Flora Finch and John Bunny -- film's first unhappily married couple. |
A Cure for Pokeritis
Dir: Laurence Trimble
1912
12:52
The first American film comedy star was not the balletic
Chaplin. John Bunny was from Brooklyn, and would have been hard to pick of a
crowd as a likely leading man. He was short, and round as a billiard ball. His
large nose glowed red with a rosacea that most mistook for a hard-drinking
life. (He neither drank nor smoked.) A vaudeville veteran, he saw the future,
walked into the Vitagraph Studios in New York, made some pictures, and found
himself internationally famous. Between 1909 and his death in 1915, he was as
celebrated as the first rue film comic, Frenchman Max Linder.
Bunny wouldn’t have made such as impact without his partner,
Flora Finch. As thin as he was stout, she played the waspish wife to his
wayward husband. The archetype of the childish husband and the nagging,
maternal wife, was something everyone connected with in a culture that seemed
to apologize for male privilege by casting the man as haplessly ensnared into a
penis-less existence by the castrating hausfrau.
This popular comic trope, which resurfaces regularly like a
pulse in the American comic dialogue combined with the classic fat/thin contrast
dynamic, worked. Their 160 films, made between 1910 and 1915, were called “Bunnygraphs,”
“Bunnyfinches,” or “Bunnyfinchgraphs,” they were so well-known. (James Cagney,
a Vitagraph neighbor as a child, used to climb over the fence and watch them
make some of this series.)
These were akin to modern, more modular entertainments –
much more like TV shows than films. These simple one-reelers, involving one
simple setup, comic hook, and payoff, were also essential baby steps – working out
one effective gag sequence could lead to two, then three, then more complex
comic films. Back then, anything went and everything was tried; the field was wide open and everyone learned as they went.
In this outing, Bunny plays poker, comes home late, swears
not to transgress again, but then comes up with some lying pretext for getting
away. His annoyed wife calls in her cousin Freddie, who hatches a scheme to
frighten Bunny and his truant companions. Disguised as police, Freddie and his
bible class (?) raid the joint where the game is taking place. Terrified and
repentant, the men give up – and then the wives stream in, and all is forgiven.
The screen work is unexciting – filmed straight on, just
like a stage show. Bunny lights a match to check the time on his watch, but we
are shooting in obvious daylight. In one case, cousin Freddie pops up behind an
oblivious Bunny after he exits the house, a move impossible for film watchers
to buy today.
A second later, though, a nice bit of business is executed.
We look in through an upper window at the poker game. Cousin Freddie’s head
rises slowly into the frame, eclipsing the sight of the players. Then, it
slowly sinks down again. And Bunny turns slowly towards the window, just
missing Freddie’s head at the window. There’s a well-timed nugget of visual
humor that could only work that well on screen. People are learning how to use
the medium, building a vocabulary and grammar of filmmaking.
Comedy as social corrective comes into play here, as
transgressors are brought back inside society’s norms as determined by its
arbiters, the “ladies.” Oddly, cousin Freddie is clearly possessed of
effeminate traits himself – handkerchief in his sleeve, rolling eyes,
extravagant gestures, probably one of the first gay characters in film.
Stereotypically, he is the wife’s confidante, and when he costumes his fake
policemen he parades them before the wives like a fashion designer showing off
his fall line. In the culture of the time, the gay character can be a magical,
two-dimensional helper, but that’s about all. For – what self-respecting heterosexual
man would help break up a card game?
Bunny died at the age of 52, a year after Chaplin started
making movies. What other work might be have done if he had 20 years more?
The NFR
Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film
Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘From the Manger to the Cross.’
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