October 17 2021
The Yorkshire Silent Film Festival, now in its fifth year, takes place at venues around Yorkshire. On 17 October it came again to the magnificent Abbeydale Picture House in Sheffield, where I managed to catch two sessions. Having been lucky enough to visit it in 2017, it’s good to see the place is flourishing. Unshowy refurbishment – it even has a little bar – has brought out its splendour even more while maintaining its charm, but there are still the odd cobwebs on high and shady corners to give shock and awe. On a cold autumnal morning the programme opened with Funny Business, a trio of two-reeler comedies all accompanied by the peerless Neil Brand.
The first, There It Is, was a real eye-opener. I hadn’t heard of Charley Bowers before, but here he was, acting and directing with a proto-Pythonesque feel that didn’t just employ visual slapstick and special effects, but an absurdist humour reminiscent not just of Gilliam but of Spike Milligan and Ivor Cutler.
A living, feathery chicken grows out of a broken egg in a bourgeois American kitchen, closely followed by dancing trousers and the manifestation of a dotty professor straight out of The Beano who darts around where you least expect him, knocking folk on the head and disappearing into furniture and fireplaces… ‘Cable Scotland Yard’, cry the householders. And immediately we see a small Yard – in wildest Scotland – manned by eager kilted chaps, one of whom is seconded to go and solve the mystery. It’s Charley himself, a whey-faced youth somewhat reminiscent of Buster Keaton with girly legs emerging from beneath his extremely short kilt, and, pausing only to pick up his assistant, a tiny Morph-like insect who fits into a matchbox, he’s off across the Atlantic. What follows is extremely accomplished, top-speed animation imposed into live action, and an ever-surprising originality. It all resolves in a silly, happy way. But – Wow!
Second on the Funny Business bill is Mighty Like a Moose, maybe a bit of a come-down after the stimulating mayhem that went before, but it grows on you. It all hinges on the absurd premise that a married couple don’t recognise each other after each has had cosmetic surgery. Charley Chase, its director and star, began as a comedian in vaudeville, and the film’s humour depends less on its slapstick routines than his persona of a vain but likeable loser husband, Mr Moose, whose huge teeth cause humour in the street as he passes. Mrs Moose (Vivien Oakland, a former Zeigfield Girl) has a huge nose. Both decide simultaneously to have plastic surgery, and afterwards meet and, not recognising each other, commence on an affair, which they proceed to try to hide from each other. Yes, it gets complicated. Chase, a prolific film actor who worked for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett, including a role in Sons of the Desert, never really hit the big time, but went on to direct too, including early Three Stooges films.
The last of the comedy trio was an early Laurel and Hardy, From Soup to Nuts. Young and silent (as we so we seldom see them), they play the familiar role of incompetent waiters – they were waiters, after all, before they progressed to undergraduate status in Chumps at Oxford. It’s fairly run of the mill stuff, but no one can fall face forward into a huge cream cake three times and still make it funny quite like Ollie. Uncontrollable laughter from children behind, magnified in the vasty hall of Abbeydale Picture House, felt like the benevolent ghosts of all the people who’ve forgotten their troubles here over the 101 years since this place was opened (by the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, no less).
Out for a brief interlude before the main feature and over the road to the splendid Greek Village restaurant found us feasting on wraps of tzatziki and robust Greek sausage washed down with a glass of ayran, and we’re off, well-sustained, back to the early afternoon session.
Back to God’s Country is a remarkable Canadian film from 1919, starring and adapted by the redoubtable Nell Shipman. Writer, screenwriter, actor, director, producer and animal rights activist, and with a turbulent personal life, she was already writing and acting in films in her early twenties, and was one of the first directors to film almost exclusively on location. She plays Dolores, a nature-loving, innocent girl living with her father in a remote cabin in the mountains. Nell kept a zoo of animals, which she featured in her films, particularly this one, where a tame and apparently happy bear and other forest creatures frolic with her. She has a vivacious modern look, and her ‘stunts’ were genuine, we even have a nude scene (chastely filmed from the back). When upright scientist Peter (Wheeler Oakman), passes through and lodges with them, they fall in love, but the is idyll is broken with the arrival of escaped convict Captain Rydal.
Villains on the run in silent movies are generally boo-ably evil, but Wellington R Playter (originally from Rawmarsh, Yorkshire, as it happens) really has the rapacious eyes and the flaring nostrils for the job, a touch of the Lee Marvins about him, and the threat he presents is genuinely chilling. He’s no match for toughie Dolores though, and she finds happiness with her Peter, until… the later section of the film involves some amazing scenes as goodies flee from baddies, pounding on sledges across the snowbound wastes, Nell herself as Dolores gamely helping propel the sledge along to save the injured Peter. What the conditions of filming were, in so obviously remote and weather-swept terrain within the Arctic Circle, is beyond belief. It was the most successful silent Canadian film ever.
The Festival has a last hurrah this year when it presents the Douglas Fairbanks version of Robin Hood on December 9 at Hull Truck Theatre. What a winter treat!
For 2017 review click here
A seat in the dark 