The finger of film

You may observe I haven’t been reviewing any films of late, but I have been watching quite a few; I did mention a while ago having a shit-ton of short films on my increasingly preposterously-proportioned list of films to be watched, and I have accordingly been making my way through a chunk of those in recent weeks. Tonight’s viewing, though, left me a little shook, that being a Keystone short from 1917 called A Clever Dummy…

…Cos you don’t often see that in films of this vintage; indeed the only other example of that I knew of was Harold Lloyd’s Speedy. But lo, here was Ben Turpin—famously thought to have been the firsr person ever to get a custard pie in the face on film—giving it a decade earlier… In the film, an inventor makes a “mechanical man” modelled after Turpin, who pretends to be the robot when a theatrical agent shows an interest in it; indeed, I think this is the third bird he does in that scene, this one being where he flips off the theatre people, who are weirdly happy with their rude new star…

…And then he does it AGAIN, this time on stage, and the theatre audience seems equally OK with the machine man being an offensive git. I wonder what the film audiences of the time thought, though? Certainly this was the sort of thing that wouldn’t fly after the Production Code came in, I’m just a bit surprised it made it through before that (maybe individual state censors were less forgiving)… it’s not like how they got away with swearing in silent films cos you didn’t actually hear the naughty words; you didn’t need to be a lip-reader here. Once again, this is one of those things that I’m sure only interests me, and if anyone else is reading this I’m sure they’re wondering what’s wrong with me… but whatever it is, well, here we are anyway. Live with it like I have to.