The Saddest Clown

One of the first comedies I have any immediate memory of watching is Buster Keaton's 'The General'. I recall sitting in front of the television with a bowl of popcorn in my lap and staring at that silent wonder. Oddly enough, I have no memory of actually laughing. But then, I never laughed at 'A Night at the Opera' until I was much older, either. But there must have been something in the sad-faced, unsmiling, intensely likable little clown that made me love him, because I watched 'The General' over and over again, on an old VHS rented from a college library. Now, several years since then, I am a film student. If I wanted to, I could analyze every joke, every sight gag, and try to discern why it works. I could attempt a genre analysis, or question where Keaton's sympathetic representation of the South during the Civil War fits into the contemporary historical discourse. But all of that, while interesting in itself, would do nothing to contribute to that warm, wonderful feeling I had when I was eight years old, when cinema's saddest clown first popped up on my television screen.

'The General' might be Keaton's best known film--it is the one the tends to appear on Best Comedy lists. But in many ways, as time has gone on, I find myself preferring his more manic works: 'Our Hospitality', 'Sherlock Jr.', 'Steamboat Bill Jr.', 'College', etc. Most of the set-ups are intended to showcase Keaton's remarkable physical talent: the storm at the end of 'Steamboat', the various athletic activities in 'College', the ever-present chase sequences in 'Hospitality' and 'Sherlock'. 'The General', in this sense, is his most perfectly realized narrative film, in that it constructs a story interesting in itself, that would hold the viewer's attention even without the gags. Try as I might, I cannot quite recall the entire story of 'Sherlock Jr.', except that it involves a dream sequence, a damsel in distress, and a typically useless detective who saves the day.

It's difficult to even attempt to write about Keaton because his work, more so even than that of his silent-era compatriots, is so visual, the very embodiment of pure cinema. Keaton rarely, if ever, smiles in his pictures, yet he is never dour. The audience never truly laughs at him, as we do at the violence perpetrated by the Three Stooges, because he is the likable little guy. More often than not, he is also very perspicacious. In 'Our Hospitality', he concocts scheme after scheme to keep from the leaving the house of his enemies who, following their genteel Southern code, will not kill him as long as he's a guest in their home. And the way he avoids leaving the house is a sight to behold, rushing in and out of doors, faking out the two brothers and their father who try their best to get him to leave. At the conclusion of the picture, after he has rescued the girl he loves in a miraculous (and seemingly effortless) feat of daring involving a log, a rope and a waterfall, the men of the family discover him and the daughter embracing in her room, having just been married. As the men put down their guns and welcome him to the family, Keaton watches them warily. And then, in the best gag the film has yet offered, he proceeds to unload a veritable stockpile of weaponry from his clothes. The little clown was prepared for all eventualities.

Keaton's career was ultimately a sad one.  Like so many of his silent-era compatriots, the advent of sound injured his box office take.  He succumbed to the travails of alcoholism and appeared in only a handful of films, among them as a washed up silent star in 'Sunset Boulevard'.  His last great performance was as Charlie Chaplin's old partner in 'Limelight' in which, for five glorious minutes, the two greatest clowns of the silent screen proved yet again that one does not need noisy jokes or silly voices to make perfect comedy.  Just the brilliance, the sheer genius, to know what makes people laugh.  

It is easy to be nostalgic for those good ol' days, particularly when the best comedians today have little to offer but scatological humor and tired re-treads of the same old schtick.  It would do to remember that men like Keaton made the least humorous things funny: poverty, war, starvation, natural disasters.  Keaton found the absurdity in such devastating occurrences.  He made sure that the little guy always won.  After Dane Cook, Will Ferrell, and the Apatow Factory have all gone the way of the dodo, the saddest clown will still remain, an unsmiling reminder of just how funny life can be.  

Planes, Trains, and Cinema

The day that trains ceased to be the most popular form of transportation was a sad day for cinema. For decades they had been the stars of countless thrillers and screwball comedies, exploited for their twisting narrow claustrophobia, the privacy of their first-class berths, and the serendipity of public dining cars where you could be seated at a table with anyone (or someone very specific if you bribed the steward). Trains allowed for a cross-section of the population to be in close proximity for a short while and then go their separate ways. Tennis stars and oedipally stunted dandies, men on the run and cool worldly blondes, heiresses and impoverished musicians, notorious vamps and missionary priests, cross-dressing fugitives and sex-kittenish ukulele-players, shy wallflowers and impecunious charmers, millionaires and entire “Ale and Quail” clubs--fate brings all these together for a time to forward the plots of their various cinematic journeys. In fact there seems to be no other form of transportation more suited to film. Cars provide room for only a few passengers and buses are at once too communal and too confined to offer the same variety of plots that a train can. Which isn’t to say that buses and cars don’t have their place in movies (the road movie is a whole genre in itself), but simply that they don’t touch on the breadth of possibilities that trains offered in their hey-day.

Trains have played a vital role in film history from its very start. Arguably the first horror film and the first western featured trains. The “horror” film is a little actuality by the Lumière brothers in 1895 of a train arriving head on into a station, which according to the advertising sent the audience fleeing for the exits in fear for their lives. The western is The Great Train Robbery from 1903, one of the most effective early film narratives. The comedic value of locomotion, however, was most thoroughly explored for the first time in the 1920s by Buster Keaton. He gave us two of the most delightful train journeys in silent film history, Our Hospitality (1923) and The General (1927). Both films are comedies of Southern manners, and Our Hospitality begins the long and very fruitful tradition of a fateful romantic entanglement beginning in a shared train compartment. This would continue in screwball comedies and thrillers throughout ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. By the ‘60s most trains came equipped with a mysteriously obliging blonde who would unquestioningly aid our desperate heroes in their hour of need.

The great writer/director of the early 1940s, Preston Sturges, understood well the comedic value of the atmosphere of those close quarters, from the awkward athletics involved in jumping on and off the freight cars of Sullivan’s Travels, to the awkward athletics (and sensuous possibilities) of a stranger climbing in and out of an upper berth in Palm Beach Story, to even more awkward revelations which can occur in the privacy first class sleeping compartment of a honeymooning couple in The Lady Eve. Still the unimpeachable master of both locomotive comedy and suspense is Alfred Hitchcock, and The Lady Vanishes from 1938 is the quintessential train movie, encapsulating all the romantic, comedic, and thrilling possibilities which train travel lends itself to. Iris Henderson is a young English woman traveling in a central European alpine nation as the world teeters on the brink of war, more importantly she teeters on the brink of marriage to a “blue-blooded cheque-chaser,” and a teetering flowerpot meant for rather whimsical old governess thrusts her into the midst of an international situation. Stuck on a train with a slight concussion Iris is forced to rely on her fellow passengers, the majority of whom wish to convince her that she is hallucinating. It is Hitchcock at his most sparkling, and its locomotive setting shows the director in his element. He was fascinated by the way people were thrown together through train travel. The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and Suspicion all deal with the romantic possibilities in meeting strangers on trains. Strangers on a Train though, plays with the opposite possibility--sharing a train compartment with a psychopath.

Today most people travel by airplane rather than trains, and though they are used for pretty much the same purpose, an airplane is far more limiting cinematically than a train. Their cabins are too big for privacy, and the various nooks and crannies are too small to provide good cover. There is no place to hide on a normal airplane, so directors often create huge multi-layer luxury-liners of jets, which so little resemble the planes that us plebs fly on that it is hard for audiences to connect them with their own experiences. The Jodie Foster film Flightplan exemplifies this problem. The pitch might intrigue--“The Lady Vanishes, but on a plane”--but in order to allow a vanishing to occur the director destroys any claustrophobia that might be invoked by making the plane itself is so huge that it seems like a flying office building. The familiarity that the movie tries to breed by being set in a space that the majority of its audience have been at one time or another is negated as Jodie Foster’s character descends into the bowels of this beast whose vastness is belied by the confines of its fuselage.

None of this is to say that it isn’t possible to make a good movie set on an airplane. Only a month before the release of Flightplan Wes Craven’s admirably tense airline thriller Red Eye came out. This film exploited rather than fought the fact that there is no place to hide on a plane, and used to great effect the terror familiar to every traveler of having a seatmate from hell. An absolutely top-notch B movie (complete with a ludicrous final act) it doesn’t try to take the elements of a train thriller and simply set them on a plane, but finds a way to work with its environment rather than struggle against it. Hitchcock would have been proud.