City LightsCharlie Chaplin (left) and Harry Myers (centre) in City Lights (1931), directed by Charlie Chaplin.© 1931 United Artists Corporation; photograph from a private collection
Buster Keaton possessed a kind of comic talent very different from Chaplin’s, but both men were wonderfully subtle actors with a keen sense of the tragic often contained within the comic, and both were major directors of their period. Keaton, like Chaplin, was born into a theatrical family and began performing in vaudeville skits at a young age. Intrigued by the new film medium, he left the stage and worked for two years as a supporting comedian for Arbuckle’s production company. In 1919 Keaton formed his own production company, where over the next four years he made 20 shorts (including One Week, 1920; The Boat, 1921; Cops, 1922; and The Balloonatic, 1923) that represent, with Chaplin’s Mutual films, the acme of American slapstick comedy. A Keaton trademark was the “trajectory gag,” in which perfect timing of acting, directing, and editing propels his film character through a geometric progression of complicated sight gags that seem impossibly dangerous but are still dramatically logical. Such routines inform all of Keaton’s major features—Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and his masterpieces The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Keaton’s greatest films, all made before his company was absorbed by MGM, have a reflexive quality that indicates his fascination with film as a medium. Although some of his MGM films were financially successful, the factory-like studio system stifled Keaton’s creativity, and he was reduced to playing bit parts after the early 1930s.
Buster Keaton in Go West (1925).The Kobal Collection
Important but lesser silent comics were Lloyd, the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Langdon, and Arbuckle. Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door. He specialized in a variant of Keystone mayhem known as the “comedy of thrills,” in which—as in Lloyd’s most famous features, Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925)—an innocent protagonist finds himself placed in physical danger. Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach. They made 27 silent two-reelers, including Putting Pants on Philip (1927) and Liberty (1929), and became even more popular in the 1930s in such sound films as Another Fine Mess (1930) and Sons of the Desert (1933). Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic. Langdon also traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), both directed by Frank Capra. Arbuckle, however, in his few years of stardom, created the character of a leering, sensual adult. Arbuckle’s talent was limited, but his persona affected the course of American film history in a quite unexpected way.
Arbuckle was at the centre of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era. In September 1921 the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel. During the party a woman became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis. Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion. Amid the volatile social transformations of the post-World War I era, with issues such as immigration restriction and the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages deeply dividing the country, many had come to regard motion pictures as a disturbing instigator of social change and its high-living stars as threats to moral order and values. The Arbuckle scandal seemed to encapsulate these fears, and prosecutors responded by accusing the actor of rape and murder. Eventually indicted for manslaughter, he was tried three times; the first two trials ended in hung juries, and in the third the jury deliberated for six minutes and voted for acquittal. But Arbuckle’s career as an actor was in ruins, and he was banned from the screen for more than a decade. Other sensational deaths involving Hollywood personalities, through murder or suicide or drug overdose, fueled the public furor.
To stave off increasing efforts by state and local governments to censor motion pictures, the Hollywood studios formed a new, stronger trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA; later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America). They also hired a conservative politician, U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays, as its head. The Hays Office, as the association became popularly known, advocated industry self-regulation as an alternative to governmental interference, and it succeeded in preventing the expansion of censorship efforts. Hays promulgated a series of documents that attempted to regulate various forms of criminal and immoral behaviour depicted in motion pictures. A principle such as “compensating values,” for example, recognized that popular entertainment had always told stories of lawbreaking and social transgression, but it held that law and morality should always triumph in a film.
The leading practitioner of the compensating values formula was the flamboyant director Cecil B. DeMille. He first became famous after World War I for a series of sophisticated comedies of manners that were aimed at Hollywood’s new middle-class audience (Old Wives for New, 1918; Forbidden Fruit, 1921). When the Hays Office was established, DeMille turned to the sex- and violence-drenched religious spectacles that made him an international figure, notably The Ten Commandments (1923; remade 1956). DeMille’s chief rival in the production of stylish sex comedies was the German émigré Ernst Lubitsch. An early master of the UFA Kostümfilm, Lubitsch excelled at sexual innuendo and understatement in such urbane essays as The Marriage Circle (1924). Also popular during the 1920s were the swashbuckling exploits of Douglas Fairbanks, whose lavish adventure spectacles, including Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), thrilled a generation, and the narrative documentaries of Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) were unexpectedly successful with the public and with critics.
The most enigmatic and unconventional figure working in Hollywood at the time, however, was without a doubt the Viennese émigré Erich von Stroheim. Stroheim, who also acted, learned directing as an assistant to Griffith on Intolerance and Hearts of the World. His first three films—Blind Husbands (1918), The Devil’s Passkey (1919), and Foolish Wives (1922)—constitute an obsessive trilogy of adultery; each features a sexual triangle in which an American wife is seduced by a Prussian army officer. Even though all three films were enormously popular, the great sums Stroheim was spending on the extravagant production design and costuming of his next project brought him into conflict with his Universal producers, and he was replaced.