Laugh ’til it Hurts

Any authentic Movie Night Program needs to include a two-reel comedy short on the bill ahead of  the feature, and thereby hangs a ramble. 

A “reel” in the old days equated to approximately ten minutes of screen time, thus a six-reel feature ran about an hour and a two-reel comedy short ran about twenty minutes. It formed a buffer between the News of the Day and the serials, cartoons and features on either side. In most ways, the two-reel comedy was the progenitor of television's half-hour sitcom, the main difference being that the “situations” changed in most every “episode,” even when the stars were the same.

Its best practitioners are barely remembered today, and regarded with polite disdain by many who do remember them and wish that others would not. Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges were masters of the form, and even Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Chase and other greats found their first successes in the two-reelers.

But alas, any guest audience who attends your movie nights is going to be made up of Modern People; and no audience is more averse to humor than a modern one.

No genre has been hit harder by contemporary social conventions than Comedy. It was always the most delicate of genres, for being so very subjective and personal. But the rise of Social Media, Personal Offense and “Sensitivity” that is anything but sensitive have conspired to reduce comedy to a series of poop jokes and pee jokes and snot jokes and Memes. Even in my own home I can’t show W.C. Fields comedies to a mixed crowd, because my guests find him too offensive. With his alcoholism and his avowed distaste for women, children and dogs, Fields has rendered himself Radioactive in the minds of over-sensitive, over-zealous, self-appointed Guardians of Good Taste. This is precisely why he is so funny, and why it’s so important to defend the past from the censoriousness of the present.

The simplest way to explain it is that all true comedy involves Pain. Comedy is Tragedy seen through Silly Glasses; and in our modern humor-free world, laughing at the misfortunes of others is no longer socially acceptable, especially if those misfortunes occur to politically “protected” species. 

Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and The Stooges in particular have never been highly regarded by anyone lacking a Y chromosome. At least in part, it’s because they never put women on a pedestal, and never held back from showing women being every bit as imperfect the men. Dim-witted and ineffectual as Laurel and Hardy undeniably presented themselves, they were easily dominated by the harridans that they were often (on screen) married to. Much of the comedy in their ouvre is built on their efforts to accomplish the very things that their wives do not want them to accomplish — and on how they fail so spectacularly at accomplishing it. Fields, on the other hand, rarely went against the wishes of his screen spouses, unless it in some way involved drink.

Don’t misunderstand. There are usually good reasons for a species to be protected. But comedy has be approached without rules of engagement. Comedy only works when it is completely one hundred percent democratic, when there are no sacred cows. Comedy only works when EVERYBODY gets a pie in the face.

The Stooges quite literally did just that, while Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, L&H and the other great comedians always gave as good as they got, and got as good as they gave.

So when you are putting together a program for your movie nights, do not neglect the comedy short, even if the comedians attempt to milk one of your sacred cows. (W.C. Fields once famously tried to take a large tax deduction of milk as a business expense for comedians!). We ignore comedy at the expense of our culture, at the expense of our humanity — and although the modern world refuses to acknowledge anything above simple biology, it isn’t Pooping and Peeing and Fucking that Makes Us Human. What makes us human are our more complex imperfections: including fear, cruelty, dishonesty, and yes, even sexism and racism. Without seeing the negatives, we can’t see the more positive human traits such as hope, aspiration, warmth or devotion. 

When classic comedy embarrasses you, reflect on how far we have come. That’s what it’s there for.

—Thorn.

Get With The Program

 

Movies were the start of it all. Books were always saved in public and personal libraries, but movies played before one’s eyes and then vanished, seemingly for good; and so the chance to save them the way one kept and cherished books was almost too fantastic a thing to be hoped for. VHS was a dream come true.

At the earliest opportunity, feature films became the core of my video collection. At first I taped them off the air; then I bought them on VHS and later DVD and digital. Recently, my collection of feature films crossed over the 2,000 mark.

And that’s just what I’ve actually watched at least once. Currently my queue of unwatched movies that I’m hoping to get around to sooner or later numbers at least 1,200 more.

With that many feature films all begging to be watched, it’s essential that my weekly viewing schedule include at least two, and sometimes three Movie Nights. At that rate, I don’t expect to run out of new-to-me attractions before the day I die, but it doesn’t stop me from adding more when I can. It’s the Preservationist Instinct in me. Because as movie theaters continue to die out, our options and selections will grow more limited. Streaming services are no option at all as far as I’m concerned. To be pro-active in your choices in movies, you’re going to need to keep a lot of them in-house. Lots of folks use Plex and other apps to organize their collections; at the moment I prefer to make my own arrangements.

I tend to approach feature films on a seasonal basis; this started probably two decades ago when I was in another life, working a job that I hated and facing a long cold dreary winter without relief. I thought, what will make me happy this winter? My “Sci-Fi Fridays” were born.

Twice or thrice a year I give over Sunday nights to mysteries of the cozy variety; meanwhile, Tuesdays tend to be a catch-all and catch-as-catch-can.

On the face of it, organizing your own personal Film Festival is simple enough, and yours will vary wildly from anyone else’s according to taste. The real question is, how far do you want to take it, and how authentic do you want to get?

To this day, movie theaters still show previews of coming attractions, but from the 1930s all the way through to the ‘60s (and in some places lasting even into the ‘70s), your ten cents got you not just a movie, but a full program of short features, comedies, cartoons, serials and newsreels. Recreating an authentic theater program has long been an interest of mine, but be warned that it’s very much a bottomless rabbit hole.

Trailers for coming attractions are some of the hardest things to find in any depth, as there are generally no official releases of these, and you’re most likely to find them as extras on DVD or Blu-Ray. On the other hand, some private collectors have made a lot of vintage trailers available on YouTube, but if you’re like me and want to have local copies you’re going to have to find a way to download them. There are ways and means of doing this, but you’ll find they’re in a constant state of flux; any links I could include here would likely be invalid by the time I posted them. So you’re going to have to research this for yourself. It’s worth doing, though, because it adds an extra layer of authenticity (and therefore fun) to start your show with a concise but thematically-appropriate collection of Coming Attractions.

FYI, back in The Day, the Coming Attractions reels usually ran at the END of the show, to help clear the auditorium. That’s why they’re properly called “trailers.” I don’t know when exactly they were moved to the beginning of the show, but that’s where they’ve lived for as long as I’ve been alive, which is a long time for some of you. It’s now so customary to lead with them that “who am I to kick?” Doing it any other way seems wrong somehow.

Next up, vintage Newsreels. These are even harder to find than trailers, but there are samples lurking on YouTube and at the Internet Archive. Nearly every one of the major studios had their own Newsreel program, but Fox’s MovieTone News, usually announced by Lowell Thomas, are most common today — and even then, most of the available entries are Major Historical Events or are oddball Color Pieces. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” but this is an aspect of the American cinematic experience that I wish was far better preserved and more commonly accessible than it is.

Novelty shorts are a very nice boost to your movie programs, and thank goodness for Warner’s which makes a large amount of these available to us on affordable DVD-Rs via the Warner Archive Collection, a print-on-demand model that makes hundreds of titles available that would not be commercially viable any other way. Here’s the link: https://www.warnerbros.com/collections/warner-archive. My advice is to buy them and rip the DVDs to digital: not only for the convenience, but as protection against the disks going bad (DVD-Rs are notoriously unstable).

You’ve got a wide range of material to choose from here: short dramatic films such as the ones in the CRIME DOES NOT PAY series, comedic puff pieces such as the Pete Smith, Robert Benchley or Joe McDoakes novelties; travelogues such as the wonderful full-color MGM TravelTalks, jazzy concerts (the predecessor of the Music Video) and records of stage vaudeville performances like the ones included on Warner’s VITAPHONE VARIETIES series.

Serials — those fifteen-minute slices of action, low budget adventure and cliffhangers (both Star Wars and Indiana Jones were inspired by them) were a staple of Saturday afternoon matinees, but I like to include a serial chapter each and every time I run a feature, whether or not friends are present. They’re less plentiful on the ground than they were back in the days of VHS tape, (Republic was actively releasing them for a while in the ‘80s and ‘90s) but limited numbers can still be found in most retail outlets. Kino-Lorber has released two of Republic Pictures’ best on Blu-Ray: THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL from 1941, and DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE, from 1939. Both are terrific examples of the genre: once you get through all 12 chapters of either, you’ll know whether or not want to dig deeper into the genre.

There are a couple more genres to explore here, but they deserve more space.  In particular, no other film genre has been more harmed by modern sensibilities than comedy; I’ll explore two reelers and B-movies Next Time.

Happy viewing!

— Thorn.