Indeed there was–although the praise of Keaton reminds me again that I’ve never seen anything with Harold Lloyd, whom I knew nothing about until Roger Ebert praised to the skies a few years back.
Maybe if you tire of monsters of the day (if that’s possible) unlikely heroes of the day might substitute.
Monoceros4–If you live in the Chicago area (you might, since you referenced Ebert), the Park Ridge Library where I work will be running a program of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd later this spring. 11 movies will be shown at the library, but Lloyd’s Speedy will be shown across the street in the historic Pickwick Theater.
P Stroud
If you have TCM on cable they show some of Harold Lloyd’s work occasionally. “Safety Last” is one of my favs. TCM’s searchable database is very useful.
It is. What’s fascinating about film as an artform is that, since it’s been around such a short time, you can really see it develop. (The fact that so much of it is now available on DVD really helps.) People like Keaton and Chaplin and Griffith were literally inventing the language of cinema as they went along, a language that unlike Esperanto, really has become man’s first universal one.
The Rev.
True story: about a month ago I watched a few Keaton things on TCM, including Steamboat Bill Jr. (which I’d seen) and something I can’t remember the name of; he and his wife get a house they have to build from the ground up, and wackiness ensues. A couple of nights before, I’d watched something and referred to one of the actors and his pratfalls (cannot remember who now) as the original Jackie Chan. As soon as I started watching Keaton, I immediately rescinded my earlier statement and proclaimed Keaton as the original JC, feeling a bit ashamed I’d forgotten about Keaton’s amazing leaps down the steamboat and having further proof during a scene from the house-building short where his house is being spun about by a strong storm, and he’s running counterwise to it, up the porch, leaping the railing, diving at the door, missing, crashing and rolling, getting right back up and doing it again a few more times.
I don’t know what film this chase is from, but I watched it twice already here. That fall with the tree at the beginning is INSANE, and his dodging of the boulders is a thing of sheer artistry. The things he did in his films…Buster Keaton just didn’t give a f—, did he?
It’s a short feature (56 minutes) called Seven Chances, and as far as I know the first comedy built around the idea of a guy who will inherit a fortune if he gets married by 5:00. (Hence the slew of women chasing Keaton.) Probably the most famous Shemp Stooge short, Brideless Groom, has the same concept, although the execution isn’t quite as good.
You should check out Seven Chances and Cops in particular. They’re great stuff.
It was while doing something similiar to that tree stunt that Chan came closest to being killed, by the way. He jumped past the tree and fell to the ground. He required emergency surgery, and apparently has a hole in his skull covered with a plastic plate you can feel through his scalp. I remember him showing this to Ebert one time. Ebert was weirded out because Chan can make the plate vibrate by humming.
The Rev.
Yeah, I’ll definitely do what I can to see those.
I hadn’t heard that Chan story. Jesus, that guy REALLY didn’t give a f—! Which, admittedly, I already knew.
I wish we could’ve gotten an in-his-prime Jackie Chan up against Tony Jaa. The human crash test dummy vs. the human special effect.
Picture it: Tony Jaa leaps 30 feet through the air, knees Chan in the chest, Chan falls off a building, then gets right back up and punches Jaa in the face and through a plate-glass window, then shakes his hand because it’s the punching that hurts, not the five-story fall. Then Chan grabs, I dunno, a bum’s shopping cart and uses everything inside it to attack Jaa, until Jaa retaliates by running up a wall, kicking out a window, and drops on Chan amid a hail of glass with a series of ten backflips that turn into a drop kick to the chest, which Chan naturally shrugs off.
Eventually, they realize they’re on the same side and vow to team up, and we get the biggest anticlimax in action movie history as every single bad guy kills him- or herself rather than face this unstoppable duo.
My right brain is in the throes of ecstasy right now.
Rock Baker
The glory days of the Great Stone Face may’ve been in the silent era, but I’ll always think of his revival in the 60s when he became a regular in AIP comedies, still an indestructible dynamo. My favorite Keaton moment is from How To Stuff A Wild Bikini, where he plays B’wana the witch doctor. He’s telling another character why his latest formula has had an unexpected outcome, more or less recapping everything that’s happened up to that point. Then he looks right into the camera and notes “And that’s all the plot you’re gonna get from me!” His scenes in Pajama Party are also quite priceless, like his feud with a perfume girl.
