Movie Review: "The Kid Brother." Harold Lloyd. 1927.

 

Before sound came to Hollywood, comedians could be very personal and heroic -- which only added a certain naive luster to their white-faced appeal as untutored waifs under God's own care.

*

Emerging from the godless slapstick rough house of Mack Sennett's Keystone Studio, clowns such as Chaplin, Keaton, and especially Harold Lloyd drew apart from the meaningless hurly burly of mere physical absurdity to work out their own frail destinies -- while keeping all the props and schtick of pratfalls and pies in their elemental scenarios.

*

Before movies could bark, they wagged their cinematic tails in many remarkable and fetching ways. They could be visually lush and striking, with casual nods to artists like Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian, Van Gogh, and even Picasso. Backgrounds and settings, the entire mise en scene, when in capable camera hands, could evoke anything from the grimy off-kilter reality of Chaplin to the mystic bucolic splendor of Harold Lloyd -- especially in the several 'rural' films he made in the mid-Twenties; films that celebrate a vanished cinematic heartland that nowadays many dismiss as 'flyover country.' This is never more apparent than in his film "The Kid Brother." The trees, the dirt roads, the shanties, the river -- even the actors -- carry a sometimes stark, sometimes gauzy, nimbus about them ~ as if the whole movie were a fairy tale narrated by one's grandmother on a snowy evening.

*

The movie opens on Lloyd washing the laundry for his widowed father and older brothers on their farm -- and drying the clothes by stringing them up on a soaring kite line. Complications ensue, leading to the first of several imaginative chases, with a goat, a bully, and other sundry and frenetic characters trying to get the best of Lloyd.

*

And so we come to a consideration of the comic chase -- perfected in silence during the 20's and never really improved upon even after sound crashed the party.

Movies are supposed to move -- and their function as speed and action personified are never more absolute and entertaining than in the slapstick chase. Always based on misunderstanding combined with ignoble happenstance, the comic speeds along city streets and country lanes, usually pursued by a cop or two or other figures of authority and/or menace.

And hark ye, the old silent chases as manufactured by the great movie clowns and their cameramen were not simply a blur of violence and speed; they had an athletic grace and wry ingenuity that produced vivid and admiring chuckles from cinema audiences.

The several chases in 'The Kid Brother' are no exception. How many different ways are there for one man to chase another? You'd be surprised. Lloyd and his gag men come up with dozens of variations on the alarums and excursions that are the lifeblood of most silent comedies. I won't go into narrative detail here about the Lloyd chases -- they need to be seen in person, like a fine painting or dazzling dance routine, to be savored and appreciated.

*

Ancient comedy, with Shakespeare and earlier, always had a romance and then a wedding to tie things neatly into a bourgeoisie package at the end. The silent clowns did the same. In 'The Kid Brother' Lloyd is enamored of a traveling medicine show girl, and through courage and determination (plus the sprightly machinations of the unseen goblins that launch every comic into the abyss only to pull him back at the last second) he not only saves the girl from peril but manages to prevent his own father from being lynched. Lloyd and the girl stroll down a country lane straight out of Currier & Ives, hand in hand, as the camera irises out.

*

Certainly there were female comics during the Silent Era -- but audiences of the time didn't care for the zany and flippant spirit of the slapstick clown in a woman. Women were to be wooed, rescued, and brought into domesticity during the last reel. And we may cavil against our grand daddies for holding such medieval and chauvinistic opinions -- but maybe we should be asking our grandmothers just what they thought about the whole subject before sending anyone to the guillotine. 

*

Lloyd and his comic colleagues are recognized as brilliant delineators of the Human Comedy by critics and pundits today -- but what of the masses who, presumably, yearn for a good belly laugh nowadays as much as their predecessors? Not being omniscient yet (although I'm working on it) I can only relate the sad experience of inveigling some of my grand kids into watching 'The Kid Brother' when it recently played on Netflix. Within ten minutes they were clamoring for the Teen Titans on Cartoon Network.

*

The great cinema clowns require our patience as they silently build their castles on custard pies. Cell phones and tablets are inherently inimical to the enjoyment of silent comedy. And so I fear that the inspired buffoonery of Harold Lloyd and his contemporaries will remain relegated to something akin to a museum tour -- a phenomenon people approve of but rarely participate in. 

But no use crying over spilled nitrate negatives -- let's all binge watch Seinfeld . . . again. 

Prose Poem: American Rant.

 

Tim Torkildson: Patriot and Beach Comber.

America, you're a fraud.

Your M&M's melt in my hand.

Your Timex watches take a licking

and stop ticking.

Roto Rooter does not make my troubles

go down the drain.

There's absolutely NOTHING

about an Aqua Velva man.

You can't say anything with flowers.

Your fingers can't do the walking.

The best part of waking up is taking

a shower, not coffee in your cup.

Chewing gum doesn't double

your pleasure. Ever. 

There's rarely room for jello.

And special orders do upset us --

us being the American people,

who have been lied to and promised

pie in the sky and have gotten nothing

but a mess of flighty plastic bags

whirling about our heads in gossamer

mockery.

There is no breakfast of champions.

Or pause that refreshes.

Where's the beef, America --

where's the beef?

Movie Retro Review: "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein."

 

"Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" is the only great movie the team ever made.

Every other movie they made is just a series of programmed japes and Joe Miller retreads. They were, in a very real sense, the puppets of gag writers Felix Adler and John Grant.

If this seems harsh, it's because comedy is too important, too precious, to duck constant reevaluation -- even the icons need renewed scrutiny. And Abbott & Costello are certainly comedy icons; in a very mannered and eventually very faded way.

The movie is great by accident more than by intent.

It combines cliches, tropes, and moth-eaten concepts of comedy timing and byplay to produce not a 'send up' of monster films, as most movie critics like to prattle on about, but a superlative cinematic Invictus to the horrors and terrors that mankind faced in the past and continues to face today.

Frank Skinner's opening theme is so heavy handed that it always sinks into the unformed subconscious of every child who has ever seen the film -- those ominous chords still haunt me today, 55 years after first hearing them on our old black & white Magnavox.

The film opens, not with the two star zanies, but with Larry Talbot -- symbol of predestined doom as the wolf man. He introduces the plot, such as it is, and then disappears for the next fifteen minutes of the movie while Bud and Lou begin their slapstick labors. Which are promising and done in an economical and (pardon the pun) no-nonsense manner, as baggage smashers at a Florida train station. Costello gets more comic mileage out of a stack of recalcitrant suitcases than anyone but the Three Stooges.

"Frankly, I don't get it" is the repeated refrain of Bud Abbott during the film; as pudgy Costello is cossetted and cooed over by an assortment of slinky and slimy villians and villianesses. They want his brain for the Frankenstein monster -- thinking it will somehow tame the fearsome proto-zombie into becoming a docile superman who will do their bidding. And that is the first great theme this film harbors and nurtures -- the inexplicable fortunes of each of us. We all believe, more or less, that we are in charge of our own lives -- but there are forces, often malignant, that have mapped out our gruesome destinies, and we seem powerless to discover them or their schemes until it is too late to combat them. Frankly, none of us 'get it." Until it's too late.

Costello's incoherent splutterings as he faces down first Dracula and then the Frankenstein monster are an apt, if obscure, reflection of the world's initial reaction to the Atomic Age at the end of World War Two; faced with such frightful and destructive power, we are all reduced to unnerved burlesque comics.

"I saw what I saw when I saw it!" is another important refrain from the film, as Costello vainly tries to convince others of the monstrosities menacing the community. (BTW: Anyone else notice how much Costello resembles the mature Robert De Niro?) Costello's shrill voice in the wilderness, warbling like a clown Cassandra, should give pause to those who think anything or anyone uncouth and unlicensed can't be telling the truth.

Lyle Talbot is also the wolf man; Dracula poses as a doctor; everyone in the film has a facade, a disguise. A costume party gives the crowd a weird and possibly threatening persona. And so the theme of otherness, of the impossibility of ever really knowing the character of another, becomes prominent as the film spirals towards its climax in a mad scientist's laboratory. And the wolf man's dilemma poses the most disturbing question of all -- can a person even know and command their own self?

The film has no truck with existential posturing; this is not a Jean-Luc Godard film with actors sitting around discussing the meaning of life and death -- this is a mainstream slapstick comedy film in which the protagonists are truly involved in a matter of life and death -- their own. Their peril is both real and supernatural -- and it's that conundrum of the magic and mundane that propels "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" to the heights of an ambiguous Shakespeare or Greek tragedy with raucous comic relief. Things are altogether too grim to flow unceasingly without buffoonish leavening.

The climactic chase, when Dracula, the wolf man, and Frankenstein's monster are all after Abbott & Costello remains one of the most intense slapstick pursuits in cinematic history. All it needs to be complete is Godzilla rising out of the Florida swamp to give a rousing 'yoicks!' 

Since it's a traditional comedy, the monsters are defeated and destroyed at the end, and the happy lovers are reunited (oh, did you miss them? No matter -- they were of miniscule importance anyway.)

But slapstick comedies are not romantic comedies; the best ones always have what Mark Twain called a 'snapper' -- a twist that takes the comics out of the frying pan into the fire. And this film ends with a beaut: As Bud and Lou row away from the destroyed monsters they rejoice that all such evil things have at last been wiped off the face of the earth, at which point the Invisible Man, with an insane chortle, lights up a cigarette in their boat. Abbott and Costello naturally jump ship and swim away as the THE END title card appears.

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein is nearly 70 years old, but it succeeds much better at using comedy to explore and explode darkness than, say, Chaplin's 'Great Dictator,' or Harold Lloyd's 'Mad Wednesday.'

The film is an unsettling reminder, a memento mori with pratfalls, that darkness can descend at any time and, but for the grace of God, we all would succumb.  

 

  

 

Rumble, a YouTube rival popular with conservatives, will pay creators who ‘challenge the status quo’ (Drew Harwell for the WaPo.)

 

Why take a vacation when a lobotomy is cheaper?

The video site has exploded during the pandemic as a home for anti-vaccine misinformation and conservative complaints about Big Tech censorship.

When you want to smash the truth

with the elderly and youth

there is nothing finer than

making truth the boogie man.

*

On the internet of things

talk of cabbages and kings

skewed to show statistics bent

throws the naive off the scent.

*

Extravagance of claims provides

conservatives with easy rides

into public thought and deed 

with amazing, dreadful, speed.

*

Reading their stuff, I suppose

it is time for UFO's

to invade our helpless nations

and to force rude vaccinations.

*

Or that microchips will be

in our french fries and chili

so that Big Tech will control

all our heart and mind and soul

*

Cranks and crackpots are well paid

for their mental Gatorade

posted on new platforms that

are just talking through their hat.

*

The public seems to eat it up,

and so let's give a loving cup

to those who know the truth but say

that black is white and night is day!

Prose Poem: Your $4.39 Latte From the Local Roaster Could Soon Cost More. (Coral Murphy Marcos, for the NYT.)

 

The author, in a deep funk.

If an addiction isn't expensive,

what's the fun of it?

That's why I love paying 

one hundred dollars

for a cup of coffee.

Didn't used to be that way.

For a few measly dollars

you could get a good cup

of coffee at any coffee shop.

But now that coffee beans are

worth their weight in gold

and baristas wallow in wealth --

well, a cup of coffee is the

ne plus ultra of the jet set addict.

To feed my appetite

I roll drunks

rob banks

embezzle funds

sell my own organs

resort to blackmail

vote Republican

and print my own money.

I've lost my family

my home

my job

my self respect

and my memory.

I don't have a name

or country of origin

anymore.

All I have is that warm

swirling black brew

in a cheap paper cup

and a barista supplier

who lets me lick her

apron.

Siberia’s wildfires are bigger than all the world’s other blazes combined. (Robyn Dixon, in the WaPo.)

 

Russia is currently fighting more than 170 forest fires in Siberia that have closed airports and roads, forced widespread evacuations, sent a pall of smoke across the North Pole. But it has abandoned dozens more fires covering thousands of square miles, with no effort to fight them.

Siberia is all aflame/ev'ry pine is now fair game/for a charcoal destiny/with drought now reaching apogee.

*

The temperature does naught but climb/Thermometers work overtime.

The permafrost evaporates/The taiga

has no advocates.

*

The air is greasy with wood smoke/It's making penguins gag and choke/far off in the bleak arctic wastes/where krill are dying as it bastes.

*

Poor Mother Russia grows more parched/as forests to their doom are marched/But when you ask an apparatchik/they say life there is a picnic.

*

I would not be a Gloomy Gus/and hope that if we make a fuss/our leaders East and West will vow/to save the earth, and not the Dow.

A Prayer.

 

Christ Jesus, Savior of all flesh,

my leaden soul deign to refresh.

Weak and weary, yet proud and thick,

my sin-bred burdens make me sick.

Oh may I speak with joy sincere

of having thy sweet spirit near! 

Sneaky Thieves Steal Hair From Foxes, Raccoons, Dogs, Even You. (Annie Roth for the NYT.)

 

Professor Torkildson has studied the wild life of Provo Utah for years. His conclusion: There isn't any.

"It’s simple: Mammals have hair or fur. Birds want it."

'Kleptotrichy' is the handle

used when birds begin to vandal

hair from off the human head

for their nesty comfy bed.

*

Titmice swoop down on the brow

of a blonde or any frau,

plucking strands with bold resolve

for an aerie to evolve.

*

And the black cap chickadee

will also do hair thievery.

From a dog or wild raccoon --

its heists are never picayune.

*

So beware when you're outdoors;

those little birds can be raptors.

Snatching such a hairy ration

just to have some insulation!

Woman left dead mom wrapped in newspaper while she sapped her bank account. (Mark Lungariello for the New York Post.)

 

"An Arkansas woman left her mother’s dead body wrapped in newspaper for months while she slept in the same house and sapped her mom’s bank account, authorities said."

In Arkansas when your are dead

no coffin do you get, instead

they have you all appareled

in the Pine Bluff Daily Herald.

*

Like the pharaohs of past ages

your hollowed corpse is stuffed with pages

of the local news and then

it's ready for the grand Amen.

*

Folk in Arkansas are canny;

 when it's time to take old Granny

to her final resting place

she's wrapped up like a chunk of plaice.

*

You might say stiffs in Arkansas

have joined the Fourth Estate -- haw! haw!

Eternal headlines they will read

while worms and bugs inside them breed.

*

Let's hope the news won't cause reflection

that makes them miss the Resurrection!

Prose Poem: Democracy dies in darkness. It turns out, foxes steal newspapers in darkness, too. (John Kelly for the WaPo.)

 

TIm Torkildson, otherwise known as 'Foxy Grandpa.'

"Every few years, I hear about foxes that are stealing newspapers. In 2009, it was happening in Alexandria’s Yacht Haven subdivision, where a fox (or foxes) unknown was plucking The Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Examiner and the Mount Vernon Gazette from in front of people’s houses."

I found a fox sitting on my front porch

reading my newspaper

this morning.

"Would you like some coffee?"

I asked it facetiously.

"Earl Grey tea, if you don't mind"

replied the fox.

Another fox strolled out

from the bushes and joined

the first one.

"Could I have the sports

section, please?" it asked

the first fox.

This was getting too much for me,

so I went back inside to make

vichyssoise to serve chilled at dinner --

that always calms me down.

When I came back out on the porch

the foxes were gone,

and so was my newspaper.

My dog Rufus came up to me;

it smelled like it had been rooting

around inside a dead skunk.

"Well" I said to it, "can you talk

now too? Where did those foxes

go with my newspaper?"

Rufus just barked at me, 

then went over to the corner

of the porch with direct sunlight

and lit up a meerschaum pipe.

So I decided that if animals can

act like humans,

humans can act like animals.

If you want me

I'll be hanging upside down

with my hands and feet

from a branch of the sycamore tree,

like a three-toed sloth.

I've left instructions for the 

newspaper to be delivered on

top of my stomach each morning.