picture, actor and actress between drama and comedy/musical), I'm sure most have you have been wondering who would have won for the previous five years if I'd been doing the Golden Globes thing all along.
Good question, thanks for asking.
It's kind of a mixed bag, as it turns out, which is why I didn't use this format in the first place. For every inspired choice, such as Marion Davies (comedy, Show People) or Edward G. Robinson (drama, Little Caesar), you get somebody like Maurice Chevalier (comedy/musical, The Love Parade) who'd have readers running for the exits. And then you start wondering whether I would really have given Marie Dressler the best supporting actress award of 1929-30 knowing I'd also give her an award for 1930-31. And on and on.
Clearly, I have too much time on my hands.
Anyway, here they are. Make of them what you will. At least Al Jolson dressed for the occasion.
1927-28 Picture (Comedy): The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin) Actor (Comedy or Musical): Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) Actress (Drama): Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven and Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) 1928-29 Picture (Comedy): Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck) Actor (Drama): Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March) Actress (Comedy): Marion Davies (Show People) 1929-30 Picture (Comedy or Musical): Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor) Actor (Comedy/Musical): Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade) Actress (Comedy/Musical): Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade) 1930-31 Picture (Drama): M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal) Actor (Drama): Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) Actress (Comedy): Marie Dressler (Min and Bill) 1931-32 Picture (Comedy/Musical): À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford) Actor (Comedy/Musical): Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (The Music Box) Actress (Drama): Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)
Tomorrow I'll be back to my regular blogging schedule, starting with my choice for best actor of 1931-32. In the meantime, there's a Buster Keaton double feature on Turner Classic Movies tonight starting at midnight, Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator, both from 1924, both on a short list of Keaton's best.
Here's what TCM has to say about them:
12:00am [Silent] Sherlock Jr. (1924) In this silent film, a movie projectionist dreams himself into a mystery movie. Cast: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Ward Crane, Joseph Keaton Dir: Buster Keaton BW-44 mins
1:00am [Silent] Navigator, The (1924) In this silent film, two members of the idle rich have to move fast when they're stranded on an abandoned luxury liner. Cast: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Frederick Vroom, Noble Johnson Dir: Donald Crisp BW-60 mins
Tomorrow night on TCM starting at 8 p.m. are six Marx Brothers classics, including Katie Award nominee for best picture of 1931-32, Monkey Business.
8:00pm [Comedy] Monkey Business (1931) Four stowaways get mixed up with gangsters while running riot on an ocean liner. Cast: Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx Dir: Norman McLeod BW-78 mins
9:30pm [Comedy] Horse Feathers (1932) In an effort to beef up his school's football team, a college president mistakenly recruits two loonies. Cast: Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx Dir: Norman McLeod BW-67 mins
10:45pm [Comedy] Duck Soup (1933) When he's named dictator of Freedonia, a con artist declares war on the neighboring kingdom. Cast: Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx Dir: Leo McCarey BW-69 mins
12:00am [Comedy] Night at the Opera, A (1935) Three zanies turn an operatic performance into chaos in their efforts to promote their protege's romance with the leading lady. Cast: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kitty Carlisle Dir: Sam Wood BW-91 mins
2:00am [Comedy] Day At The Races, A (1937) A group of zanies tries to save a pretty girl's sanitarium. Cast: Groucho [Marx], Chico [Marx], Harpo [Marx], Allan Jones Dir: Sam Wood BW-109 mins
4:00am [Comedy] At The Circus (1939) The Marx Bros. team up to keep a circus from going bankrupt. Cast: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kenny Baker Dir: Edward Buzzell BW-87 mins
This is the Marx Brothers at their best. You don't want to miss it.
It's March 23, 2010, and we here at the Monkey are celebrating the first anniversary of being able to say "We here at the Monkey." I don't know if you're getting anything out of all this blogging business, but I sure am: a chance to re-watch old favorites like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, discover new favorites like Anita Page, Douglas Fairbanks and René Clair, and hear from movie fans, both the living and the dead, from all over the world.
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are keeping the celebration pretty low key, just the usual collection of jugglers, bikini dancers and session musicians in gorilla suits. We might even squeeze in time for a movie or two.
If you're in the neighborhood, stop on by. We'd love to see you!
This week's entry on Turner Classic Movie's Silent Sunday (technically Monday morning at 12:15 a.m., EDT) is Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality from 1923. It was his first really great feature-length film and started an incredible six-year run that included Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman.
If you haven't seen this one and you have access to TCM, I highly recommend it.
From TCM's website:
12:15am [Silent] Our Hospitality (1923) In this silent film, a man returns home to the old South and gets caught between feuding families. Cast: Buster Keaton, Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton Jr., Joseph Keaton Dir: John Blystone BW-73 mins
"Grand Hotel. Always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens."
I think most people hear that line, spoken at the beginning and again at the end of the Oscar-winning movie Grand Hotel and assume it's meant ironically, that we've just seen the tragic collision of five desperate people—a has-been ballerina who wants to be alone, a bankrupt aristocrat turned unwilling jewel thief, a haughty plutocrat with a failing business, a secretary willing to turn tricks for a new frock, and a dying nebbish who wants to see what he's been missing—and we know that in fact a lot happens at the Grand Hotel.
But maybe if he'd said the same thing differently—"There's nothing new under the sun"—we'd appreciate what he's really driving at.
That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.Is there anything of which one might say, "See this, it is new"? Already it has existed for ages Which were before us.
That's the Preacher, by the way, writing in the Book of Ecclesiastes and for those of you who remember their Old Testament, you know Ecclesiastes is one of the most morose and fatalistic works of literature ever written, a meditation on the futility of, well, everything, that makes Kafka feel whimsical by comparison.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. ... One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
It's telling that the character who speaks the famous last lines of Grand Hotel is a war veteran (Lewis Stone) who lost the right side of his face to a grenade. For him, Berlin's Grand Hotel is not so much a residence as a sort of limbo where he waits to pass from this world into the next, and while he waits, he watches, he and the generation of men buried under the poppy fields of France. He and they wait, they watch and they pass silent judgment on these five desperate people who have so much and savor it so little.
To pay a debt owed to vicious gamblers, "The Baron" (John Barrymore) intends to steal a strand of priceless pearls from the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) but falls in love with her instead. In the next room, factory owner Preysing (Wallace Beery) schemes to hold on to his failing business by telling a whopping lie, while his secretary (Joan Crawford) hopes to leverage some nice clothes and a little rent money out of him before giving her lovely body to her piggish boss; frankly, she'd rather be with the Baron. And clinging to them all, hoping to partake of the crumbs from their table, is Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore), an invisible little bookkeeper who has just received a death sentence from his doctor.
The faintly ludicrous story—"too melodramatic," Katie says—was first a novel, Vicki Baum's German-language Menschen im Hotel, then William Drake's Broadway play, and sometimes it creaks with the contrivances of the source material. But Grand Hotel was perhaps the first movie ever to boast an all-star cast, and boy genius producer Irving Thalberg determined that it be as glitzy and glamourous as the MGM movie machine could make it. It still works as a time capsule of that era's star power.
Thalberg always conceived of the story as a showcase for Greta Garbo, MGM's biggest star. Director Edmund Goulding suggested Buster Keaton for the part of the dying nebbish; Thalberg wanted rising star Clark Gable for the Baron. Louis B. Mayer vetoed both ideas. He wanted to sign John Barrymore to a long-term contract and with John's brother Lionel already working for MGM, thought by casting the one he could entice the other. Thalberg cast Joan Crawford, another MGM contract player and veteran of many shopgirl roles, to balance the increasingly esoteric Garbo. And with a lot of arm-twisting, he got the popular Beery to consent to play the unpleasant Preysing.
The resulting clash of personalities may have made for an unhappy set—with Crawford blasting out Bing Crosby records in her dressing room, Beery taking constant lunch breaks, and Garbo sitting silently in a corner—but audiences ate it up, turning Grand Hotel into one of the year's biggest hits. It won the Oscar for best picture despite receiving no other nominations.
Still, the all-star cast, while selling tickets, actually works against the cohesiveness of the movie as a whole. These five great actors have five very different styles and it's the rare viewer who responds to each of them equally. Leslie Halliwell cites John Barrymore, Daniel Eagan prefers Wallace Beery, Danny Peary likes Joan Crawford and TV Guide praises Lionel Barrymore. (The only one they all seem to agree on, perhaps a little unfairly, is Greta Garbo—"Revival house audiences laugh today at ... her permanently furrowed brow," says TV Guide—which is unfortunate since this may be the film most fans first see her in. If you don't know her work, I recommend you start with the more accessible Flesh and the Devil, Camille or Ninotchka then branch out from there.)
The character and storyline you focus on may depend on which actor's style you're most comfortable with. Personally, I find myself drawn to Lionel Barrymore's Otto Kringelein and his interaction with the Baron (uncharacteristically underplayed by brother John).
After a lifetime of anonymous devotion to a heartless corporation, Kringelein learns he has a terminal illness. With no family to look after him and no heirs to the nest egg he's been scrimping his whole life to save, Kringelein determines to spend every last dime on a spree at the best hotel in Berlin, the Grand Hotel of the movie's title. But Kringelein is a cringing mouse of a man, and the habits of a lifetime prove difficult to break. He wants to live but has no idea how.
Enter the Baron who despite the gulf between their social standing takes Kringelein under his wing. Kringelein gives the viewer a rooting interest among these otherwise self-absorbed and self-destructive characters, and the interaction between him and the Baron lends Grand Hotel a poignancy it would otherwise lack. Writing for the New York Times, Mordaunt Hall said after the film's premiere that "Mr. Barrymore brings out every possible note of this sensitive person" and that "[i]f ever an actor got under the skin of a character Mr. Barrymore does here."
Barrymore's Kringelein becomes a rumination on what it means to be alive and it's ironic that he's so busy trying to make up for lost time—"living," he calls it (gambling, dancing, pouring champagne down his throat)—to notice the life-and-death predicament of his one true friend, the Baron. Not until Kringelein abandons his self-absorption does he begin to live. The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa would later mine this same theme to great effect in the 1952 movie Ikiru.
Let's face it. Grand Hotel is a pretty depressing movie. Despite the glamourous stars and Cedric Gibbons's fabulous art Deco sets, it has more in common with Kafka than Astaire and Rogers, and when it's all said and done, the film turns out to be something of a cold bottle of champagne served lovingly to a cockroach. It did, however, set the pattern for a whole series of potboilers from Stagecoach to Airport about a diverse group of strangers having a bad day.
And it did give us what is arguably the best performance of Lionel Barrymore's long career.
Barrymore, by the way, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1878, the eldest sibling of an acting dynasty that included John and sister and future Oscar-winner Ethel. He began acting on Broadway in his early twenties and made his first movie in 1911, the first of more than two hundred films.
Barrymore won an Academy Award for acting in 1931's A Free Soul and was nominated as a director for the Gloria Swanson vehicle Madame X, but he's best known, in America at least, for his role as George Bailey's nemesis, Mr. Potter, in the Frank Capra Christmas classic, It's A Wonderful Life.
Crippling arthritis confined Barrymore to a wheelchair in 1937 but didn't derail his career; he played key roles in such films as Key Largo, You Can't Take It With You, Dinner At Eight and Captains Courageous, and portrayed the recurring character Dr. Leonard B. Gillespie in fifteen movies.
"I've got a lot of ham in me," Barrymore once admitted. A lot of talent, too.
He died of a heart attack in 1954. He was seventy-six.
It's impossible to say with any certainty who invented the pie-in-the-face gag so much associated with silent film comedy. The pie itself was probably invented by the ancient Egyptians during the Neolithic Period, around 9500 B.C. and my best guess is that the first pie was thrown for laughs somewhere around 9500-and-ten-minutes B.C. The tomb of pharaoh Ramses II, who took power in 1304 B.C., included etchings of royal bakers preparing galettes, a thin-crusted pie stuffed with honey and nuts—maybe the first artistic representation of a pie in history.
Legend has it that Mabel Normand threw motion pictures' first pie, hitting an unsuspecting Roscoe Arbuckle in the short A Noise From The Deep (1913). The fact is though, it was the otherwise forgettable Mr. Flip (1909) starring veteran comic Ben Turpin that was the first film to feature an actor getting hit in the face with a pie. Famous for his crossed eyes and brush moustache, Turpin began his career in burlesque and vaudeville before making his film debut in 1907 at the Essanay Studios. Mr. Flip has all the appearances of being based on a stage routine Turpin had earlier perfected, leading me to believe that the pie-in-the-face gag was already an old one by the time it showed up on film.
Still, there are historians who insist Normand should get credit for throwing the first pie (as opposed to merely shoving it into the victim's face). Well, maybe. Even that much is hard to confirm. I've read that Normand in fact threw the first pie at a stagehand who had made a pass at her, and that the story has morphed over time into credit for inventing the thrown-pie gag. I've also read that it wasn't Normand who threw the pie at all but Arbuckle himself and that he hit co-star Nick Cogley. A copy of A Noise From The Deep resides in New York's Museum of Modern Art where it is screened periodically. If I ever see it, I'll let you know the scoop.
"[N]umber one is we don't use a regular baker's pie," he told Markle, "and throwing the pie in a cardboard plate is no good because that plate flying off detracts. So, what we used to do is our prop man would get our baker—whoever is closest to the studio—to make pie crust, two of them, with nothing in them, and take just a little flour and water to make a paste, just enough to glue the two together. That was so that your fingers wouldn't go through the bottom of it. Now you fill it, about an inch, with just flour and water mixed, which clings like glue and stretches. Now, on top of it, if I'm going to hit somebody in dark clothes, a brunette, you put a lemon meringue type of topping on it and garnish with whipped cream, you see. When it was a light costume, a blond, something like that, you put in blueberry, and then enough whipped cream just to splatter.
Keaton was credited with once hitting a movie villain "plum in the pus" from a distance of twenty-seven feet.
The Three Stooges later revived the art of the pie fight in such shorts as In the Sweet Pie and Pie, and Mel Brooks staged one of the best known pie fights in Blazing Saddles. And then serious film fanatics are aware of the pie-fight-that-wasn't that was originally to end Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The fight was to have broken out in the war room and the sequence was filmed, but Kubrick later decided to delete it. If you look closely though you can still see the pies when the Russian ambassador partakes of the war room's lavish buffet.
