Silent Movies

I know what most of you are thinking, "Boring." End of. And some time ago I would have agreed with you. I quite liked Laurel & Hardy for their cartoonesque type comedy but other that that, if it's in black & white with no talking, I can't be arsed to watch it.

UNTIL....
There was a program on the BBC a while ago about silent comedy and there was only a few programs featuring Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd & Buster Keaton. What i'd discovered is that i'd never really given the films of these people much though - never given them a chance.

Charlie Chaplin in particular was the one where a lot of more recent comedians/ writers/ journalists had basically just said, "I didn't get him," or that he just wasn't funny thus people didn't bother watching the films. Bollocks to them. His work was way ahead of it's time, it' not just stereotypical slapstick around some weak plot (which Laurel & Hardy seemed often guilty of), watch 'The Kid'. Made at the dawn of cinema but one of the best films i've seen for a long time. I know it's not a silent film but 'The Great Dictator' is worth watching too. It's quite preachy but considering it was made in 1940 it's pretty damned interesting if anything, apparently Hitler saw it twice....

Laurel & Hardy were slapstick. The majority of it is actually quite funny, but silly-funny so it may not appeal to modern tastes. Despite this you can still see some ways in which it influenced comedy afterwards especially if you've ever seen Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) - what he did was pretty much silent comedy and very slapstick. At the time, between 1915-ish and 1930, a lot of the film comedians copied from eachother particularly from Chaplin but a lot of his work was in the little details, these were just emphasised by others. The best known Laurel & Hardy film is 'The Music Box' - the well known one where they're trying to get the piano up the stairs. Poignant for me because Stan Laurel used to live in the same town i'm from & the idea of the staircase is very familiar - I'm pretty certain where the idea of big stairway came from.

As for the other two mentioned, Buster Keaton did a hell of a lot as far as film-making was concerned. The way his films were edited & cut were totally new, as were most of his stunts. Along with Lloyd, there was obviously no CGI, all the stunts were perfomed by themselves. One Keaton scene is where he's running full tilt down a mountain folled by large (but fake) boulders but does the whole run in one take, dodges everything like his life really depended on it - something you rarely see today. There'd just be several scenes edited together just to look like one whereas Keaton only had the one camera on him for the whole time. As with Harold Lloyd, that scene when he's hanging from the clock, he is that high up.

So you may think the idea of sitting through some old shitty black & white silent movie is the last thing you want to do but if you're a film-buff and you've never 'properly' watched these sort of films, I suggest you do so.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Great link.
And I'm suprised that anyone replied to this post at all. The stuff I mentioned is a bit general but it's really only because it's stuff I'm just discovering myself.

Safety Last is probably the best know Lloyd movie (couldn't remember the title before) but all of these movies have influenced and somewhat dictated the way films are made today but very few people recognise them. They're never played in the UK - the last 'old' movie I saw here was a 'A Night at the Opera' with the Marx Brothers. There's been some L&H but apart from that, nufink.

knkwzrd; if you can recommend some more movies it'd be appreciated.

On a side note, Metropolis was used in the Queen video for Radio Ga Ga. True story.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Umm.... The Great Dictator was a Chaplin's first talkie film.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.