REVIEW: CHAPLIN MUTUALS & MACK SENNETT V1

[Paul E. Gierucki]

One minor correction regarding CineMuseum's Mack Sennett Collection;
there are several bonus commentary tracks, bringing the number to 28.

-- Paul E. Gierucki

http://www.filmmonthly.com/film/video-a ... on-vol-one

Chaplin’s Mutual Comedies & The Mack Sennett Collection, Vol. One

Jef Burnham | August 19, 2014

The latest Blu-ray releases from Flicker Alley easily rank among the best releases to hit the market from any distributor in 2014 to date. An incredible pair of collections, Chaplin’s Mutual Comedies and The Mack Sennett Collection, Vol. One celebrate two of cinema’s most iconic early funnymen with a combined 62 films ranging from silents as early as 1909 all the way up through the earliest talkies. Each collection, now available separately, includes a full-color booklet with extensive liner notes, as well as featurettes, rarities, and, in the case of The Mack Sennett Collection, commentary on select films throughout.

Chaplin’s Mutual Comedies features newly restored, HD presentations of all 12 films Charlie Chaplin made for the Mutual Film Corporation from 1916-1917. These two-reelers (which means each film runs somewhere between 20 and 35 minutes) include what I’ve always considered to be some of Chaplin’s most iconic shorts, not the least of which are The Immigrant, One A.M. and The Rink.

One A.M., by virtue of its sheer simplicity may be my personal favorite of all of Chaplin’s shorts. In this virtual one-man show, Chaplin plays a highly inebriated chap who simply arrives home in a taxi and attempts to get himself inside and to bed. What transpires therein is pure slapstick magic. The Rink is also one I find myself returning to time and time again, not only because my son likes watching Chaplin glide around on roller skates, but because I too am amazed by the incredible physical control the man exhibits while eluding his pursuers around the rink.

As a package, the set is a beautiful thing to behold– perhaps the most beautifully packaged release in Flicker Alley’s catalogue, in fact, next to the Trip to the Moon SteelBook. The Chaplin set too comes packaged in a Limited Edition SteelBook, but as the set contains a whopping five discs (2 Blu-rays and 3 DVDs), the SteelBook is a sort of double wide SteelBook, measuring 1 ¼ inches wide at the spine! Of course, what’s inside that packaging is ever more stunning.

The transfers of these films are among the most stunningly clear I’ve seen of films from this era, having been restored through a collaboration between Lobster Films in Paris and L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, Italy, who sourced these transfers from 35mm prints (two prints were used for a number of the films to ensure the highest quality presentation of each shot was used). In addition to the 400 minutes of breath-takingly restored Mutual films at the heart of this collection, the set also includes a 63-minute documentary by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange about Chaplin’s rise to stardom; a documentary about Eric Campbell, who played heel to Chaplin’s Tramp character in 11 of these Mutual films; as well as a 28-page booklet featuring behind-the-scenes images and an essay by Chaplin: Genius of Cinema-author, Jeffrey Vance.


The Mack Sennett Collection is in many ways a more remarkable collection than the Chaplin set. First of all, though it is only volume one of a series (or pair perhaps) of Mack Sennett releases Flicker Alley has planned, this collection boasts 50 films! And these films range in length from five minutes to 72 minutes, though most are something like 20 minutes long. Even still, that’s a hell of a lot of funny for your money– 1005 total minutes to be exact, which is even more impressive when you consider how vitally important Sennett was to the development of film comedy!

Sure, plenty of films collected here feature Sennett as writer, director, or even star, but it also boasts a plethora of collaborations between Sennett and a veritable who’s-who of early film comedy. You’ll find here such familiar faces as those of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin (both of whom also directed shorts featured in this collection), Mabel Normand, Harry Langdon, Carole Lombard, and W.C. Fields among many others. You’ll also spy folks who you might not readily associate with comedy, such as Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery. Speaking of folks one doesn’t usually think of when they think of comedy, the earliest short in this collection, 1909’s The Curtain Pole, was in fact directed by Birth of a Nation-director D. W. Griffith from a scenario by Mack Sennett!

What makes this set so extraordinary, apart from boasting 50 films and a 1005-minute running time that is, is the breadth of the material covered. Sure, all the works herein originated in some way with a single man. Sennett himself wrote, directed, starred in, and/or produced every film in this collection, and we also find herein early works from many of comedic cinema’s greatest talents, as mentioned above. Even more impressive still, however, is the fact that it spans such a significant period of cinema’s development, from before the popularization of the feature length film, which we have Griffith to thank for, and into the earliest developmental days of the talkie.

It can take some time to acclimate yourself to these early talkies if you don’t watch many from this era, but that’s in part what makes them so fascinating to me. Though silent films had largely relied on (mostly live) music and lightning fast visual comedy, these early days of sound experimentation resulted in films awkwardly bereft of music and characterized by a more stiltedly slow comic pace. And when you’re dealing with a wit like that of W. C. Fields, you really do want the wisecracks coming at you fast and furious, but that doesn’t dull my love for his 1932 two-reeler, The Dentist.

Of the four talkies featured in Volume One, two star Fields, the most memorable of the pair being The Dentist. Though, as mentioned above, the pace of the film feels significantly inhibited, especially when compared to some of Fields’ later films, this short includes some truly classic Fields sequences, such as the golf outing during which he continuously hassles his poor caddy, and a sequence in his dental practice in which a patient wraps herself around his torso during a tooth extraction. There is however, I feel I should mention, one horribly racist joke in this piece, but then, when watching pictures that date back over 80 years, you do have to keep in mind the social climate in which such pieces were made.

The Mack Sennett Collection spreads the 50 films out across three Blu-ray discs and includes a 28-page booklet featuring liner notes on each film in the set. Each disc also includes a host of special features, including outtakes, rushes, newsreels, documentary featurettes, and television appearances by Mack Sennett, not the least of which is an episode of This is Your Life devoted to Sennett! As if that array of features weren’t impressive enough, Flicker Alley has also included optional commentary tracks from film historians on 21of the films in this collection, which prove to be absolutely fascinating and highly informative complements to this collection of historic artifacts.

In short, if you’re a lover of film history as I am and/or hunger for gorgeously restored silent comedy, you’re going to want to put aside the cash for these sets… and soon!

[Richard M Roberts]

A new thumbs-up review from something called THE DISSOLVE:

http://thedissolve.com/reviews/1028-the ... gitally-r/



RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Richard M Roberts]

DVDTalk chimes in with a big thumbs-up:


http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/64610/ma ... l-one-the/


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Paul E. Gierucki]

DVD Talk's excellent review of CineMuseum's THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/64610/ma ... l-one-the/

The Mack Sennett Collection, Vol. One
Flicker Alley // Unrated // $59.95 // August 19, 2014

Review by Stuart Galbraith IV | posted September 1, 2014

Any good film critic/historian worth his salt tries to experience as many movies of all kinds as humanly possible. One simply can't write intelligently about Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) without an awareness of the influences of John Ford's seminal John Wayne Western The Searchers (1956), for instance, just as The Right Stuff (1983) is essentially a brilliant reworking of another Ford-Wayne film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). And how can one even begin to understand the entire filmography of Quentin Tarantino without first seeing the spaghetti Westerns, Euro-war movies, Yakuza thrillers, and Jack Hill-directed Blaxploitation pictures that so inform his oeuvre?
I had long considered myself something of an authority of classic film comedy. Over the years I've watched and re-watched (and re-watched) practically every surviving feature and short by Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Bros., W.C. Fields, et al. I've read dozens upon dozens of books about them and the genre they inhabit.

And yet, though I'd seen scads of Mack Sennett-produced silent and early-talkie comedies through the years, as well as excerpts from others in Robert Youngson's popular compilation films of the 1950s and '60s (1957's The Golden Age of Comedy, for example), none of this quite prepared me for The Mack Sennett Collection, Vol. One, a new Blu-ray set of 50 digitally restored classic films, which also includes two feature films: Down on the Farm (1920) and The Extra Girl (1923).

I quickly realized just how woefully incomplete my education had been, and how also, until now, I hadn't been able to put Sennett's achievements into proper context. Among other things, this incredible three-disc set obliterates in the best (and most satisfyingly funny) sense all preconceived notions of this silent pioneer's legacy.

Few dispute his legacy as of the two great producers of silent era comedy, the other being Hal Roach, whose own company is best remembered for the peak years of Laurel & Hardy and "Our Gang." Roach's studio gave up making short subjects at about the same time Sennett did, but where Roach expanded into feature film production and, later, into television, Sennett was more or less forced into retirement after 1935.

Soon after, newer Hollywood movies began acknowledging Sennett's innovative slapstick, in well-meaning "tributes" such as Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Cops (1955), and Blake Edwards's The Great Race (1965).

But, arguably, these films did more harm than good to Sennett's reputation. They perpetuated the notion that his talents were limited to the broadest, more frenetic of slapstick, personified by those famous Keystone Cops and their wild, stunt- and gag-filled chases across the early Los Angeles landscape, and the pie-throwing melees that climaxed other Sennett films.

As this Flicker Alley presentation makes plain, Mack Sennett (1880-1960) and the various film companies he worked for - Pathe, Paramount, Educational, and his own Keystone and Mack Sennett Comedies Corp. - made a far more expansive range of screen comedy than is generally known. Yes, he helped rising talent like Chaplin, Langdon (toward whom Sennett allowed a kind of humor quite different from the Sennett house style), and others who'd moved on to bigger and better things, but he also nurtured his own amazing if less remembered reparatory company of comedians (Mack Swain, Louise Fazenda, Ben Turpin, Billy Bevan, Chester Conklin, etc.), writers, and directors. Some of these names faded with the coming of sound (or died prematurely), while others continued on long after Sennett's retirement, sometimes for decades in other movie genres.

For instance, I had known the Scottish comic Andy Clyde primarily as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick, California Carlson, in dozens of that B-Western series' '40s entries. I had long heard about Clyde's long tenure starring in two-reel comedies at Columbia Pictures, where he worked longer and more prolifically than any other comedians there except for the Three Stooges, but until recently those comedies were practically impossible to see.

And yet, he turns up again and again in the Sennett comedies, where his incredible versatility and skill at makeup demonstrated he could and did play everything from oily young cads to crotchety old men (a specialty, which Clyde started playing while still in his late twenties).

The set also makes clear just how far Sennett's influence reached. After Sennett was forced into retirement, actors like Andy Clyde drifted over to other comedy factories; in the later silent and early talkie period it was often to Sennett's main rival, Roach, and later many of them ended up at Columbia with some, like Clyde, toiling there into the mid-1950s. Fans of the Three Stooges will be startled at just how direct a link there is between Mack Sennett's shorts of the teens and '20s and the Three Stooges films of the 1940s and '50s.


The set wisely samples Sennett's filmography chronologically and pretty much touches upon his entire career save for the last shorts he directed at Educational, at least one of which, Keaton's The Timid Young Man (1935), is available elsewhere on Blu-ray. Sennett was born in Danville Quebec, and originally had aspirations to become an opera singer and/or actor of the legitimate stage. The earliest film of the set, The Curtain Pole (1909), in fact is a D. W. Griffith movie written by and starring Sennett. That's followed by two more American Biograph productions, The Manicure Lady (1911) and A Dash Through the Clouds (1912), the first directed by and starring Sennett, the second directed again by Sennett but starring Sennett's first great discovery, the infinitely talented comedienne Mabel Normand.

The first disc mainly chronicles Sennett's rise through 1917 and the beginnings of so many silent comedy greats: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Charley Chase, and, early in her career, Gloria Swanson. Included are such treasures as A Thief Catcher, a long-lost Keystone Cops one-reeler rediscovered by historian and disc producer Paul E. Gierucki in 2010, which features a heretofore unconfirmed appearance by Chaplin as one of the Cops.

Disc 2 kicks off with a four-film look at Louise Fazenda, a comedienne I confess to knowing until now primarily for her mostly uninteresting sound era appearances, in movies like The Show of Shows, Alice in Wonderland (1933), and the notoriously bad Swing Your Lady (1938), her penultimate film. Little did I realize how charmingly funny she was in movies like Down on the Farm (1920), an early rural comedy with Fazenda playing a simple farmer's daughter pursued by lascivious landlord James Finlayson, who in this delightful comedy holds the family's mortgage.

In addition to the better known The Extra Girl with Mabel Normand, Disc 2 introduces many viewers to more obscure but impressively talented comics such as Charlie Murray (also the director of the silent The Wizard of Oz), Billy Bevan, and Sid Smith.

Disc 3 is a kind of catchall of Sennett's later career, silent and early talkie shorts starring Bevan, the great Harry Langdon, cross-eyed Ben Turpin, Carole Lombard in an early role, among others. The Bluffer (1930) is a fascinating Andy Clyde "Brevity" (one-reeler) made in two-color Technicolor. Two of the best films in Sennett's W.C. Fields series, the awesomely dirty pre-Code The Dentist (1932) and the surreally hilarious The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933) feature better prints of those than I've ever seen, and Don't Play Bridge with Your Wife (1933), hints at the direction of Sennett's other talkies.

Video & Audio

For their age and, in some cases, extreme rarity, the shorts and two features in The Mack Sennett Collection, Vol. One look great, some restored by CineMuseum and Keystone Films using the original (highly unstable and flammable) nitrate camera negatives, in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio (with rounded corners). Others are derived from surviving prints housed at the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Blackhawk Films, Lobster Films, the Richard M. Roberts Collection, Gierucki Studios, and dozens of private collections, with Richard M. Roberts's name appearing most prominently. In some cases, it's obvious the films were restored using multiple sources.

All of the films feature strong and complimentary musical scores composed and performed by one of the following: Phillip Carli, Ben Model, Dennis Scott, Andrew Simpson, and Donald Sosin. The discs themselves are region-free.

Extra Features

Twenty-one of the films rate commentary tracks by silent film authorities such as Brent Walker, Steve Massa, Richard M. Roberts, Stan Taffel, Sam Gill, and Paul Gierucki. Those I listened to were packed with good observations and detailed history, identifying even background players, filming locations, and the methodologies of how these films were researched and recovered.

A 27-page booklet notes each titles producing company, running times, release date, director and cast, a synopsis sometimes with production notes, and the source of each master.

Other supplements include silent outtakes and studio rushes (9 minutes), footage of Sennett's Edendale studio exterior as it existed in 1920, a trailer for The Crossroads of New York, The Sennett Story by Joe Adamson, an episode of radio's Texaco Star Theater called "Mack Sennett on the Air" as well as an excerpt from The Lawrence Welk Show, footage and outtakes of Sennett's 70th birthday party and a 1941 dedication of the Mabel Normand soundstage, and brief outtakes of a 1962 Keystone Cops reunion.

Parting Thoughts

The best extra is saved for last. In 1954, Laurel & Hardy were ambushed by the producers of This Is Your Life, the live proto-reality show hosted by Ralph Edwards. On that infamous program there were numerous technical gliches, mostly uninspired surprise guests, and Laurel & Hardy themselves hardly said a word and Stan especially resented appearing on the show more or less against his will.

This Blu-ray set offers an entirely different experience with Mack Sennett's appearance on the program earlier that same year. Contrastingly, Sennett's is positively delighted by the surprise, appearing genuinely shocked and humbled by all the fuss. Several big-name but earnestly effusive colleagues turn up: Louise Fazenda is among those saying he taught her everything she knows about comedy. Harold Lloyd offers a warm tribute, and iconic character actor Franklin Pangborn all but break down in tears. Throughout the program there's a running gag, a man being chased around the stage every so often by the Keystone Cops. Finally, the actors playing them are introduced. The man being chased is the great comedy director Del Lord (remembered today for his innumerable Three Stooges shorts). The cops: a by-this-time nearly blind Vernon Dent in Ford Sterling's old part, with Heinie Conklin, Hank Mann, and an appropriately unrecognizable Andy Clyde taking up the rear. (Even Sennett didn't recognize him.) Many This Is Your Life episodes are sappily sentimental or even creepy (e.g., the Frances Farmer show) but, occasionally, the show could be extremely touching, even moving. After gorging on Mack Sennett for the last 10 days and watching this at the end I could understand the great, bittersweet significance of that mini-reunion. Roach's studio was nicknamed "The Lot of Fun." I guess there must have in fact been two.

This is an amazing set, one of the best Blu-ray releases of the year, and a DVD Talk Collector Series title.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His credits include film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features.

[Richard M Roberts]

Another Good Review from something called Cinephiled:

http://www.cinephiled.com/videophiled-c ... k-sennett/



RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Gary Johnson]

just as The Right Stuff (1983) is essentially a brilliant reworking of another Ford-Wayne film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

I'm happy that the Sennett set is receiving rave reviews across the Web, but I couldn't help fixate on this reviewers statement and the correlation he sees between the two films quoted above.

[Richard M Roberts]

just as The Right Stuff (1983) is essentially a brilliant reworking of another Ford-Wayne film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

I'm happy that the Sennett set is receiving rave reviews across the Web, but I couldn't help fixate on this reviewers statement and the correlation he sees between the two films quoted above.

Who's the Woody Strode character in THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)?


RICHARD M ROBERTS (come to think of it, who's the Lee Marvin character in THE RIGHT STUFF?)

[Richard M Roberts]

We made the New York Times Today:


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/movie ... .html?_r=0


Hoberman's always on the pretentious side, but hey, he seemed to like it so what the hell.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Gary Johnson]

He wouldn't be writing for the Times' Art section if he wasn't at least slightly pretentious.

So it has been a couple months now since the release of these two comedy sets. Is there any consensus yet on Flicker Alley's marketing ploy of linking Gierucki's Sennett with Shepard's Chaplin? Are consumers ordering both sets in tandem, thinking that one must go with the other? That was the mindset behind this, wasn't it?

[Richard M Roberts]

So it has been a couple months now since the release of these two comedy sets. Is there any consensus yet on Flicker Alley's marketing ploy of linking Gierucki's Sennett with Shepard's Chaplin? Are consumers ordering both sets in tandem, thinking that one must go with the other? That was the mindset behind this, wasn't it?

It's been exactly one month today that the two sets came out (Aug 12), so no figures have been figured at present. The only seeming mistake Flicker Alley made in putting out the two sets at once so far is the sometimes downward comparison of the Chaplin Mutual set to the Sennett set.


RICHARD M ROBERTS