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.)

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (PG)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail was officially rated PG, but that was back in 1975, before PG-13 was instituted as a step before R. It definitely earns the higher rating, so depending on the age of your kids, you want to consider what’s ahead.

Son K is now 12, going on 18, and we figured it was an appropriate time for Monty Python. Of course, the television episodes are available on Netflix and elsewhere, so starting there is a possibility. Those can be spotty, in terms of what might be inappropriate, as you don’t know what you get from episode to episode. (For some reason, when I think of Monty Python, the first thing I think of is, “Oh, intercourse the penguin!”)

Anyway, we rented Holy Grail, knowing that both The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life have solid R ratings, and figured we’d be pretty safe.

First, you need to know that there is a great amount of cartoonish gore in the film, which isn’t a problem -- at least not in our house. You may not care for the spurting streams of fake blood and occasional rampages of killing that are darkly hilarious -- how funny is the line, “It’s only a flesh wound!” uttered by the Black Knight as he’s losing limbs in a sword fight?! -- but compared to what a lot of kids see in movies and X-box games these days, it’s probably no worse ... and the cartoonish aspect helps offset the volume.

As suspected, K loved Monty Python’s absurd and bizarre brand of humor ... we had a great time, and now we’ve got some TV episodes lined up to see.

Here’s the caveat: material that may be inappropriate includes some language (no F-bombs), and dialogue rich with sexual innuendo, most of which kids under 12 or 13 will either not get, or will miss due to the speedy delivery. Most of it takes place in one scene, where one character enters a castle full of vestal virgins, one of whom points out they are all between the ages of 16 and 19, unsupervised, and pretty much all deserve spankings. We were sort of holding our breaths through this scene, and it reached a pinnacle with her offering -- very quickly and rather casually, so it didn’t really stand out -- “followed by oral sex.”

I’m not sure, but I think I heard K laugh at that. I was trying to just get through the moment.

Anyway, now that you know the worst of it, you can plan to talk loudly over that part, or take one of those well-timed breaks.

If you’re new to Monty Python yourself, you need to be the type of person who appreciates ridiculously hilarious lines such as, “I fart in your general direction!” These are lines your kids are sure to remember, and will practice repeating until you long for the good old days of "Blues Clues" and "The Wiggles."

Here's a great clip (whoever put it on YouTube had a brightness issue, but you get the idea):

MARX BROTHERS' DUCK SOUP (G)

Well, we didn't exactly have a Marx Brothers fest this weekend (as predicted earlier), but we did make a second attempt to charm son K with a Marx Brothers classic. I can't say it was a successful endeavor.

A few years ago, we tried Night at the Opera, but it was clear that K was too young to keep pace with the speedy dialogue and definitely too young to understand the humor. So, at age 12, we figured we'd try again; this is, after all, a kid who has grown up seeing black and white films of all kinds, and has a fairly mature sense of humor.

This time out, we tried Duck Soup ... but with pretty much the same results. Duck Soup is barely over an hour long, so not a huge time investment. Groucho is appointed leader of the country of Freedonia, and his brand of absurdist governing is hilarious at the same time it feels slightly dated and sexist. But his bluntly chauvinistic character is part of the charm (isn't it?) and so you don't really tsk tsk so much as you rather guiltily chuckle along to the gags. 

But of course, most of this inarguably adult humor is lost on kids.  

Unless you are dying to get a Marx Brothers fix yourself, and want to test your own kids' capacity for staccato one-liners and double entendres with phrases they may not be familiar with, I'd say these films are probably better saved for later.    

This Week's Classic Kids' Movie

This 1963 madcap comedy has inspired countless others, and is so jam-packed with top-name comedy actors it’s hard to know where to begin.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (rated G) is a true classic, and you owe it to your kids (and yourself) to see it. It’s a piece of American comedic and film history, truly! Set aside a chunk of time, like a pizza/popcorn night or a long, rainy Sunday, and plan a break or two as it’s looong (153 minutes) and will probably feel that way to the kids. The slapstick nature of the movie is plenty old-school (come on, it stars Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, Spencer Tracy, Terry Thomas, Buddy Hackett and Sid Caesar for goodness’ sake), but the snappy dialogue and amazing driving and car stunts should hold the kids’ attention.

The basic storyline is that before driving a car off a cliff, Jimmy Durante tells some folks where he’s stashed a large sum of loot. When they see him meet his demise, the race is on. Oh, yeah, we could go on about lessons learned in the movie about greed .... and integrity, and ... um ... safe driving, but that would just spoil the fun.

LITTLE MANHATTAN (G)

Sometimes we parents need to be a little duplicitous. Sometimes we need to act dumb. Sometimes we need to do both at the same time.

“So, watch this movie with me, will ya? It’s about a couple of kids growing up in New York City... and, you know, you were just there and everything. It could be fun.”

I tried not to sound like I cared much one way or the other.

“Well, what’s it about?” K asked.

“About two kids growing up in New York City,” I repeated, with an emphatic “Duh!” unspoken but firmly implied.

“But what is it about? Sports? Getting lost? Monsters in Manhattan?” He was impatient, furiously drumming along to a Dinosaur Jr. song (I forgot how good they could be!) on "Rock Band 2." (Thank God it’s not all Survivor, the Go Gos and System of a Down.)

“I don’t know. They just ... live there.”

“I’m going to watch it, even if you don’t.” I almost blew it, forcing the nonchalance, but I can proudly say that I had just the right tone of not really caring. I’m no amateur.

If I told him Little Manhattan was about an 11-year-old kid (who happens to live in NYC) and his first love, I would have been laughed out of the room and that would have been the end of it. I had to play it right.

“Why don’t I just start it in a bit, and if you don’t like it after ten minutes, you can do something else. But I want to see it .... ‘cause... you know ... it’s New York.”

Silence (except for the sloppy drumming).

“Ok,” he grunted in between fills.

So, an hour and a half later, we’re grinning and talking about what a fun movie it was.

(Yeah, that’s how you do it!)

So, yes, a big thumbs up here. Little Manhattan is totally charming, sweet, not embarrassing to watch with your own 11-year-old kid, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard of it before. Was it a straight to DVD movie?

It came out in 2005, and is directed by Mark Levin, who was a writer and co-producer for the television show “The Wonder Years.” Remember “The Wonder Years?” This film shares that style of narrative ( the story being told by the boy) and also shares its knack for not presenting kids as silly and dismissive, but rather as curious, bright and impatient masses of matter -- with brains and emotions firing in all directions -- trying to find their way.

Levin also directed Nim’s Island, and wrote 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, both pretty decent kid films. He knows what he’s doing.

Get Little Manhattan, watch it with your kids -- act surprised that it has anything to do with embarrassing, budding emotions and hormones, but revel together in all the life-stuff you share with the film: the agony of belt acquisition in karate class (or your own sports drama equivalent); bullies; the “iron curtain” that falls between boys and girls and their friendships somewhere around first or second grade; a tweener boy constantly being mistaken for his mom on the phone (what could be more embarrassing for him?); and perhaps even the throbbing pain of divorce (the boy’s parents are in the horrible, awkward throes). Admire New York (and wonder if a good parent would really let their kid ride all over NY -- even the upper West Side -- on a scooter, for hours on end) and remember how much you loved Bradley Whitford in “West Wing” (and maybe you loved Cynthia Nixon in “Sex and the City;” I could never get through an episode of that show).

And the best part: steal surreptitious glances at your progeny during the cheesy but bittersweet “this-crush-is-gonna-kill-me" scenes, and glean something about your kid and the future.

Hey, it’s gotta happen sometime.

LAUREL AND HARDY (G)

So, how about starting your new year off with a resolution to get more of the true classics for your kids to watch when it’s couch potato time? Here’s a good place to start: Laurel and Hardy.

There is so much to say about their movies that the best thing I can do is just advise you to grab one and go -- your kids will love it! These films have the physicality and charm of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, but their naivety and bumbling lack of sophistication is especially appealing to kids.

I’ll list a few here that we’ve seen and tell you we’ve loved them all. K remembers The Music Box as being silent, but it’s not. It just was so well done, with very little dialogue, that his brain has simply filed it as a silent movie. It's brilliant! (Note: purists will say that pre-1940, Hal Roach L&H films are the best, that when the duo moved to Fox Films, all was lost. Great Guns and Bullfighters are the best of the later lot, and are quite entertaining, but other than those, stick to earlier works and especially the collections that have lots of shorts on them.)

Way Out West - Laurel and Hardy to the rescue of a young lady about to be ripped off by unsavory land grabbers

Flying Deuces - Our boys join the Foreign Legion

March of the Wooden Soldiers (aka Babes in Toyland) - A fantastic journey through Storybook Land

The Music Box - one of many shorts, where our fearless friends attempt to move a piano into a house that sits atop a long flight of stairs

Busy Bodies (short) - Mayhem in a lumber yard (contains some rather rough slapstick, hilarious and yet not very nice at the same time...)

The Bullfighters - It’s as if nobody warned Stan and Ollie that amateur bullfighting was not a good idea!

Blockheads - Oliver reads about his old war pal Stanley walking the trenches 20 years after WWI has ended, somehow not knowing the war is over. Ollie to the rescue!

I feel I must post a discouraging word about one film, A Haunting We Will Go (1942, one of the post-Hal Roach films). We rented it around Halloween, hoping to have a fun Halloween movie to tell you about, but this is a rather tedious exercise in senseless plot-convoluting and rather un-funny scriptwriting. And it doesn’t even fit in with the Halloween spirit, when you get down to it. A real miss, so don’t bother seeking it out.

I know I’m missing some other short films we’ve enjoyed here, but you’ll have fun exploring on your own.

RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER (PG)

This is a long and spotty franchise, beginning with 1963’s original Pink Panther, starring the inimitable Peter Sellers. There are quite a number of Pink Panther films, but be sure to do your homework: some don’t star Peter Sellers (and I’m not talking about Steve Martin. Q: Did you even know there was a Pink Panter movie with Alan Arkin as Inspector Clouseau? A: 1968’s Inspector Clouseau.)

I hope I’m not bursting any bubbles here, but I can’t recommend the original for family viewing -- only because it was so slow, the first 30 minutes filled with interminable conversations and scenes setting up a very, very convoluted plot which lost all three of us in no time, and had K complaining and bouncing around the room (granted he was nine or ten at the time, but we felt his pain) -- but I do recommend one of the later titles, albeit with slight reservations.

The fourth PP movie, The Return of the Pink Panther, from 1975, is great fun, and starts off with not only clever, animated credits, but once the credits end and the movie begins, we are thrust right into the action, with a stealthy, well-disguised diamond thief breaking into a museum in a fictional middle eastern country (filmed in Morocco) to steal the Pink Panther diamond. It’s a clever, well-paced scene that pulls you right in, and very soon you’re guffawing at the ridiculous mishaps and bad luck that are the very essence of Paris’ Inspector Clouseau. He’s called upon to catch the thief -- much to the dismay of many who have worked with him and know the havoc he can wreak. (After obliviously wrecking a hotel with his incompetence and endearing buffoonery, he sniffs haughtily, "I must leave. Zis hotel is deteriorating rapidly.")

It’s physical humor, not terribly sophisticated -- pratfalls, knowing looks and Clouseau’s baffling pronunciation of words continually draw laughs -- and the story is blessedly easier to follow than the original movie.

Recommended, but: for kids with the attention spans of gnats, there’s a slight sag in the middle. The PG rating is likely due to a couple of things: there is a scene of Clouseau ogling a lovely lady as she unknowingly disrobes to step into a sauna -- you don’t see anything but it’s a slightly uncomfortable moment for parents; the debonair Sir Charles, a professional but retired (or is he?) jewel thief breaks the fingers (one at a time, in different scenes) of a slippery, untrustworthy snitch. It’s not done in a gruesome or graphic way, but it’s just ... mean, darn it. There is also some language of the times that rankles: Clouseau continually refers to his Asian butler/martial arts sparring partner as having “yellow skin," or as "a yellow skin."

I hope to get around to some of the other PP films eventually, and confess we just watched this one recently since K howls at the previews for the upcoming Steve Martin film. I wanted him to have some background appreciation for the character before seeing a contemporary take on these classic films. Return of the Pink Panther was a hit at our house.

Steve Martin. Hmmm. Well, I can think of worse people to riff on such classic films ...

Here's a rather long trailer, and a Steve Martin trailer after it:

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.