In the introduction to his essential new book The Funny Parts (McFarland, 2011), writer Anthony Balducci relates an anecdote about Bill Cosby appropriating and improving on a routine first performed by George Carlin, and the lasting personal enmity that resulted from this “theft.”

Balducci tells the story as a signpost for how attitudes about intellectual property in comedy have shifted over the last century or so.  Among other things to admire about this book, this anecdote is an example of how Balducci shows an awareness and appreciation of modern comedy, and a refreshing willingness to discuss them in the same context as silent comedy–whereas too many scholars and writers steeped in silent-era movies tend to act as if popular culture ceased to exist in 1928.

The Funny Parts is an exhaustive—and at times exhausting—catalog of slapstick routines and bits —a history of the genre that doesn’t tell the story in chronological order, or by artist, but rather by joke.

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Marlene Dietrich in MOROCCO (1930)

Two of the most intriguing performances that were nominated for an Oscar this year can be found in ALBERT NOBBS (2011). In the film Glenn Close and Janet McTeer play women who decide to dress as men in order to find work in 19th century Dublin. I haven’t had a chance to see the film yet but while I was watching the trailer recently I started thinking about how many talented women have portrayed male characters in movies. I thought I’d share some information about some of the most compelling films featuring actresses in gender defying roles as well as actresses who just looked darn good in menswear but the list of names I compiled exceeded my expectations. What follows isn’t a complete list of films featuring cross-dressing actresses but I hope it’s a good jumping off point for anyone curious about the history of girls being boys in the movies.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been exploring competing claims on the creation of movies.  The Lumière brothers hold a sizeable claim, for having pioneered the exhibition model that became the norm–and even if modern trends are moving back towards the Edison-style intimacy of one-movie-one-viewer, the bulk of film history belongs to the Lumière tradition.  I’ve also given props to Louis LePrince for his role in innovating the technology by which movies are recorded, even if he doesn’t get the credit for that.

But if we talk about the creation of movies as being all about the technology of cinema, or the business models of exhibition and distribution, we leave out the heart of the matter–it is the content of movies that enthralls audiences and creates shared dreams.  And if we want to talk about who pioneered what movies ought to be about, then it’s time to talk about George Méliès.

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The inventor steps aboard the train, and loads the packing crates that contain his most wondrous device.  It will revolutionize the world.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is the very birth of the modern age.  The inventor takes his seat—it will be a few hours from Leeds to Paris, his old homeland.  Although the inventor has been living and working in England, he is French in his blood, and it is in France that he must tie up some last loose ends.

The competition has been fierce.  He has not been alone in working on such a device.  His is still embryonic and needs improvement—and the idiots at the patent office have fundamentally misunderstood his creation.  Sorting out that mess will take time and tact, he thinks to himself.  But he can content himself with the knowledge that he is first.  He will be rich and famous.  The future belongs to him.

But he never gets off the train.

Instead, it arrives in Paris without him, and he will never be seen again.  The authorities will search high and low for clues, but the mystery will never be solved.  And in the confusion following his disappearance, much of his equipment will also disappear.  His legacy will go to others, with more money and power, and his name will fade from the history books altogether.

 It is the kind of sensational tragedy that filmmakers like Louis Feuillade will make their names depicting.  Pulp films for generations hereafter would find inventors, bankers, and other keepers of valuable prizes attacked on trains.  Why, this will be the bread and butter of the nascent film industry in just a couple of decades.  But not yet.  We are only in 1890 at this point, five years before the first public screening of a motion picture show—the movies don’t yet really exist, and Feuillade is just a pimply teenager.  What we have just seen is no fiction, because whatever it is that happened to Louis Le Prince actually happened.  Ironically, his invention… well, it was the movies.

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Author Susan Orlean recently published Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, a biography of the canine movie star. Instead of doing the usual round of book signings at bookstores, which are seldom lucrative these days unless the author is a star or celebrity, Orlean is touring theaters. The author is using the occasion to introduce new generations to Rin Tin Tin by showing a 1925 film starring the talented canine. I thoroughly enjoyed Orlean’s program, which included a short film about Rin Tin Tin, a reading from the book, a screening of Clash of the Wolves, a Q&A with the author, and a signing for those who purchased the book. If Orlean comes to your area, I can’t recommend her program enough; it offers much to think about regarding the meaning and value of pop culture in America, the bond between humans and animals, and the need for writers to find a larger context for their memories and experiences.

Unlike Lassie, who was a character created for the movies and played by several male dogs, Rin Tin Tin was a real pet from the real world before he became a movie star. And, there is much about his life story that is as heart-wrenching as any script for a movie. In September 1918, U.S. soldier Lee Duncan found a family of German shepherds in a bombed-out kennel in Fluiry in the Meuse Valley of France. A female with five puppies seemed to be the last survivors in the kennel, and Duncan took it upon himself to rescue them. He found homes for the mother and three pups, but he adopted the remaining two puppies, which he named Rin Tin Tin and Nenette (some sources use “Nanette”) after popular French dolls of the time. When he tried to arrange for passage for the two puppies on his return trip home to America, he ran into red tape. An officer intervened on Duncan’s behalf, and the puppies made the arduous voyage. Sadly, Nenette died from canine distemper shortly after her arrival in the States, but Rin Tin Tin grew into a strong, athletic dog. A striking-looking dog, Rin Tin Tin was nearly black, with gold marbling on his legs, chin, and chest. His unusually large, tulip-shaped ears were expressive, signaling mood or emotion through their twitchy movements or erect position.

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My fellow Morlock, R. Emmet Sweeney has written an excellent appreciation of the restoration of the long-lost John Ford film Upstream (1927)  that was recently screened at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. Like Rob, I saw this delightful movie for the first time as well–though I was in a relatively small audience at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York with Philip P. Carli providing live musical accompaniment on the piano. The Dryden Theatre at Eastman House rang with laughter and applause last weekend in response to Upstream, though the audience was also held rapt by another movie on the program created by a member of the same family. Francis Ford (1881-1953), a man who acted in around 400 movies and wrote, directed and produced close to 200 films, preceded his baby brother, the four time Oscar winning director, John Ford, into the burgeoning movie industry by several years. Frank Ford is primarily remembered now as a fairly obscure and often silent member of the John Ford Stock Company in the background of numerous films, including Upstream, where he appears as a medicine show salesman who likes to guzzle his own wares.  On rare occasions in his long years as an obscure character actor, Francis had a few moments of glory: his brave (if thirsty) Revolutionary soldier Joe Boleo in Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), the frightened victim of a lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), the old codger who rises from his death bed to witness the battle royal in The Quiet Man (1952) or his silent but animated coonskin-wearing Civil War veteran in The Sun Shines Bright (1953). While Francis was often a sad, peripheral figure after he gave up directing for acting in the late ’20s, filmmaker Francis Ford’s  When Lincoln Paid (1913), has only recently been restored after almost 98 years in obscurity, and highlighting a nearly unknown talent.

The film was a thirty minute, two-reeler, made for distribution by Kay-Bee pictures, (Kay-Bee was a subsidiary of Universal and was also known as Bison). The Civil War story may have been directed by and starred John Ford‘s elder brother and unsung pathfinder, Francis Ford a year before John Feeney’s arrival in California, but the seeds of the “Fordian” storytelling that recur so often in justly celebrated films such as The Searchers, Young Mr. Lincoln, and How Green Was My Valley can be discerned in When Lincoln Paid in less polished form, as characters cope with private pain and loss, the longing for revenge, the development of empathy and public action for a greater good. Long forgotten and assumed lost, this movie was unearthed by contractor Peter Massie, who came across a 35mm Monarch projector and seven reels of nitrate film tucked away and forgotten in the summer of 2006 as he prepared to demolish a barn in Nelson, N.H. It was eventually determined that this movie was the only surviving copy of one of the eight silent films starring Francis Ford as Lincoln; there are no known surviving copies of the others.

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A few weeks ago I was bloviating self-importantly about Laurel and Hardy’s debut talkie, Unaccustomed As We Are, and how I felt it demonstrated the ability of silent-era comedians to weather the transition to sound without losing a step.  Some of the replies in the comments section addressed the central question directly:

“What’s strange to me is that, to judge from most of the histories I’ve heard, people suddenly stopped being interested in the kind of comedy they’d loved for decades, silent comedy in the style rather than the technical sense, as soon as sound showed up. People watch that kind of comedy now- Mr. Bean is an internationally popular figure, and Mr. Hulot was one before him, both of them fundamentally silent comedians dropped into a sound world a la Modern Times. So what killed it back then? Why did people suddenly want all Grouchos and no Harpos?”

That’s a superb question, Tom S., and very carefully phrased at that.  It’s a question I’ve been thinking about for many years, and while I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer, I do have some ideas.

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To renew or not to renew? That is the $329.99 subscription question.
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The wheezing, rickety looking vehicle you see above, silently mocked by the parallel oil pipeline, is desperately straining up the incline, hoping to reach the space outside the CinemaScope frame. Why the hurry? Because they’re trying to….Escape From Zahrain! This 1962 Paramount adventure film is being released on DVD by Olive Films on December 7th, and it delivers the ragtag-group-on-the-run goods. At age 51, it was director Ronald Neame’s first Hollywood production, after a lifetime in the British system.

An assistant cameraman on Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), he became a highly sought after cinematographer for 12 years, and worked frequently for David Lean (This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit). After moving to producing duties on Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, he segued into directing with the 1957 relationship drama Windom’s Way (1957). It wasn’t until the success of Tunes of Glory (1960), and its Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay, that Paramount came calling. He’s mainly remembered now for The Poseidon Adventure‘s disaster theatrics, but his career seems to warrant further investigation. I’m sure there are readers out there more well-versed in Neame’s work, so please send recommendations my way.

The plot of Escape from Zahrain essentially re-locates Stagecoach to a made up Middle Eastern country, throwing together conflicting personalities into a tight space. Sharif (Yul Brynner) is the stoic imprisoned leader of a revolutionary group in Zahrain advocating the expulsion of the corrupt U.S. oil company. A student cell led by Ahmed (Sal Mineo) leads a bold jail-break scheme, springing Sharif as he is being transferred to another city. As they race away from government thugs to the border, they have to deal with the other inmates in Sharif’s car. Huston (Warden) is an arrogant American embezzler, while Tahar (Anthony Caruso) is a murderous, shifty local. When this suspicious group needs a new ride, they kidnap Laila (Madlyn Rhue) and her emergency vehicle in their rumble towards freedom.

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