Stuff and Nonsense, Part II

More ink-based classic comedy odds and ends filched from Ebay.

A 1922 trade ad for Charley Chase's brother Paul Parrott's first series for Hal Roach.

At five reels, Grandma's Boy (1922) was Harold Lloyd's first true feature, the four reel featurette A Sailor-Made Man having been released the year before. I love the copy emphasizing that Grandma's Boy was still doing phenomenal business "in the Midst of Summer", a reminder that in the days before air-conditioning, crowded theaters in Summer were nasty, smelly sweatboxes you wouldn't want to spend too much time in.

1926 Pathe' exhibitor's yearbook promo for Lloyd's features. There's something a little unsettling about that portrait of Harold.

And speaking of unsettling, here's a 1922 trade ad for Eddie Lyons' Arrow comedies. Maybe that expression meant "zany funmaker" in 1922. Today it means "dangerous madman concealing a knife".

Nothing duller than a "respectable" silent short comedy. If you were the type of movie patron offended by the crude and untoward antics of, say, that disreputable rapscallion Buster Keaton, you could always watch Carter de Haven for a round of polite and barely audible chuckles. Mr. P. A. Powers is the same Pat Powers that distributed and provided the sound equipment for Walt Disney's first talking cartoons, screwed him out of his profits, and then signed his key animator and business partner Ub Iwerks out from under him to set up another studio.

Exploding stoves are wacky! Look at that cat fly! Ho ho! Who stars in Fox Imperial Comedies? Apparently no one worth mentioning by name. Just put your trust in William Fox that the stars are fully qualified and accredited Laughmakers. George Marshall did direct some of the Imperial Comedies, but King of the Kitchen (1926) was directed by none other than former Karno vet and Chaplin crony Albert Austin, best remembered as the wonderfully deadpan man whose alarm clock Chaplin eviscerates in The Pawnshop (1916). Austin reportedly spent his final years as a studio guard at Warner Brothers.. sad, but a definite improvement over the fate of former silent star Karl Dane who was reduced to selling hot dogs outside the MGM gates... as I'm sure I've mentioned before, ghoul that I am.

This 1926 promo for the Fox Animal Comedies was drawn by cartoonist, animator, puppeteer and all-round renaissance man Tony Sarg, who, among other things, created the first figural balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1927 (including the first character balloon, Felix the Cat). Sarg's association with Fox and the Animal Comedies is a total mystery to me as he had been out of the film business for several years. As for the films, I'm assuming they consisted of comically edited and doctored up nature footage.

Any idea who the mustachioed star of Educational's 1922 Mermaid Comedies might be? At first glance I thought it might be Billy Bletcher, but the dates don't add up. Is it Jimmie Adams, perhaps?

In 1926, Educational's tag "The Best of the Old and the Best of the New" had yet to take on the decidedly negative connotations it would during the 30s when the studio developed a decidedly unfair reputation as the elephants' graveyard of film comedy. They had a pretty good lineup in 1926, but I suspect that Educational made more money that year from the globally popular Felix the Cat cartoons than from the rest of their of their output combined.

One of Hal Roach's numerous Westerns starring Rex the Wonder Horse, this one written in part by Stan Laurel. There's even a horse love interest, "Lady", and a horse villain, "The Killer"! Kids in 1926 must have gone nuts over this.

1926 Charlie Chaplin reissues from Pathe'. The copy essentially reads "Chaplin. 'Nuff said."

The Florodora Boys

The "Florodora Boys" number from Warner Brothers' 1929 all-star extravaganza The Show of Shows is more remarkable for who is in it rather than for any inherent entertainment value it may have.. which apparently holds true for most of the film. The number is a reference to the musical Florodora which opened in 1899 at the Lyric in London before running on Broadway for 505 performances at the New York and the Casino between 1900 and 1902. It was revived three times, the last being a Schubert production of 1920. For reasons that are beyond me, the question of what happened to the original Florodora Boys became a common pop reference for years. A 1938 Screen Gems cartoon, Midnight Frolics, features the ghosts of the original Florodora Boys. This number is introduced by Frank Fay doing his self-depreciating shtick that probably played better in person than it does in this film. I personally think he's rather funny in small doses, but he's omnipresent in The Show of Shows. The Warners clearly felt they had a find in Frank. The number itself opens with a chorus line consisting of Alice Day, Lila Lee, Myrna Loy, Patsy Ruth Miller, Marian Nixon, and Sally O'Neil who really do nothing more than chant and look pretty (again, the novelty was in the lineup and frilly Edwardian costumes). Ben Turpin, Heine Conklin, Lupino Lane, Bert Roach, Lloyd Hamilton, and someone else I have yet to identify (he plays the plumber.. Would you help me out here, folks?) then take the stage and each gets a stanza and a little bit of business; Turpin does his forward somersault, Lane does his jackknife split, Conklin stares blankly, etc.. Lupino Lane is particularly interesting here as he crosses back over the line from silent slapstick to the world of musical comedy from which he originally came (and in which he would eventually find his greatest success, largely as the originator of "The Lambeth Walk").

Requiem for a Professional Patsy

Reader Greg G. has brought to my attention this incredible new Lloyd Hamilton DVD set from Looser Than Loose. "Ham" Hamilton will be familar to anyone who has read Walter Kerr's indespensible critical history of silent comedy, The Silent Clowns. In it, Kerr deftly analyzes Hamilton's Move Along (1926), presenting it as an example of the strengths of quirks of silent comedy as a whole. Lloyd Hamilton's best known character, the vaguely prissy, precise, and put-upon sap of his 1920s shorts, was plainly the inspiration for Jackie Gleason's "Poor Soul" right down to the flat cap. Despite his strong popularity and respect within the industry for his talents (Keaton once referred to Ham as "one of the funniest men in silent pictures."), attempts to move into features met with very limited success, leaving Hamilton largely confined to Educational shorts until his untimely death in 1935 from complications following stomach surgery. As Glenn Mitchell writes in A-Z of Silent Film Comedy, Hamilton also had the severe misfortune of having worked for studios "with the worst survival rate." The vast bulk of what must have been Ham's finest work, his 1920s Educational series for director Jack White, went up in flames in the devestating 1937 Fox vault fire, leaving little more than tantalizing fragments of the career of the silent era's most unsung comic talent. The Looser Than Loose set appears to pull together most of what remains, from the early "Ham and Bud" Kalem shorts co-starring the diminutive Bud Duncan (much, much later to appear at Monogram as Snuffy Smith), to the two-reel abridgment of Ham's first feature, His Darker Self (1924), and tosses in a disc of mouth-watering extras besides (drool). Now where'd I put that spare $65...

Disc 1: Ham and Bud, Beyond Redemption and deodorant
"Ham" in a Harem (Kalem, 3/30/15)
"Ham" and the Sausage Factory (Kalem, 2/12/15)
The Spook Raisers (Kalem, 7/29/15)
The Great Detective (Kalem, 7/18/16)
The Love Magnet (Kalem, 10/10/16)
The Deadly Doughnut (Kalem, 4/14/17)
The Bathtub Bandit (Kalem, 10/31/17)
- with Ethel Teare

Disc 2: The Misadventures of a Poor Soul, Part One
Jonah Jones (Educational, 9/21/24)
- with Babe London, Dick Sutherland
Careful Please (Educational, 2/7/26)
- with Louise Carver, Stanley Blystone, Eddie Boland, Glen Cavender
Nobody's Business (Educational, 3/29/26)
- with Dick Sutherland, Stanley Blystone, Eddie Boland
Bonus Features:
Nothing Matters (Educational, 1926)
- with Stanley Blystone, Eddie Boland, Anita Garvin. Reel one only
A Flyer in Flapjacks (Kalem, 2/20/17)
- Ham and Bud with Ethel Teare

Disc 3: The Misadventures of a Poor Soul, Part Two
His Darker Self (G&H, 3/16/24)
Crushed (Educational, 11/23/24)
- with Blanche Payson
Move Along (Educational, 7/25/26)
- with Glen Cavender
Bonus Features:
Hooked (Educational, 2/8/25)
- 16mm fragment: approx. 5 minutes
Good Evening Judge (Kalem, 8/8/16)
- Ham and Bud

Disc 4: Ham Speaks!
Good Morning Sheriff (Educational, 5/18/30)
- with Eddie Baker, Lige Conley
Toot Sweet (Educational, 11/10/29)
- with Will Hays
Don't Be Nervous (Educational, 7/7/29)
- with Heinie Conklin, Dick Sutherland, Glen Cavender, Leo White
Bonus Features:
Hollywood on Parade (6/5/32) - Lloyd Hamilton and a galaxy of stars
The Model Janitor (Kalem, 2/13/17) - Ham and Bud with Ethel Teare

Disc 5: Extras
Bonus Ham and Bud Short: Raskey's Road Show (Kalem, 6/15/15)
April Fool (Educational, 11/21/20)
- directed by Charles Parrott (9.5mm fragment)
Jonah Jones press sheet
Unidentified Ham and Bud
- possibly Rival Fakers (11/21/16)
Oh No! What Happened to Bud Duncan?
Casper's Weekend (F.B.O., 1928)
- with Thelma Hill, Kit Guard
Glass Slide Show
Photo Gallery
Bonus Ham and Bud Short 2: The Phoney Cannibal (Kalem, 4/27/15)
Unidentified Fox Sunshine Clip
- probably from His Musical Sneeze (2/23/19)
Ben Model's Lloyd Hamilton Theme
Acknowledgements

Liner Notes by Steve Massa
Music tracks digitally restored from vintage recordings by
Looser Than Loose
Original piano theme composed and played by Ben Model

Happy Turkey Day!

Silent comedian Lloyd Hamilton would probably be regarded almost as highly as Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon today if the vast bulk of his filmography hadn't gone up in smoke. Described by Buster Keaton as an "overgrown boy", Hamilton spent years at Kalem as half of the team of Ham and Bud (partner Bud Duncan went on to play Snuffy Smith in two fairly funny wartime Monogram comedies), moved on to Fox (most of whose silent comedies were destroyed in a fire), and then to Educational (yet another fire) where he starred in a long series of shorts directed by Jack White, brother of Jules. In this late 20s Thanksgiving-y publicity shot, Lloyd takes aim at White.. or White's stuffed owl. You figure it out...