Silent Comedy Masters

Slapstick was the first genre cinema invented for itself. It needed no words, travelled everywhere and taught a global audience what the medium could do with a body, a staircase and a well-timed cut. This Reel follows it from the Keystone lot in 1914 to the last silent two-reelers of 1929.

Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) is the first released film in which Charlie Chaplin's Tramp appears on screen, improvised at a children's soapbox derby. Two years later at Mutual he had complete control: The Pawnshop and The Rink (both 1916), Easy Street and The Immigrant (both 1917) are the films where the character acquired its pathos. The same studio system produced Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's Fatty's Tintype Tangle (1915) and Mabel Normand's Mabel's Blunder (1914), which Normand wrote and directed herself; both are on the National Film Registry.

Buster Keaton learnt his trade with Arbuckle and struck out on his own in 1920. One Week, Neighbors and The Scarecrow (all 1920), The Haunted House, The Playhouse and The Boat (all 1921) and Cops (1922) are the two-reelers that established his deadpan physics; The Playhouse's multiple-exposure minstrel show is still a technical marvel. The features followed: Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Keaton's Civil War epic that was a financial failure and is now routinely voted among the best films ever made, and The Cameraman (1928), his first for MGM and the last in which he had real freedom.

Harold Lloyd's "glasses character" was the most commercially successful of the three. Never Weaken (1921) is the short that perfected his high-rise thrills, Safety Last! (1923) put him on the clock face above Los Angeles, and The Freshman (1925), included here under its alternative release title College Days, was the biggest comedy of its decade. Laurel and Hardy close the Reel: The Battle of the Century (1927) contains the greatest pie fight ever filmed, and Big Business (1929), in which a Christmas-tree sale escalates into the mutual destruction of a house and a car, was one of their last and best silents.

Everything published in the United States before 1931 is in the public domain there; the Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd titles remain protected in most of Europe because the directors died less than seventy years ago, and Popcorn shows the applicable rights statement on every film page.