Hollywood’s fascination with itself has generally meant that movies about movies–or, more precisely, movies that celebrate movies–tend to be overvalued by the film establishment relative to their actual merits. For example, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels tends to show up on a lot of classic movie lists, it was singled out for the Criterion treatment back before Criterion’s management really cottoned on to the idea that comedies can be classics, and when writers try to summarize why Preston Sturges is important, Sullivan’s Travels is almost always cited as his one or two most significant accomplishments. What Sullivan’s Travels is not, however, is terribly funny–it is one of Sturges’ tamer works. If you want to ask me what Sturges should be most remembered for, I’d have to say Palm Beach Story–a profoundly anarchic comic masterpiece that wholly abdicates any responsibility to make a lick of sense.

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The mind needs structure. So when watching films in quick succession, unexpected linkages emerge, like the strange thematic similarities between Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives (in theaters now from Cinema Guild) and The Farrelly Brothers’ version of The Three Stooges, discovered while watching them back-to-back over the weekend. The first is a critically-acclaimed art film in limited release, the second the lowest of lowbrow comedies out everywhere, and yet they are both  episodic narratives about arrested male development, albeit in different stylistic registers. The Day He Arrives uses a teasingly complex script to lay out the alternate life paths its passive protagonist could have taken, hypnotically acted out with repetitive gestures and phrases. The Three Stooges, however, are active participants in their own destruction, eager to endlessly pratfall down the same road to get the eternally recurring nyuk-nyuk inducing result. Two versions of male stupidity, touchingly rendered.

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What do Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen (also 1991), Frank Marshall’s Alive (1993), and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999) – to name but a few worthy titles – all have in common? For starters, these are prime-cut films. Great titles no matter how you slice and dice ‘em, and ones I’ve already covered in a previous post of a couple years ago. They also touch on the taboo subject of cannibalism, and there is a reason why I’m thinking of them all on this fine April day. READ MORE

The Farrelly Brothers’ Three Stooges movie is not the first time contemporary directors have sought to recreate slapstick comedies.  This week, we’ll visit Blake Edward’s attempt to revive Laurel and Hardy in the 1980s.

You have to be careful with titles like A Fine Mess.  If it isn’t perfect (and what movies are?), you’ve just gone and handed critics an easy way to poke fun at you.  Your title just slides effortlessly into a put-down—something like “it’s sure a mess, but nothing about it’s fine.”  Go ahead—Google this movie—you’ll find endless variations on this phrase.  But it serves no one.  There’s no real value in shrugging off this movie with an empty turn of phrase—actually digging into why it doesn’t work (and what about it does) is more interesting.  On the face of it, there’s no inherent reason this movie should be such a disaster.  There are in fact plenty of reasons to have had optimistic hopes for it.

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Following the phenomenal success of United Artists’ early James Bond films many Hollywood studios tried to mimic their crowd winning formula. One of the most successful attempts to cash in on Bond’s appeal was OUR MAN FLINT (1966) starring a tall, lanky and laid-back James Coburn. The film was produced by Saul David for 20th Century Fox and although it spoofed the Bond films with a knowing wink and wide smile, it also had its own kind of charm and wacky appeal. OUR MAN FLINT was followed by a sequel (IN LIKE FLINT; 1967) and there were plans to make more Flint movies but unfortunately they never materialized. Today the Flint films aren’t as popular or well known as the Bond films but they were wildly successful during their day and they’re credited for making James Coburn a star. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the popularity of the Flint films led to them being spoofed as well.

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Spread out!

Having been on a remake kick now for several weeks, I can’t pass up the opportunity to comment on the current big-screen “remake” of The Three Stooges.  The only problem is, I haven’t yet seen it (I write these blogs a week or more before they go up), so I’m not in a position to (yet) comment specifically on this particular rendition.  But remaking the Three Stooges is nothing new—the Three Stooges were always an act of continual reinvention.

The Three Stooges were a show-business anomaly, and an act comprised of paradoxes.  They hit their greatest and most enduring popularity not only long after their most creative period, but even after they had reached a de facto retirement.  They are remembered as a movie comedy troupe, created in the crucible of vaudeville, and preserved on television.  Far beyond the Cury-vs-Shemp debate, the “three” stooges, depending on how you count, number as many as 12.

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On Friday, March 16th, Jerry Lewis will be celebrating his 86th birthday. Jerry’s been on my mind a lot lately so I didn’t want to let the occasion pass without making note of it. I love Jerry Lewis but it’s not always easy being a Jerry Lewis fan.

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Too Hot to Handle—a fairly forgotten romantic comedy from 1938, a passable entertainment but not the sort of movie likely to inspire much deep discussion.  Or is it?

See, this unassuming movie ties together many of the themes we’ve been working with since the end of December—this is a movie about movies, specifically about how movies lie, and how people who lie tend to make movies.  Like Melies’ faked coronation of King Edward VII, these are newsreels that lie—documentaries that are secretly fictional (which is the sort of thing we had on our minds at that very first film show in 1895, with the Lumiere Brothers’ very first film being a staged “documentary”).

The film in question is by Jack Conway, whose virtues I sang back on February 4, and is a quasi-remake of a Buster Keaton silent classic—one that calls into question the conventional wisdom of what happened to the silent clowns when the movie started to talk.

That’s a lot to pack into one movie—so let’s get started unpacking it.  This week, Too Hot To Handle!

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Last week we discussed the way in which the predominant critical attention focused on the “Big Three” of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd has distorted the history of silent comedy and unfairly marginalized the majority of screen comedians of the era—at least we did that in a theoretical sense.  Not once in that blog did I ever actually mention one of those marginalized comedians by name, or explain what might make them interesting.

So this week we have a comedian who got his start on Karno’s stage, came to Hollywood to work for Mack Sennett, made the transition from short films to features, was one of Hollywood’s highest paid comedians, and left his mark in some of the most important and beloved classics of silent cinema.  And did I mention his name was Chaplin?

Syd Chaplin, that is.

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