Harold Lloyd Collections (G)

I wrote a while back about one of the greatest silent comedies, Safety Last! starring Harold Lloyd, and there are a number of collections that feature his work in short form. I'm revisiting Lloyd (and should mention Chaplin and Keaton in this breath, too) to remind you that short films may be a great way to get kids raised on color screens interested in these silent, black and white classics.

We recently rented The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection (Vol. 2) from Netflix, when my 9-year old nephew was visiting, and weren't sure it would hold his attention. Son K is accustomed by now to his parents pushing ... unusual ("to a kid," he says, in the same way he says, "No kid eats grilled peaches" -- or, insert most any non-pizza/burger food item here -- "You just think they do!") movie fare his way, but we weren't sure about his cousin.

To our delight, it worked. These things are so much fun, and so out of the ordinary for today's kids, I urge you again to consider these for family movie night. Again, try the shorts first for many of these classics; some run 20 minutes, some closer to an hour, but all may be easier for the first time out.

(See my post on Laurel and Hardy movies here.)

THE GENERAL (G)

Back in 1862, during the Civil War, Union Army raiders stole a locomotive named The General, running between Atlanta, GA and Chattanooga, TN, in order to disrupt service and do damage to the track, covered bridges and telegraph wires. The hijacked train was pursued not only by other locomotives, but also by handcar, and on foot. While the event did not exactly go according to plan, and several raiders were executed as spies, other raiders escaped their imprisonment and later -- back in Union territory -- received the very first Medals of Honor ever bestowed.

This exciting story has been told at least twice on film. One is in Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), featuring Fess Parker (Daniel Boone!) as the conductor of the hijacked locomotive, determined to stop the Unionists. It gets good marks on both Netflix and IMDB, so check it out.

The Disney version is likely more a retelling of the story, where the Buster Keaton version, The General (1927), is more a feast for the eyes with fantastic stunt work and comedic genius (in silent film fashion) filling the screen.

In The General, Keaton plays a southern engineer (turned down by Confederate recruitment officers when they realize his value as a skilled engineer), aghast to learn his beloved Annabelle is on the hijacked train. He thus embarks on a chaotic adventure to recover the train and his love, and uncovers a dastardly plot against the Confederates along the way. Can he save Annabelle? Regain The General? Can he get word to the south about the impending attack?

It’s a fantastic story, and full of Keaton magic. As with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, there are many worthy films in this artist’s cannon, but we strongly recommend this as a starting point for Keaton. Kids are thrilled with the visuals, especially if you take the time to explain they are all quite real, no computer trickery, and that Keaton actually put his life on the line for some of these shots.

Here is a great little snippet from a documentary (courtesy of YouTube) about Keaton and the making of The General. The narrator reports, during one especially harrowing scene: “The camera man had orders to keep shooting until Keaton either yelled CUT, or was killed.”

SAFETY LAST! (G)

I think I promised long ago to write about Harold Lloyd, and I’m sorry it took so long! Someone asked me the other day to recommend one of his films, and after I gave a rushed, 30-second summation and a thumbs up, I wrote a note to myself to post about Safety Last! (1923) next.

Harold Lloyd is one of the great masters of silent film comedy, and yet his name doesn’t come to mind for most folks in the same way Chaplin’s and even Buster Keaton’s names do. I’m not sure why that is, especially with a film like Safety Last! in his oeuvre; it was recently selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

As I wrote in an earlier post about the charm and the value of silent films for kids, exposing your children to a whole different film methodology will be a learning experience and something I bet they’ll enjoy. I think it engages them on a different level, having their little brains jump from the words on the screen back to the image, putting the two things together to make a whole.

The plot of Safety Last! isn’t all that complicated, or important really (the gist is: Lloyd is trying to both impress his fiance by pretending to be something he’s not, and he’s trying to win a tidy sum of money by pulling off a marketing stunt at the department store which employs him). What makes the film work is Lloyd’s utter likeability and “underdog” character, and of course the wonderful physical comedy. There are mix-ups and stunts and site gags galore that bring on the giggles, but the pivotal and most famous scene in the film is Lloyd’s climbing the side of a building, filmed of course before the advent of special effects and CGI and all that cool trickery to which we are now accustomed. It looks real, feels real, and you hold your breath for what seems like an eternity as things go wrong and he hangs on for dear life to the hands of a tower clock. (A similar scene played out years later in the movie Back to the Future.)

If your kids’ reading skills are up to snuff, I’d say young ones around age seven or eight should have no trouble keeping up with the brief lines of dialogue that need reading, and they should delight in the simplicity and honesty of what they’re seeing on the screen.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN'S THE GOLD RUSH (G)

(1925) (No official rating; "G" equivalent)

We saw this on a snowy night in Maine at a library in a small, nearby town. It was mostly seniors in the audience; in fact, Keegan was the only kid present. He was nine years old, and we were surprised to see our super active son (he has never sat still watching TV) completely involved in this classic film. The Gold Rush is one of Charlie Chaplin’s masterpieces, and should hold the attention of kids both over and under the age of ten (and it’s good training for reading subtitles, as they're short and sweet!). There is plenty of action and adventure, a villain and love interest, plus some comic moments of sheer genius. Set in the Alaskan Yukon, Chaplin’s Little Tramp is a misfit of a gold prospector, hoping to strike it rich, and the impressive special effects of the film easily convey the biting cold and the painful hunger endured by the Little Tramp and his cohorts. There are many memorable scenes, and choosing a favorite between the dance of the dinner rolls (a bittersweet scene, with the Tramp waiting for the girl who never shows), the leather-boot-as-Thanksgiving-turkey scene, and the fantastic, white-knuckled moment when our hero’s humble cabin is teetering on the brink of a cliff is impossible.

Not all silent films will work for younger kids. Some are very slow, and not all of them contain the great physical comedy that artists such as Chaplin were known for. Many of Chaplin’s films would make delightful family viewing, but The Gold Rush is certainly a favorite. Note: Netflix has a two-disc set which includes both the silent version, and the 1942 sound version. I recommend the original, but must admit I haven't seen the latter.

"Yondah lies da castle of my faddah”

Sometimes silence is truly golden. Hearing a young Tony Curtis wrestling with his Bronx accent in many of his films (the above line is loosely credited to 1952's Son of Ali Baba, although the actual line differs slightly) reminds us of the magic of silent films at the beginning of all this celluloid craziness. You needed your imagination and full attention to flesh out the characters in a silent film, and you fleshed them out to suit your own vision.

Silent films are great for kids. It’s a good exercise in concentration, in honing reading skills, and in experiencing something quite different from what surrounds them all day long: noise of varying kinds, and human voices -- yours and their teacher’s and their friends' and the X-Box’s and the crossing guard’s and the television’s and the neighbor's next door. Silent films force the viewer to assign a personality, a tone, a feeling to the faces on the screen, and actually create a more involved viewing experience.

When our son, Keegan, was about five years old, we took him to a special event at the fantastic Castro Theater in SF, an all-day affair with old silent films, cartoons, magicians, jugglers and I can’t remember what else at the moment. It was his first experience with silent films, and we helped him read the short sub-titles and made sure he was engaged. He loved every minute of it. That was followed shortly by another Castro visit, this time to see Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, which I'll write about another time.

Around this time, my husband, D, told me one night that he had been discussing film with his college students one afternoon, and casually asked how many had never seen a black and white film. This was around 2001 or 2002. An astonishing 99% raised their hands. D was floored. So was I. This was in the Bay Area, for god’s sakes, a place drowning in rep theaters and performance spaces and film festivals. What self-respecting SF college student had never set foot in the Red Vic or the Castro or the UC Theater in Berkeley, to name just a few? They’d never seen The Third Man, or Casablanca or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf or Citizen Cane?

That means they never saw Mel Brooks’ Frankenstein, for that matter.

Things sure have changed.

I think that may have lit the fire under us to make sure our son grew up knowing more than Disney (actually, D is anti-Disney, so it was probably already ingrained in us)... and to ensure that as Keegan grew a bit older, films more sophisticated than Indiana Jones would enter his purview – well before his college years! D and I have always had a taste for the more underground-everything (movies, music, art, etc), but it's easy to get in a rut with your kids and just rent them Shrek because you don't have time to think about it.

Get comfy. Read on. (And click on July's "Welcome to KidsFlix" posting to the right if you didn't start there.)

(Possible comment topic: Do martinis go with popcorn?)