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A biography of pioneer comedy mogul Mack Sennett and the tale of his Keystone studio and comedians.
Faber and Faber, London, November 2003
Faber and Faber/Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, February 2004
The Sunday Times, 9 November 2003
By Christopher Sylvester:NEVER A DULL MOMENT
This is a story of cultural transition. Although theatre was always considered subversive of social norms, early cinema “introduced a particular element: the disruption and disordered rearrangements of the apparent solidities of `normal’ life.” Keystone, of course, is inevitably associated with the pell-mell antics of the Keystone Kops. “Marionettes of some malign force of anarchy,” says Simon Louvish, “the Kops would leap into their car only to fall behind and be dragged along in a meandering daisy chain.” Mack Sennett, the man behind these and many of the other clowns of the silent era, had an unquenchable “lust for gags and jokes.”
Of Irish origin, Sennett was born Mike Sinnott in Quebcois Canada. His family moved to America, settling in Connecticut, and Sennett became first a touring burlesque player, then a chorus singer in New York, before joining the Biograph Picture Company as an extra and working for D W Griffith. Biograph made every kind of movie, but Sennett was only interested in comedy and later founded Keystone, the first film-production company dedicated to that genre.
The story rattles along with all the dash, but not the disorder, of a Keystone Kops chase. Many of the silent films under discussion languish in archives and are only brought out for scholars or occasional festival screenings. Thankfully, Louvish is expert in vivid description and insightful interpretation, and he brings these movies to life on the printed page like no other film historian.
The title of this book is apt, since Sennett’s life was inextricably bound up with his clown progeny… And what clowns: Charlie Chaplin, for a while, dainty tomboy Mabel Normand, walrus-moustached Chester Conklin, goatee-bearded Ford Sterling (chief of the Kops); pantomime genius Fatty Arbuckle, cross-eyed Ben Turpin and moon-faced innocent Harry Langdon. Sennett would often complain that his stars “start with Sennett and get rich somewhere else!” The problem was not that they fell out with him or that he was too mean, but that “the fame of his new employees spread much faster than his own capacity to keep up with the game.” In concert with Griffith and Thomas Ince, Sennett attempted to create a monopoly of screen acting with the Triangle Film Corporation. It failed miserably and cost him dear, but, for all his hubris, his “business sense remained subordinate to his instinct for, and love of comedians.” By the early 1930’s, he was a busted flush. He lived until 1960, a shadow of his former self, constantly editing the story of his life in a whirlwind of reinvention, but at the same time never ceasing to plan a comeback as the king of comedy.
The anti-authoritarian absurdism of Sennett was not confounded by the new technology of sound. “It was not the form but the content of the movie dreams that defeated him,” declares Louvish, pointing out that both Sennett and Griffith belonged to “a pre-Freudian world,” and were incapable in their art of admitting “the hidden power of sex, the shadowy impulses of the soul and the spirit, moral ambivalence and self-destructiveness of desires.”
What is more, Sennett barely acknowledged the presence of such desires in his private life. Louvish concludes that Sennett’s love affair with his protégé Mabel Normand was a myth that suited both parties (as well as Keystone’s publicists). Furthermore he is convinced that Sennett, “while indulging in occasional heterosexual dalliances, was essentially homosexual in his inclinations, though how active a `gay’ life he led in his secluded mansions, when mother was absent, we genuinely cannot know.” There are various reasons for making this inference and, while Louvish does not press the point, Sennett’s sexual orientation may have reinforced the sense of alienation from normality that formed the core of his comic fantasies.
In the mid-1920’s, Sennett bought a 340-acre plot overlooking Hollywood. An architect drew up plans for a grandiose palace, but it was never built, because Sennett’s fortune evaporated. Nevertheless, he left a more imposing monument in those extraordinary clowns he bequeathed to us.
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