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American silent film comedy is generally remembered a the domain of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, but by the 1920s, the mental and physical energy of hundreds of bright young men, women, children, and chimpanzees was being focused on slapstick, and an avalanche of nonsense flowed out to theaters every week. This final volume of Kino on Video's Slapstick Encyclopedia focuses on six particularly madcap entries in the slapstick canon, produced at the smaller independent "fun factories," starring several master comedians who have yet to be awarded proper recognition.
Larry Semon unleashes his particular brand of non-stop action, wild stunts, and inventive effects in The Grocery Clerk, while Three of a Kind captures the chaos that ensues when a trio of massive comedians (nicknamed "A Ton of Fun") invade a posh nightclub. A zany, pixilated comedy that foreshadowed the heyday of the one-reel cartoon, the live-action Family Life sends up every aspect of American domesticity: automobiles, vacations, pre-fab houses, gang warfare, and natural selection.
The all-but-forgotten talents of Charley Bowers and Billy Bletcher are commemorated in two of their most sensational and convention-bending comedies: Now You Tell One and Dry and Thirsty.
But the piece-de-resistance of this collection is Yukon Jake, an elaborate and beautifully rendered parody of Northern adventures in the Jack London mode. Directed by Del Lord and starring slapstick's cock-eyed anarchist supreme -- Ben Turpin -- Yukon Jake rips down the barriers of conventional comedy and serves up an unforgettabele farce in which the services of every level of production, from the story room to the tilting department, are put toward the generation of laughter in its raw, unadulterated essence, the true embodiment of slapstick. |
